Your lead generation strategy can tremendously impact your sales opportunities, closed deals, revenue growth, profitability, and cash flow. But most tech startups struggle mightily with lead generation -- often because of a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance -- a lack of self-awareness -- among the founders and the leadership. But you can avoid this same frustration and misery with a few basic tweaks to your lead gen tactics.
In this blog post, you’ll learn about six lead-generation strategies that tech startups need for a healthier marketing, sales, and go-to-market playbook.
- Set SMART goals to focus your lead generation strategy (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound).
- Determine and research the buyer personas most relevant to your SMART goals.
- Map the buyer's journey that your most important buyer personas progress through (awareness, consideration, and decision).
- Create lead generation content and offers for each of your buyer personas and buyer's journey stages. In other words, if you’re targeting three different buyer personas and want to be competitive at all three stages of the buyer’s journey, you need an absolute minimum of nine different offers (3x3).
- Develop lead nurturing workflow automation and conversion path strategies that advance leads through their buyer's journey and accelerate sales cycles. Sales cycle acceleration that educates and builds trust is more important than ever in a world where so many prospects very strongly prefer self-service rather than ceding control to a legacy sales process.
- Measure what's working vs. what's not -- and double down on your lead generation successes. And be sure to set goals that are attainable in your timeframe based on either your existing benchmarks or industry benchmarks for other companies in your industry, targeting similar buyer personas, and with similar marketing and sales resources.
What’s your favorite lead generation strategy for tech startups? Which of these six lead gen tactics will make the biggest impact on your startup? Let me know in the comments section down below.
And if you're part of a tech startup (or scaleup) that needs to improve its lead gen strategy, be sure to enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.