6 Steps To Getting Your Marketing and Lead Generation Off the Ground
What is the 30-Day Plan?
Typically, a 30-Day Plan is a structured outline that details specific goals and actions you aim to achieve within a 30-day period. For this newsletter, we are talking about lead generation so we touch on preparing a plan for you on how to approach sales leads, communicate with them often, and to get the sale. Generating leads, creating a lead generation strategy, executing a lead generation plan and ultimately growing into a sales process is not for the weary or half hearted individuals. It takes a plan, incorporates a process, and needs focus.
The Marketing and Lead Generation Plan For a Start Up Operation
A lead generation plan is similar to a workout plan, in that in your first 30 days it is all about training for the long term and preparing for the execution, i.e. the marketing/promotion of your product or service. Here's a quick preview before getting into the nuts and bolts:
If you already have written standard operating procedures (SOPs) for your marketing and salespeople, it will help to make their job much easier in that they’ll have some direction towards lead generation and the sales process. If not, the SOP can be developed from your 30 day plan.
If you have a website, then you will be in good shape because you have content that is used for creating your very own lead generation process to market and promote your services. Be happy, you have some content. How else will qualified leads know about you and your company?
The Form
P.S. Don't forget to have a contact form on your website so you get those low-handing fruits of sales. Your sales team will love you for generating leads and a lot more traffic to your website that they don't have to chase after so hard. This is critical for good relationships with your sales person and future growth of your customer base from the business on the internet.
As long as you have relevant content and it is engaging content about your product or services, it will be helpful in your conversion rate from lead to sale rather quickly. Your web site visitors and site traffic will allow your marketing teams to understand what valuable content is being read and where content may be needed for your potential customers. Basically, what is or is not working. Now for the real work to begin!
It Doesn't Have To Be Hard
So let's not make this hard and let's get you generating leads that are also known as "above the funnel" leads while you go through this 30 day plan. If you want to get some quality leads that are fast and considered low hanging fruits that can enter your sales process, here's how to think about your lead generation strategy.
I'll start with this: Don't think like you're a restaurant owner waiting for customers to come in; rather, be more like a scout or a recruiter, where you are the pursuer and you are looking for your target. Eventually, you will work to have a balance of inbound leads coming from your website and social media and outbound lead generation activities. Here's how:
Step 1 - Personas and Key Words
Buyer Personas That You Want as Leads
As a business, you want to embrace having that mindset of solving a problem. So we want to identify a specific demographic you will want to target so you can solve their problems. What do you sell? Who is your customer? What will they likely purchase? What type of person in the industry do you sell to? What are their pain points? What are your prospects searching for on sites? More later on the importance of defining these personas.
Know Key Words That Resonate with Your Potential Customers
We use a tool for optimizing key words on our web site from Surfer SEO to assist our lead generation. The purchase price is reasonable and helps identify keywords that your potential customer is using in their searches. That is how they find you.
For instance, if I wanted to tie my content around “clinical research,” Surfer SEO will essentially guide you in the direction of words like “research” or “clinical trials,” and it will even recommend questions you should consider writing about because that is likely what your potential customers might be searching for while doing their research. Questions like “what is clinical research?” or “how do I get involved in clinical research?” Remember, you are doing this to increase your potential to attract customers to your content in your lead generation efforts.
To piggyback off that idea, you want to have the same mindset when trying to identify the personas of your buyers. I’ve had many examples in customer engagements where the customer would be buying one service and out of the blue the conversation turns to another of our customer’s challenges and to our delight a new sales opportunity presents itself. Your customer came to your company for one need, and they wound up purchasing another of your services or products.
Know Thy Customer
The important point is to know your customer, so you can help your customer connect the dots by using examples and different forms of usage of your services or products. The traffic you are looking for is a specific type of customer who will purchase because of a need they have that you are able to solve by them working with you. I believe your conversion rate can increase by mastering defining the personas of your buyer and qualifying them as your potential customer. More below on defining your buyer.
Step 2 - Identify and Assess
Defining Buyer Personas
Defining buyer personas is a crucial step in creating a successful lead generation strategy. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and data analysis. By understanding your buyer personas, you can create targeted content and marketing campaigns that resonate with your potential customers. I can't express enough how important this becomes to your lead generators and sales staff. They need to know the best way to articulate how that particular buyer is going to realize the value you bring to them.
Buyer personas help marketers understand their target audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors.
Tidbit
In fact, 71% of companies that exceed revenue and lead goals have documented buyer personas. This shows the importance of having a clear understanding of who your potential customers are. By defining your buyer personas, you can create more effective content and marketing campaigns that speak directly to your audience, ultimately improving your lead generation efforts.
Assessing Your Website first 30 Days
If you don't already have a website, get one now! Squarespace is a great tool to start off with. Anyone with some sense of online knowledge can build a web site with this tool.
When looking at your company’s website, consider it from the perspective of a customer. Is this something you would read? Are the pain points your customer is experiencing noted in the content? Do you have images that describe the challenges you are going to solve for them? Do you feel it will bring you leads? Does it capture your interest? Will it capture the interest of your potential customers?
Be sure to give potential leads a form they can fill out so you can get back to them. Contact forms are essential in capturing and managing leads efficiently. Google has some tools that you can use and connect to your website so leads are automatically delivered to your inbox. That form you ask them to fill in should have room for their contact information like name, email address, title, company and phone number. Your website and the information you collect from it are part of the lead generation process.
Importance of Key Words and SEO
This may sound redundant, but make sure the keywords that resonate with your customers are on your company website. When website visitors seek you out, they will likely do so through online search engines like Google, so make sure that you don’t play a game of hide-and-seek with potential customers. Let them find you through the language they use! There is so much more to be said about SEO. Stay tuned as we plan to write more about the know-how’s and tools in a later blog.
Assessing Available Content for Your Lead Generation Process
If you want to rank on Google, and show up more in search results, you’re going to need to put content out on a regular (if not, daily) basis. Comb through some of your older articles to see if anything stands out, and if you can turn that into additional content.
Writing content does not have to be left up to the subject matter expert. Perhaps for ideas on subjects to be explored and written about and even to create an outline; however, your marketing department can prepare the article by doing some research on their own or by interviewing the expert. Once in ready form, the expert can review and suggest changes, if necessary.
LinkedIn For Writing Articles
LinkedIn allows for articles to be posted on your personal profile. You can also do a post on your company profile to further distribute your information. Another suggestion is to take advantage of thoughts that provoke you during your day regarding the business. Jot down your ideas into a draft article in progress on LinkedIn, so you can go back to it later and either finish it up or pass along to your marketing department.
Assessing Social Media Accounts/ Prepare 3 Social Media Postings Each Week
Social media is becoming more of a hangout these days than actually meeting people. In this instance, it’s ok. After all, we are trying to reach a much wider audience than the length of voice, so let’s make good use of it.
When you’re posting on social media about your business, try to be fun and creative with your outreach. People are going to be scrolling through hundreds of posts, so give them something to stop by for. It’s also not a terrible idea to attach some sort of current event or trend to your post to get more eyes on it.
Have someone interview the Founder and key members of the team so your audience gets to know the people in the company better. Incorporate current day discussions in your writings about books, movies, events. Whatever that event/trend is, people will be searching for it online, so there’s a chance they may run into your posts by accident.
Post, post and post as often as you can. The more good content you put out there using key words, the better ranking you will gain with google so that your information is always at top of page on google searches.
I discovered Buffer, a great internet site for generating, creating and scheduling quality posts. It's free for managing up to three social media accounts. Creating and generating posts to discover and gain new sales leads is a big part of the solution the matters to your revenue. Every stage of building business is better off with LinkedIn as a value-add to sales.
You certainly want to be posting regularly during the weekday. If you are able to produce a good amount of content on a regular basis, Google will rank you higher, and you will be seen by a larger audience.
Web Traffic
Tracking website traffic is crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of your content. By analyzing audience demographics and the performance of your marketing campaigns, you can ensure that your lead-generation efforts are aligned with your overall business objectives.
Step 3 - Preparing Mailing and LinkedIn Template Campaigns to Generate Leads
In my opinion, one of the greatest inventions in the last century is the mass-mailing system. You can send one letter to hundreds of potential customers in one swoop, as opposed to sending each email individually.
Pull together a general email letter that tells your prospects about what product or services you have to offer and what pain points your product or service solves for your prospects. Referencing your own website in the letter is key so that as you generate leads, you are observing what they are looking at more closely and gain visitors which is a great sign.
Analytics
Google Analytics is a good fit solution for this! While sending out email is managed in some automated fashion in 2025, the content needs to be watched in that you are still applying SEO to your letters ensuring key words are applied.
Personally, I like to plan my mailings out in advance and have either a targeted location or specific interest area that I’m going for.
Many systems now keep stats and record your interactions, whether they didn’t respond, you had the wrong email address, and most importantly when they say yes! The technology in this area is amazing these days, and you’re behind the 8-ball if you’re not taking advantage of it.
Set Up LinkedIn Campaign for Quality Leads
Every industry looking for more potential clients has its "go to" social media outlet and for Pharma/Biotech, the right solution is LinkedIn. In this next marketing step we will discuss a lead generation strategy to generation sales leads from LinkedIn. This is in addition to your postings. Remember, your potential customers not only look at web sites but also social media, another purchasing power.
LinkedIn is basically Facebook for people in business. Even more so, it’s a great tool to connect with people from around the business world in real-time. So you will want to create a profile for yourself and your company to generate leads.
LinkedIn is a good value at a reasonable cost to gain new leads/customers in three ways: creating and posting relevant content, building an online presence generating online traffic from an internet site presence, and then of course, pursuing and capturing leads which is a critical stage in the sales process.
But here’s a secret: LinkedIn could be used in a less-formal way to get your foot in the door for a sales meeting. If you are active in posting updates about your product/service, you are more likely to start getting more interest towards your company.
It’s like a commercial that anyone would see watching their TV; the more times they see the company name, the more likely they’ll start to remember your company which means you are generating awareness.
The key and what brings value to lead generation is to create a personal connection that encourages communications. The way to do that is through the Connect option on LinkedIn. Your sales is depending on you using your content and the Connect option to deliver leads and sales.
Setting up your lead generation strategy with your own LinkedIn personal profile as well as your company profile page is key to selling and is a key driver for customer communications.
Using the CONNECT feature is great for the reader because it limits the writer to only so many characters. This makes it less annoying to those reading your invitations to connect with them. I opt to use the connect while others will write lengthier messages using in-mail. There are tools like Expandi that allow for automation of this task as well.
Generating online activity for your prospects is helping your sales teams by boosting traffic person by person, lead by lead, leaving no money on the table. Your online presence as well as through outbound sales efforts is a good sales strategy. Your sales from generating leads will benefit from daily LinkedIn Connections. This is a great item to add to your checklist each week.
Create Mailing Lists/LinkedIn Profile Lists- Eventually Input Leads into CRM System
Our bread and butter here at Sales-Link is the data, particularly the contact information that we maintain for our customers within the pharma/biotech industry. I know a lot of customers still think purchasing data is the answer to finding more leads but sadly that is not true.
Data is constantly needing updates especially with all the movements in our industry of late.
My preference is to work with a company that maintains the data real-time and creating lists as needed. We help customers learn how to collect a listing of leads themselves. Once your team gets their hands dirty, they become knowledgeable and know their leads and potential customers. even better.
I am a big fan of keeping customers informed of the lead generation process and that includes data lists and how to keep them clean.
If you would like more information on how to create and maintain your own lead lists and more, visit us at Sales-Link.net.
Work with good data that will bring you in quality leads. Remember "Garbage in, Garbage out!". There are good resources available that have clean data that can be used for lead generation or, get help to scrape some of the contacts and contact information you need. You can quickly store this information onto excel sheets for future upload into a system. Remember, this is all to be done to quickly generate leads that become potential customers that will be added as sales lead activity by your sales team now or later.
To quickly generate leads, use the letter plus the contact data to do your email campaigns and also to reach out and connect on LinkedIn. We find that most qualified sales leads come in from both email and LinkedIn.
You should always have a plan when you begin any type of project, and you’ll see just how easy this plan to be executed in your first 30 days, helps get you started on your sales journey to landing more clients in business.
Step 4- Creating a Lead Generation Funnel
A lead generation funnel is a visual representation of the journey a potential customer takes from initial awareness to conversion. The funnel typically consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. By creating a lead generation funnel, marketers can identify areas of improvement and optimize their marketing campaigns to increase conversions.
A lead generation funnel helps marketers understand the customer journey and identify areas of improvement.
tidbit
It’s important to note that 50% of qualified leads aren’t ready to purchase at first contact. This means that having a well-designed lead generation funnel can help you nurture these leads and guide them through the sales process. By optimizing your lead generation funnel, you can increase conversions and revenue, ensuring that your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.
Step 5 - Qualifying and Nurturing Leads
Qualifying and nurturing leads is a critical step in the lead generation process. Lead qualification involves evaluating leads based on their purchasing power, interest, and intent to buy. Lead nurturing involves providing leads with relevant content and communications to educate and engage them throughout the sales process.
Additionally, lead nurturing helps marketers build trust and credibility with potential customers, increasing the chances of conversion. By providing your leads with relevant content and communications, you can keep them engaged and guide them through the sales funnel, ultimately turning them into paying customers.
It can be as easily as assigning a high score to the best leads, and lower scores for those you may not readily see as buyers. Understanding the prospects focus, the company characteristics and any pain points you are aware of help shape the scoring system you end up using.
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Lead qualification helps marketers identify high-quality leads and prioritize their sales efforts. In fact, 67% of lost sales result from not properly qualifying leads before taking them through the sales process. This highlights the importance of having a robust lead qualification process in place.
Step 6 - Assess Contacts Responding and Clicking In - Furthering Your Sales Process
Holy cow, if you are lucky and leads are starting to visit your sites, whether it's your web site or LinkedIn site and they are clicking into your materials– a meeting or better yet, a customer could be just one step away.
Leads are a tricky group. Some leads will keep clicking into your materials and seem like they will never become a customer. But that isn't true; it's more likely they aren't ready to buy and will remain a lead for sometime but will eventually buy.
The devil is in the details. Leads need to be nurtured; it may be 6 months to a year before that lead will become a customer. That's where you create your 60-day and beyond lead generation plan. (we will be posting that next!)
Details and Activity Bring Leads to Sales
Lead generation is an ongoing activity and you have to have the stomach and budget for it.
At any given opportune time that senior management has a bit of time on their hands, they can view the leads report and see if there are any low hanging fruits that can be converted to a customer fast. It may be a relationship or something they recently heard at a board meeting or conference about the company clicking into your materials that will pull them over into the sales category.
Just know leads need to be continuously fed with different forms of activity, whether via social media, email or a quick call, even some ads. The forms of activity you use with your leads should be aligned with your business, your customers' personas, and your budget.
Do some level of lead generation because sales forecasts don't always go according to plan. That is the beauty of updating plans and continuously growing. Lead generation is a process. One that brings leads and customers to increase your revenue. Do it everyday, whether an hour or more.
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Believe it or not, only 2% of all sales are made on the first contact – and a whopping 80% of deals aren’t closed until between 5-12 tries. Keep lead generating!