Solopreneur lead generation strategy fundamentals
“Lead generation is at the top of the solopreneur sales funnel and can create a steady pipeline of prospects.”
Leads = healthy solopreneur pipeline
Before you can make a sale, you need a lead. But not just any lead—you need as qualified a lead as possible. A qualified lead will have a higher likelihood of buying from you. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.
So how do you get qualified leads? It starts with the most basic aspects of your business: what is the problem you solve and who do you solve it for. Both of these elements (problem you solve and who you solve it for) inform your lead generation strategy.
Here is a high-level step-by-step guide to building a solid lead generator:
Brainstorm the ways your prospect (the “who”) is trying to solve the problem you solve on their own.
Make a list of the things they do wrong.
Make a list of the outsourcing they do (getting the wrong resource to help them) that is incomplete or fails.
Make a list of the things they need to avoid so they can be more successful doing it on their own.
Make a list of the different ways to solve the problem that are not the best ways of going about it and why.
Make a list of alternatives to solving the problem.
Make a list of others who have done it wrong and the negative outcomes.
Make a list of others (possibly your clients?) who have done it right (or gotten your help) and the positive outcomes.
Once you have brainstormed those lists, you’ll start to see some patterns in your prospect’s decision-making process and where the information gaps are. Next,
Make a list of the top 3-5 situations where there is the highest cost in time, money or waste, that prospects experience trying to solve on their own.
Pick the one that is in the earliest stage of their progress toward the outcome they want.
Design a lead generator that addresses that ideal situation and helps your prospect take the next step or get a big win.
Lead generators are just that—they are aides to guide your prospect to the next step in working with you. Create that lead generator (or lead magnet) and build a landing page in your website you can direct prospects to. They opt-in, you get their name and email address, and you can continue building a trusting relationship with you as the authority over time.
And don’t stop at one lead generator. You can have as many lead generators you want as each one will entice a prospect in the early stages of solving their problem. This is how HootSuite got so much real estate and such a big list in the early days of lead generation. They created endless content, and put a gate (opt-in) in front of their high-value content so they could build a relationship with the prospect and get them to become a subscriber.
Think uniquely you
Lastly, make sure that your lead generator isn’t already out there in the world. You don’t want to compete with another source of information. Do the search yourself as if you were your prospect. Check out the quality of the content out there that’s also trying to solve the same problem.
Just because someone else published something that addresses your prospect’s problem doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. What it means is that there are likely gaps you can address, or, there’s a spin you could put on it that would really help your prospect even more.
Always produce quality content and complete content. 🍀
