How do you generate leads in your business?

Corey Winter 0:01
Welcome to 10 minutes to being boss, the buy side show for creative business owners where we give you actionable insights, tools and tactics on Korea winter. And here's your host, Emily Thompson.

Emily Thompson 0:14
All right, Cory, what do you have for me today?

Corey Winter 0:16
So I kind of want to take this episode to get down and dirty with the basics of a business with a really basic question. How do you generate leads in your business?

Emily Thompson 0:28
Who, back to the basics with being boss? Sure, why not? Can we use that? Yep.

Emily Thompson 0:37
Great, great, great. Okay, this is a good question. Because this does sort of get right down to the basics of being boss of building a company. But because most creatives don't get into business, because they love business, but mostly because they want to sell their creative expertise, one way or the other, this is not a skill that most of us would have come to the table with, or really understand how it works. So it is basically like it. Alright, so let's maybe get real basic, I'm just gonna keep using that word basic, basic basic, let's do a bit of defining. So in case you need some clarification, a lead in your business is a potential buyer and to generate leads is to sort of have contact have contact points with potential buyers. So to generate leads in your business, you need to come into contact with people who may want to buy from you very basically, that is that it's pulling people into the sort of atmosphere or universe of your business. If you are operating offline, I feel like that may be a little, it's a little more restricted. Let's say you have a brick and mortar store, a lead is going to be someone who sees your Billboard and things, okay, I need to go visit that store or is walking by your storefront, on the internet, there's way more opportunities for people to come into contact with your brand. And we'll talk about that in just a second. But generating leads is basically just getting people aware that you exist. And it's a little more refined than that there's not just any one of it's actually someone who could be a potential buyer for what it is that you sell. And every business generates leads differently. So not no two businesses, this is not the same for any two businesses really. But you do need to generate leads in the right way for your business. I also want to say that the closer someone gets to the conversion point that plays where a lead is converted into a customer or a buyer, the closer they get to that conversion points are of Checkout, if you will, the warmer that lead gets. So sometimes you'll talk about or you'll hear people talk about warm leads that someone who's like, maybe ready to buy or cold leads that someone who's aware of your business, but like isn't really coming into the sales funnel, which we'll talk about more in a second. They're not really in your sales funnel very far to they're not getting closer to that conversion point. So oftentimes, you'll hear people talk about warm leads and cold leads. And just to paint sort of a picture for this, if you have an e commerce website, your version of generating leads could be as simple as just getting people to your website. So every visitor to your website is potentially a lead. And because they're so close to the place where they can convert into a customer, especially if they're hanging out on your website for a couple of minutes. Those are warm leads, if they're clicking through, they're signing up for your newsletter, all of those things, those are warm leads. If someone comes into your website and bounces back out, that's your bounce rate on your analytics, which is something there it can tell people how or I can tell you how engaging your website is, those are gonna be cold leads, they're gonna come in, bounce out done. But you can also think about new followers on your social media accounts as leads. But because they're further away from that conversion point from your checkout cart, they are a little more cold than the people who were actually on your website. And you're going to want to consistently do extra work to get them from your social media page to your website in order to make them go from cold leads to warm leads. And then structuring your business from social media to website conversion is known as your sales funnel. And this sales funnel is a very important thing for you to understand. You need to know how it is how it is that people find your business and how it is that they need to sort of take that path from finding you to actually buying you and this is not something you should just sort of leave up to chance a great business owner builds a sales funnel and very intentionally moves fievel moves people from one part of that sales funnel in down closer and closer to that conversion point, because you take people from one point of that sales funnel into the next funnel or part of your funnel through clear calls to action. So things like being on your social media, and consistently telling them to go to your website. And when they're on your website, telling them very clearly how it is that they can find what they need and add it to their cart, you have to tell people how to get from one part of your sales funnel to the next quite often I'll see creative business owners who have a massive mass of people in one part of their sales funnel, and they're wondering why they're not converting. And it's usually because they're not telling people in that part of their sales funnel. Let's say they have a massive following on Facebook, but they're not getting much traffic to their website, it's usually just a matter of telling people how to get from one part of your sales funnel to the next. Yes.

Corey Winter 5:53
Well, I was going to ask for some specific examples. So you have had right now you have two businesses that are totally different in what they sell, you have Almanac supply company that sells physical products, then you have been bust that sells more resources and knowledge, then you also used to have a website design company. How did you generate leads for those three types of businesses? I don't know. I thought you would have an answer. I'm sorry. That's why I'm trying to get more specific. Okay, I'm sorry.

Emily Thompson 6:24
Oh, so because this is different for every business. Let me just pick one, I'll go with Almanac. Almanac is an interesting example. So Almanac is a product business that operates both both online and offline. And we use that we sort of straddle that online offline fence, if you will, to generate leads more sort of ongoing. So I think of the top of our funnel, the place where we're really generating those leads getting new people into our sales funnel, we go to our market every week, during the spring, summer and fall, we actually are physically packing up our products we're going and we're putting ourselves in a place where people hang out. Once they're there they are once we're there, once we're all there together, they can walk by, they can see us they sort of have these contact points with our brands, with our brand and we're able to pull them in in a number of different ways. So let's say someone is purchasing, then we gather their information, we get their email address, we convert them immediately into buyers. But one thing we want to do at almanaque is have people come back as repeat buyers. So we make sure we get their email address so that we can email them later with new products. New seasonal things, they may find interesting, sort of keep them in the funnel, so that they're not just like bouncing in buying a thing and bouncing right back out. If someone isn't purchasing, we may get them to just sign up for our newsletter so that once they're on the newsletter, we can consistently show them new items, get them engaged in things that we're doing, or come back to the market to support us there. And then also sometimes people are just like wandering by having business cards around so that people can pick them up and come back to us on our on their terms. Those are more cold leads. But they're leads nonetheless. So we see a sort of that offline, at the market as as top of funnel, what we want them to do is become website shoppers, so that we can have them shop with us any day anytime. And not just when we're at the market. So there's some interesting things you can do. But it's mostly about understanding what sort of assets you have in your funnel. So if it's markets, if it's your email list, if it's your business cards, if it's gathering email addresses when people make a purchase. If it's completely different, something completely different. Like let's say you have an email opt in, or you have a small course for people to buy at a small price point, whatever it may be, there are assets that you have in your business that make up your sales funnel. And we actually do a really great, we have an exercise around this in our CEO day kit, where we have our bosses outline their sales funnel, and the way you generate leads is bringing new people in the about getting people into that top of funnel, you can do things like guest posting or going to networking events or simply just showing up in the places where your customers are hanging out both online and real life and being present as well as providing value. But you also need to be very mindful moving forward as a business owner to be consistently sort of shoring up your sales funnel. As you are growing your business as things change online and offline. You'll begin creating or finding weak parts in your funnel. And you must consistently be tending to those weak parts whether that's like shoring up your social media accounts. Making sure that your website is super functional or signing up for additional markets, or whatever it may be. Your job is not only generating new leads, but it's making sure that your sales funnel is always operating in the most smooth way that it can. So

Corey Winter 10:16
you just mentioned the CEO day kit course. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and where users can find

Emily Thompson 10:21
it? Oh, absolutely. So yeah, CEO day kit is a course Sure. I like to call it kit, which is why it's called CEO day kit, it's fine. Because this series of videos and worksheets that Kathleen and I put together, it's tools that we've used for years to sit down one day a year specifically, but you can also do every quarter or every month to create a plan, create and follow a plan for our business. And one of the tools in that kit is this sales funnel exercise comes with a really great worksheet with nice visuals, you can really visualize what your sales funnel looks like. And so you can also find the holes in your sales funnel that you need to patch up or fix so that you can be consistently moving people from being kind of aware of you to actually being customer. And there are several several other exercises in CEO day kit to we built just for creatives who need a little less like business jargony assistance with running their creative business. We love it. It's being boss club slash SEO is where you can find it. It's one of those things that we've created that I'm kind of most proud of.

Corey Winter 11:37
And if you also join the community, you can join a bunch of bosses and work through your SEO decade together. Oh true that

Emily Thompson 11:46
gory. True that so if you get co de cap with community access, I do quarterly q&a calls with the bosses in that community CEO daycare crossover. And we totally workshop all of the pieces of CEO daycare that you may be running into, sort of blocks with or want further assistance with as you were going through it for your business. Go get

Unknown Speaker 12:11
those leads.

Emily Thompson 12:13
Amen to that.

Corey Winter 12:16
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