Lead Generation Engine

The 600lbs Gorilla of Growth

What 's in the courseHi,

Glad you joined us to learn how to become a Master Entrepreneur, by studying the lost art of lead generation.

This guide teaches you one of the best growth hacks there is. Once you've read this guide you will be able to create leads out of (almost) thin air.

We'll take you through the process step-by-step and learn you to build a massive growth engine. It 's arguably one of the harder engines to pull off, but it 's gonna be 100% worth it.

Once warm leads start flowing into your inbox every day you'll wonder how you ever did without it...

Intro: The ultimate sales hack

The blueprint

1. Finding The Source

2. Data Scraping

3. Finding anyone?s email

4. Outbound outreach

5. Outsourcing & automation

Coffee is for closers?

Templates & scripts

The ult imate sales hackAn introduction to lead generation

Getting shortcuts & blueprints other people are using to profitably grow

their business is basically the Holy Grail of growth marketing. Here at

Growthcasts we do everything for blueprints?

The Lead Gen Engine bluepr int is great for you if:

1. You're running a B2B business. ? Whether you're selling enterprise

products, software for SMEs or consultancy, this engine will produce.

2. You're suffering to get enough leads into your funnel and create a

pipeline of warm sales opportunities that your sales team can close.

3. You want to quickly validate your core assumptions (thus achieving

P/M-fit faster), you want more success with PR & publicity, or you want

to learn more technical marketing skills.

The BlueprintIn the rest of this book I?ll show you the exact blueprint we ? and many other

high-growth companies ? use to build their Lead Gen Engine. The Lead Gen Engine is

composed of 5 components:

1. Find ?the source?

2. Data scraping

3. Finding email addresses

4. Outbound outreach

5. Closing the deal

Each component feeds into the next one, and generally you?ll need each of the 5

components to make this engine work. Before we dive into the details, let?s run

through the high-level overview:

1. Find the sourceFind a place where many of your ideal customers hang out or are registered online.

Specifically you?re looking for info that will help you reverse-engineer their email

address. This typically means name + domain info.

3. Finding anyones email

2. Data scraping

Once you?ve found the source, you want to pull all the data you need

from the site, and put in into your database. This way you can

manipulate & use the data to extract what you need: email addresses!

Self-explanatory: we?ll show you how to find the email address of

virtually anyone. Then we?ll show you how to automate & outsource

this process?

4. Outbound outreach

We?ve now got a database of thousands of highly targeted, super

relevant leads. We need to reach out to them, and tell them about

the incredible offer we have for them!

5. Closing the deal

This is where sales takes over. The better your lead gen, the easier

the sales will be. We give you some essential pointers to not screw

up here? !

Spam laws & cold out reachBefore you get startedUnder the SPAM-CAN act you are able to send emails to business people that you do

not know. Simply put: cold out reach is NOT spam .

But.... You?re gonna be sending out a lot of email. Hundreds per day once you?re scaled

up. That means we first need to teach you some etiquette & rules:

1. You can only cold email business email addresses. No personal emails. Ever.

2. Be open, transparent & honest ? don't misrepresent who you are, use

misleading subject lines, or otherwise deceive.

3. Include your business address ? this can be as simple as an PO box, but you

MUST include it by law.

4. Give a clear, straightforward opt-out option, and make sure you honor opt-outs.

5. Email works so well because it is intrusive. You'll get semi-superpowers, so use

them responsibly. If many people dislike your emails or attitude, you?re gonna

get in trouble.

6. Know what others do on your behalf. Even of you hire another company to do

your outreach you are still legally responsible.

How it works

This is the first, and arguably the hardest part of the Lead Gen engine. We

need to find a source online where we can find our ideal customers.

Finding the source1

Where do your customers hang out?Here?s the thing with web scraping, and the entire Lead Gen Engine:

nothing magical happens... It?s all technology. All the technology does is

just make it lightning-fast to do the boring tasks of finding data &

manipulating it to get email addresses. We need to still do all thinking,

here, in step 1.

What information do we need?

- Our client 's company domain: e.g. www.growthcasts.co

- Full name of our ideal contact: e.g. Pieter Moorman (that 's me!)

ExamplesThis step is the hardest one, because you actually need to do some

thinking yourself here. We can?t hold your hand 100% here. But let me

give you some examples:

Leansit es

- What it does: Professional-grade website builder for SaaS startups- Ideal customers: Entrepreneurs- Source(s): Angellist, CrunchBase, ProductHunt, Betalist, Fb-groups

Dr ip

- What it does: Simple email marketing software- Ideal customers: Anyone that?s fed up with the complexity of

Infusionsoft or Hubspot- Source(s): Use buildwith.com "websites that use Infusionsoft"

Peg

- What it does: SaaS for enterprise- Ideal customers: Big brands, marketing or PR agencies- Source(s): Linkedin, agency organisations

Ot her sources ? a longlist of ideas

- Use buildwith.com to find companies using a certain technology.

For instance: your competitor 's technology.

- LinkedIn groups, Google+ groups, Facebook groups, Reddit, etc.

- Find communities & forums via Google: e.g. "top marketing

Mindtricks

- Be creative! This is the part where every business is unique and you NEED creativity to find good leads.

- Ask for help. Friends might be more creative then you.

- Combine sources: scrape company names from source #1, then find the right employee names through LinkedIn

- Keep in mind how much your customers will end up paying, if they have a high life-time value, you can spend some more time searching for them.

communities"

- Any place that lists companies: yellow pages, Angellist, Mattermark

- Ask your customers where they hang out online.

- Search results: e.g. LinkedIn search, Indeed.com, Google, etc.

- JustReachOut to find people in PR & press.

- Podcasts interviews for influencers in certain niches

- Industry-specific aggregators: Booking.com (hotels), Indeed.com

(jobs), Producthunt (young startups), etc.

How it works

At this stage we?ve identified our source, but now we need to pull all the data

from the Internet, and put it into our database. 'Programmatically' taking big

amounts of data from the Internet is called scraping.

Data scraping2Tools

- Buzzstream ? they offer a free tool for scraping all url's from a html, just copy a website's code and you'll get all the links on that page

- Import.io ? an excellent tool to get started. No coding skills required! They have everything you need for 95% of cases. Highly recommended!

- ParseHub, Octoparse, 80Legs ? other scraping tools worth using

- Custom code ? ask a developer to write a custom scraping script, or learn to do so yourself using Python. We cover this in Growthcasts, or you can learn on e.g. Udemy.

Mindtricks

- Getting stuck at this stage is not an excuse. All public data that you can see as a user can be scraped. Maybe you just don't know how to do it... Hire someone on UpWork to build your scraper, and you're all set.

- If you want to learn more about scraping it 's wise to watch some of the Growthcasts video episodes where we cover it in more detail.

- Consider stacking scrapers together to build a crawler. For instance: first scrape an index page to find all the detail pages (e.g. different companies on CrunchBase), then scrape all the detail pages (each company's detail page) for the info you where looking for.

Getting started

- Step 0: your mindset. ? Data scraping can be as easy or as complicated as you want. Don't get paralyzed by the idea or the name, and just dive in. It 's not rocket science.

- Sometimes it is as easy as copy pasting all the names and businesses from a Facebook group.

- Pick your weapon of choice to extract the data. I recommend starting with Import.io (it 's free, but you need to install it on your desktop). The tool is build for non-developers, and they have excellent support.

How it works

At this point we have basic personal information, and we need to use that to

find everyone's email address. The hardest part is that you need to do that

in an automated & predictable way. Here's how:

Finding anyones email address3

Tools

- VoilaNorbert ? A tool that does just that: test emails, and find leads.

- Findthat.email ? A direct competitor. Works equally well.

- Rapportive ? A more complex tool, but can essentially do the same tasks for you. Google "find emails rapportive" for further explanations.

- Prospect.io ? An outbound prospecting tool (see step 5, below) that has a nifty Chrome extension that scrapes emails. Work excellent with e.g. LinkedIn profiles!

Getting started

Almost everyone's email is some variation of their name plus their company's domain name. For instance: my name is Pieter Moorman. My email is pieter@growthcasts.co.

That wasn't really all that surprising, right? The only things we need in this stage are:

1. A matrix to create all reasonable combinations of first name, last name, initials & company domains. There's roughly ~20 options.

2. A way to test which one actually works...

Turns out there's a few tools online that take care of both steps...

Mindtricks

- Sometimes the above tools won't work. That should be around 10-15% of cases. Don't sweat it: lead gen is just a numbers game: scrape 20% extra leads, and the problem is circumvented.

- The ?secretary hack? ? email the secretary to find the format of the emails in the company. Then use that format to guess anyone else's email.

- You can find almost anyone on LinkedIn. Open their profile page and run the Prospect.io extension to find their email.

- Always look out for new tools! The field changes incredibly fast.

The formula

You want to send a sequence of 5 emails to each of your leads:

- Day 0 ? Main pitch

- Day 1 ? Quick follow-up

- Day 4 ? In-depth pitch, new CTA

- Day 9 ? Reminder

- Day 14 ? Breakup email

Outbound Out reach4

Getting started

This step is fairly easy: sign up for one of the tools below, write a KILLER email sequence (Tip: see the swipe files!) and you're basically off to the races! All tools provide clear reporting so you can see exactly what 's happening.

Rules

- It 's essential that you automate the entire process with a specialized outbound software tool. Find my recommendations on the right.You MUST use a dedicated tool. Not e.g. MailChimp. This way you keep lead gen & marketing automation separated.

- Follow up ? That 's the #1 secret step at this stage. Don't settle for 'no response'. Only settle for a clear "No" from those ideal prospects.

Tools

- Reply ?  my weapon of choice. An excellent outbound prospecting tool.

- Prospect.io ? Direct competitor with Reply. They're equally good at the moment. Try them both, and see what you like best.

- MixMax ? Gmail on steroids. This is a great option to get started, but I wouldn't recommend it to scale your efforts. Even if you don't use it for Lead Gen, it 's still highly recommended for all things email!

Mindtricks

- Be nice & respectful ? you're kinda rude for appearing right there in the middle of their inbox. It 's the online equivalent of appearing at a party with no invitation. So you might as well be a nice guy.

- Consider your sales funnel & CTA ? always consider how your email strategy fits in with the rest of the funnel. What 's the Call to Action that

you want your leads to take? Schedule a demo? Signup for the product (Tip: give them a special discount coupon in the email)?

- A/B test the hell out of your emails & campaign setup. Rule of thumb: test everything. Then test some more.

- Hire a professional copywriter ? once you've seen initial results this is a great idea. This is one of those touch-points where excellent copywriting can make a massive impact on your bottom line.

- Send emails in batches, once per week. Send emails every Sunday night so your prospects get them Monday morning. Better yet: test what delivery window works best for you!

- All tools allow you to further customize your emails with fields like {{ companyname }}, {{ jobtitle }}, etc. If you can scrape this data, it might be worthwhile to use it!

How it works

At some point in time, you don't want to do all of this by your self anymore.

It 's time to scale things up. Luckily for you the Lead Gen Engine is excellent

for scaling. It 's actually so effective that even massive Fortune 500

corporates use it as their primary engine of growth!

Outsourcing and Automat ion5

Rules

- Make sure you calculate your core metrics: how much do you spend

per lead? How much do you make per lead? Only scale once your

campaign is fundamentally profitable!

- Outsourcing can?t fix fundamental problems. If the core product or

copywriting is bad, then outsourcing can't fix that. Outsourcing can

make the whole engine cheaper though...!

- Start easy by outsourcing the most time-consuming parts.

Tools & options

- Upwork ? is the biggest marketplace for freelancers.

- Amazon MTurk ? Use this to outsource extremely simple tasks without having to write code for it. Needs some practice, but really cheap.

- Pipetop, LeadGenius, etc. ? are tools that take virtually the entire process out of your hands, and fully manage it. It 's not cheap, but it might allow you to scale even faster, which is the #1 rule of growth...

- Scale as fast as you can. Double down on what works!

- Outsource the entire process, or outsource partially. There's no good

or bad here. Do whatever allows you to scale as fast as possible with a

positive ROI.

Tools & options

- Optimise before you start scaling: spend money on copywriting & testing sources before you scale.

- Spend more to grow faster. It 's better to use an expensive tool that allows you to scale faster, than settling for cheap-but-mediocre growth.

- As a founder, you always need to own the sale. No excuses.

Coffee is for closers...The easy part is now over, and the hard part begins. Today you've entered the league where the heavyweights hang out.

You are quickly becoming that person everyone in your team depends on: the rainmaker. The guy who can fill the sales pipeline and bring growth no matter what.

But again, we only finished the theory, you need to get your hands dirty. Without trying and failing you won't master the skill of the lead gen engine.

To building business empires,

Piet er