What is a sales lead?
A sales lead is a person who is interested in buying a product or service. This lead already has good knowledge about the product/service and is ready to pay to get it.
Sales leads are what every business wants and strives for. A business must generate as many sales leads as possible to stay afloat and grow bigger.
Sales leads vs general leads
A general lead can be a potential paying client, software user or partner. General leads don’t have to always be potential paying clients. In some businesses, leads can be potential partners who will work with your business for a common goal.
On the other hand, a sales lead is a potential buyer of your product or service.
For example, if you’re looking for a partner who will group buy a business with you, this partner will be called a lead (general).
USA sales leads
The United States houses some of the most well-known and largest corporations in the world. Therefore, businesses’ ultimate goal would be selling to US businesses.
To sell to US businesses, first, you will need to generate USA sales leads. This is no easy task since everybody wants to sell to the US, thus the US competition for lead generation is very fierce.
However, it’s not impossible, there are some of the most effective lead generation strategies nowadays that you should know about.
USA sales lead generation guide
Generating prospect lists are the first step you will need to do. Prospects will become sales leads after successful outreach campaigns. But how fast? It depends on your business’ niche, your pricing and how well you implemented the outreach strategies.
1. Generating excellent prospect lists
There are a few ways to generate prospects. You will need them in a large number because not many of them will turn into your sales leads.
Manual search on Google and visit pages to collect prospects’ contact information
Manual search on Google to collect contact information of the businesses you want to connect with requires a lot of time and effort but you control the data quality
Use a combination of digital marketing to collect prospects
Many professional email marketers are using a set of marketing tools to generate prospect lists.
This way is quite challenging for non-technical people but if you’re into tech, you can learn how to do it through many different lessons and guides on the Internet.
Build a scraper to harvest data from the web pages
Building a scraper can be expensive, however, it’s likely a one-off purchase compared to using software where you will need to pay a monthly subscription.
A scraper is a software created by software engineers, that will crawl the web pages to get the data that you want and it’s able to collect.
Use paid ads to get prospects/leads
Using paid ads such as Linkedin and Facebook lead ads can help you generate high-quality prospects/leads, however, the cost is usually expensive for small to medium businesses.
Use social media to connect with prospects.
Use social media such as Linkedin to connect with people and engage with their posts. Slowly, you will become friends with the prospects.
When you’ve already become a person that your prospects are familiar with, it’s much easier to turn them into your clients.
However, as you can imagine, this strategy probably requires the most effort and time to get good results.
Buy prospect lists from a reliable data broker
Buying prospect lists from a trustworthy lead database is probably the fastest and most affordable way to generate a large number of excellent prospects.
But a lot of databases on the Internet are not a good choice, still, they claim to be having the best-quality data.
The only way to find out the truth is to give it a try. However, you will need to minimize the risk for your business.
At Limeleads, we offer users the following to make sure you will not waste a penny on data that you don’t need.
- Free trials (no credit card required) to try our USA prospects’ data
- Excellent support to help you go about using our platform
- Refund policies
- $79 detailed email marketing course free of charge!
- Big discounts for first-time users.
Simply sign up for a free account here and start your free trials. We’re committed to bringing our clients the highest satisfaction.
2. Reach out to your prospects and turn them into sales leads.
Now that you have a good list of prospects, it’s time to reach out to them and turn them into sales leads.
There are two most popular outreach strategies that you should learn about. They’re proven to be effective but have their own pros and cons.
A. Cold email outreach
Cold email outreach is sending emails to people that have not known about your business. This may sound annoying but it’s actually working for a countless number of businesses, especially when you send out an appropriate number of cold emails.
Cold email’s pros
- Can reach out to thousands of prospects quickly
- Affordable
- Much less annoying compared to cold calling
- Doesn’t require many people to perform well
- Can be automated to save time
Cold email’s cons
- It takes time to convert prospects into leads and paying clients
- Technical issues will happen when sending to a large number of prospects
B. Cold calling
Cold calling is one of the oldest ways to reach out to prospects. This method of outreach has been around since the invention of telephones.
Cold calling strategy nowadays has become much more complicated to yield better results. Many companies are still relying on cold calling to generate sales.
Cold calling’s pros
- Can turn prospects into leads and paying clients faster when done right.
- More personalized, compared to cold emailing, it doesn’t sound like a robot contacting your prospects.
- Relatively easy to train employees to do it properly
Cold calling’s cons
- Annoying as it can make your prospects frustrated quite easily
- Requires many people to run it at a large scale
- Can be expensive to maintain if the conversion rate isn’t good.
- It can dishearten telesales representatives quite easily
Conclusion
When it comes to generating sales leads, there are two parts as mentioned above – prospect list generation and outreach.
If you don’t have the time to collect prospects manually and are not into tech, buying prospect lists from a reliable lead database is a great option because it’s fast and affordable.
Regarding outreach, you can choose between cold emailing or calling, or try them both to see which one works better for your business. However, we strongly recommend focusing on cold emailing because it’s much less risky than cold calling.
If you got stuck at any stage of your USA sales lead generation, don’t hesitate to contact us for help via [email protected] or our live chat support.
