Can anyone ever answer the lead gen question?

Stop me if you've heard this one.

You're starting a business. You did the research, figured out your target, you know the messaging and everything to get started. You don't have a big budget—in fact, bonus points if you came from nothing, living off more calories than food, and you've got a family.

The #1 question is: how do you sell?

I mean, you know how to sell, but how do you:

• Generate leads
• Prioritize events you attend
• Get your name out there

You want to get your name out there, because you figure nobody's going to your website or responding to your e-mails, because they've never heard of you. You haven't spoken at TEDxWhatever, you just barely started making use of the channels you want to pursue, and even then, nobody's paying attention.

But what do you do to get business?

Most of the answers online are hand-wavy. Start a blog, get on social media, make your website, do some work for free, ask people in your network. I've done all of those things, and I recently abandoned my social networks while committing weekdays to blogging at least on Medium and finding a way to grow on Steemit. Yet, there's still people out there with "coming soon" splash pages that never change, because they're already getting clients and can't focus on their site.

Another hand-wavy answer is "use SEO." My first startup job was at an SEO company, and awhile we've come a long way since 2007, SEO is a marathon not at sprint. The expectation is eventually, my website will help generate leads.

But it's not generating leads now.

For the last few weeks, I've relied on chambers of commerce directories and searching "VP HR [insert city here]." That'll generate a few HR results on LinkedIn—enough to send at least 10 cold emails a week. Most websites are focused on deciding whether or not these people are even opening the emails, which leads to some paid service to get open rates.

(Incidentally, this is easily measurable, so I guess these services are just convenience services.)

Sometimes, I'll hear a CRM (e.g. HubSpot) has some leads you can generate, and when I try I end up in a loop of not being allowed to login to my account or not getting access to what is supposed to be there.

Basically, there's a lot of incomplete techniques for finding people you can do business with. Manually doing it isn't working, and the cold emails have a 5%ish response rate, and half that leads to an appointment.

I don't know about you, but it's a lot of work studying a customer, creating a system, and following through for 2.5% of people to agree to an appointment. (If you were applying for a job, Lindsay Mustain of Talent Paradigm says that you'll get about the same success rate, so it's not just a sales thing.)

I think the reason everyone has lots of vague, semi-plausible lead gen techniques is because nobody really knows what works. Either that or they do, but it would scare people off to hear slow and steady wins the race. Most people will be learning how to make their own everything to save on groceries like I did, which runs contrary to the "follow your dream" platitude at large in the professional world.

Nevertheless, selling's a lot easier when

• Someone can set up the appointments for you
• Your perceived expertise impresses the people you're trying to do business with
• You have either time or money

Last year I built a product I couldn't sell. Now, I'm in the process of open sourcing it, as I find an area I want to specialize.

That is, professionally speaking, I care about integration and business efficiency. In tech terms, I help HR leverage APIs and command-line tools to find data that simplifies their work. Outside of that, I help new business owners stop wasting time on things that don't matter.

Writing is the most interesting channel to achieve all this right now, so for me, the slow burn, possibly effective approach is to write and get my writing out there to get more business.

At least then I'll be able to definitely answer the question of how I got leads.

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I’m a developer-turned-salesperson-turned entrepreneur who believes in life beyond code. I do 2 things: teach HR how to better leverage APIs and teach aspiring software freelancers about the business side of freelancing. In short, I teach people how to stop wasting their time. I write weekdays on Medium and Steemit. I also run Jogral, a company that I spent more time reinventing than operating.

You won’t find me on Twitter, Facebook, on LinkedIn (here’s why), but you can follow me @dwilikers here and on Medium. Be sure to upvote and comment on this article!