What is Lead Generation: How to start getting sales leads
Lead generation is essential for small businesses to grow and scale. With the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, the variety of tools and strategies available keeps expanding rapidly. Successfully capturing inbound leads takes patience and consistent effort to master.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation refers to the process of identifying and attracting potential customers or leads for a business. It involves capturing the interest of individuals who have shown some level of interest in a product or service and then nurturing those leads to eventually convert them into paying customers.
Data is the most valuable asset in the world right now
Valued at around $1 million per data point, it surpasses the worth of traditional resources like oil. While oil once dominated industries, technology and data have now taken the lead. A notable example is Cambridge Analytica, which faced controversy for using digital data as a form of currency. They sold this data to major companies, enabling them to understand their audiences deeply before launching advertisements. In essence, they leveraged customer insights in advance to tailor marketing strategies effectively.
Tip#1: Understand your inbound leads before selling
The movie The Wolf of Wall Street grossed $400 million in its first year. If you haven’t heard of it, the film is based on Jordan Belfort, an Australian securities fraudster who served time for his crimes. Interestingly, Belfort only earned $1 million from the movie rights. But he’s not without valuable insights.
Belfort’s Straight-Line Sales Theory highlights the importance of building rapport to gather critical information about leads. This approach helps you better understand your prospects and improves your chances of closing sales. After all, you can’t sell a pen to someone who doesn’t need to write.
This theory was introduced nearly 20 years ago, long before the internet transformed marketing. While market manipulation has a shady reputation, the core principle remains useful: use straightforward tools and strategies to better understand your inbound leads. No matter where they come from, knowing their needs as they move through your sales funnel is key to converting them successfully.
Track your leads’ footprints across every channel
Generating inbound leads and converting customers is impossible without understanding their needs. While tracking online behavior—such as clicks on ads—is possible through legal methods, doing this manually for large data sets is tedious and impractical without automation like bots.
Retaining customers is crucial. To succeed today, you need to know what your audience wants and engage with them effectively. For example, a small e-commerce site may have many anonymous visitors it cannot properly nurture. Does this sound familiar?
If so, investing in chatbots or tracking tools that gather customer data from multiple channels simultaneously could be a game-changer. Over time, you’ll gain a clearer view of your leads—where they come from and what interests them most. Delivering a seamless, consistent experience across your customers’ preferred channels—whether Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, or your website—is essential for building lasting relationships.
Tip#2: Get every inbound website visitor to chat with you
Maintaining engagement with your lead base is essential to connect with them at the right time and with relevant messaging. Building a strong audience is key to scaling your business. Having meaningful conversations is crucial—networking and understanding your leads’ needs always pay off. Being interactive with inbound leads helps you learn what they expect and how you can offer a wider range of solutions to appeal to a broader audience.
Using multiple instant messaging and social media platforms allows you to reach more inbound leads and collect valuable data, which can then be used to tailor your marketing efforts effectively.
Remember to grab key information from leads:
Demographics – age, gender, ethnicity
Location – countries and regions of residence or business operations
Contact – for further communications and campaigns.
Background & Footprints – where the person comes from e.g. IP address, company name
Interests & Intents – the types of products and services they’re seeking
Unlike physical retail stores, identifying anonymous online visitors can be challenging. However, much of this information can be automatically gathered using bots and integrations with social media profiles.
For B2B companies dealing with corporate visitors, an email finder tool becomes essential when you identify a company’s interest but lack direct contact details for relevant employees. It’s important to respect your customers’ values and provide timely responses. If customers have to follow up multiple times to get an answer, the relationship isn’t on solid ground.
Here’s a better approach: don’t wait for leads to come to you unless they initiate an inquiry. Instead, proactively reach out to them. Using social media or instant messaging to answer common questions is a great way to build and maintain engagement.
For example, with just a simple click on a WhatsApp widget, visitors can reach out to you directly for real-time assistance. This also allows you to collect their WhatsApp contact details effortlessly.
Try this free WhatsApp Widget tool to create and embed a chat widget on your website in minutes.
Learn more about WhatsApp Lead Generation and explore 4 effective WhatsApp lead generation campaigns.
Tip#3: Leverage Call-to-action to hold on to your inbound leads
A call to action (CTA) is a powerful marketing tool designed to promote products and boost sales by encouraging visitors to take specific actions on your platform. It’s one of the easiest and most effective tactics for inbound lead generation.
CTAs play a crucial role in capturing and holding visitors’ attention. However, traditional advertising methods like website banners with offers such as “Buy 1 Get 2” or discount promotions are no longer as effective.
Many marketers rely on long, complicated forms asking for excessive personal details—name, email, location, budget, payment info, and more. These forms often result in very low conversion rates and frustrate potential customers.
No one wants to spend time filling out a form only to wait days for a response. This approach wastes valuable time and risks losing leads.
Conversational marketing is the smarter alternative. By engaging leads through real-time, interactive conversations, it significantly increases conversion rates compared to traditional “Contact Us” forms, turning prospects into customers more efficiently.
1. Interaction
Interaction is key. It is vital to be able to hold on to your inbound lead while he/she is on the site even if it is for a few minutes. It is necessary for you to hold on to the lead for the time you have.
Therefore, the type of generation displayed below is the future to increase retention and the conversation rate of visitors on your website. Using schematic words strategically placed to ensure that the customer thinks in the flow you want him/ her to think is the key practice here,
2. Strategic prompting
For example, an opening prompt “Are you having trouble maintaining a unified chat base for all of your socials for user interaction?: Having pre-fixed answers like “Yes, I need help!” placed on the reply button – ready to send after a click is an efficient way to take this on.
This is a great way for you to have visitors stay there on the website – and focus on the conversation you wanted them to have.
3. Steer away from questionnaires ✈️
Try to stay away from traditional pages asking for a basic questionnaire to be filled like the first name, last name, etc. Try to focus on smooth and sleek conversations to land your lead base, and increase traction, and have the chatbot do your dirty work.
Tip#4: Invest in an all-in-one conversational platform for automated messaging workflows
Managing data is challenging. Studies show that each active user generates around 5 billion data points, making it difficult to store and organize all this information in one central place.
With so many communication channels today—Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, Twitter, Telegram, and more—it’s nearly impossible to remember every customer query or interaction manually.
The real challenge is maintaining conversations with multiple users at once. A unified conversational platform is essential for this. It streamlines collaboration by providing a single space to engage with leads across channels.
While it’s manageable to remember details for 5–10 users, handling hundreds or thousands of leads in various stages of the sales process requires automation and organization.
Discover how to efficiently manage large-scale lead engagement using WhatsApp with multiple users.
How to generate leads on WhatsApp with Flow Builder
To set up a WhatsApp lead generation campaign in SleekFlow, proceed to the Flow Builder and follow the steps below. To provide a better illustration, we will use a music academy that uses click-to-WhatsApp ads as an entry point to generate leads interested in their music lessons as an example.
Click Create new flow > Start from scratch.
Choose Messages from new contact.
At the Start point, enable Filter by condition, select triggered message keyword as the condition. Then select contain or contains exactly and enter the keywords. Paste the pre-filled message you suggest the ads viewer use to start the conversation here.
Click Set your fist node here, select Action > Messaging > Send Message. Within the setting, enter the greeting message. For example: “Hello! Thank you for your interest in our music lessons! May I have the student's full name please?” Turn on the Save reply to save their response as a contact field, which will be stored in SleekFlow Contacts database as your CRM data.
Then, add a second Send Message action. Here, you can begin asking questions that will help you better personalize your services for them. You can also provide options as buttons for them to choose. In our example: “What is your musical goal”, with 3 options: Hobby, Exam preparation and Performance. Similarly, you can enable Save reply to store their response as a contact field, allowing you to have this data stored in your CRM for lead nurturing.
Repeat step 5 to create additional Send Message actions to ask further questions about the lead.
In this example, we will present our offer in the last action by asking, “Which instrument are you interested in?” with three options: guitar, violin, and piano. Enable Button as branch. Under each respective branch, create a new Send Message action to share the relevant offer details.
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