the lead generation strategy that makes revenue predictable

I've spoken to over 100 companies about their GTM, and you'd be surprised the sheer amount of them that do not have a consistent way of generating leads.

so I want to give a framework which we've been using to consistently generate leads for ourselves and our clients, and I guarantee if you follow this you will be able to do the exact same for your business.

so in this post I want to go over the components, john's example, and the framework.

(for anyone that's new: this newsletter is me building a GTM engine in public and trying to push GTM engineering as far as it can go.)

and if you prefer the video version it's here:

the general framework that we're going to talk about today, I call it the scientific GTM framework. bear with me, because it's not super super complex, it's just a systematic way of approaching go-to-market where your revenue becomes predictable. it's not spray and pray.

because most business owners that I speak to, they're either spray and praying, putting on loads of channels, have no clue what's working, or they're purely stuck on referrals.

so meet John. they've created a business, it's doing pretty well, but the main trouble is every new client that they're acquiring is coming through referrals. at the end of the month they are seeing expenses going out, they have employees etc, but there is no consistent way to know if this referral system is going to dry out.

and when they have tried marketing channels, it's mostly just spray and pray. they have no clue what's working, they have no clue how to build a consistent system, and they have no path to do so.

so the goal is to remove all this uncertainty and have a systematic way to approach go-to-market.

so I see GTM, it's all maths and it's all like an experiment. on a very overly simplified view, there is the offer, the market and the funnel.

so the offer is what are you offering in the market, what is your business, what have you done. the market is what is happening in the market around you, who are the people that are going to pay for it. and the funnel is how do you reach these people.

I don't want to go over the offer part too much right now, because there are tons of videos around this. I really like this Alex Hormozi one that breaks it down very very simply.

in all honesty, the reason why there are tons of videos about it is because this is usually the number one problem. if you haven't had a customer, and especially if you are stuck on referrals, you haven't got this framing right. you might have an idea of an offer or a service that you provide, but you have no clue how to frame it in a way which someone is going to pay money for.

and that comes down to a few things: what problem are you solving, what pain points does the person you're targeting have, and who is the person that you're targeting.

because a very common problem at this stage is you might solve for many different pain points, and you might solve for many different customers, but because you're trying to target all of them at once, the actual offer you're giving is targeting no one.

because even though you can solve their problems, if the offer is between you and someone else who speaks directly to their problems, if they're an MSP, "we help with these problems for MSPs", they're more likely to go with the second one, because that is the less risky option. this person knows our problems.

the second part of this is the market. who are you selling to, how many of them are there?

so if you have a very clear offer, let's take John for example. let's say we've actually worked through the offer with three types of customers that fit this criteria. who is every single person in the world that might pay for this service?

so let's say John does B2B services for manufacturing. so how many manufacturers are in the world, which ones are having this problem, which exact person would pay for this problem, and who are the competitors that are offering similar stuff, and how do you differentiate to them? and this part's really important.

the third component is the funnel. so how do you get from your offer to the market in a way where someone in the market goes through the full funnel and converts in a sale?

and there's multiple parts to this. there's top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. it's a lot more complex and nuanced and blurry than that, but at a very high level that is what you need to do.

so just to kind of summarise, so we have a very good understanding of these three main components. John has an offer for manufacturing companies where he's sorting out their security for them. it's like a managed service.

so the problem might be that the manufacturing companies need to go through some sort of compliance where they're going to a new market, or they might be having some issues where they're not secure. that is the problem, there's all kinds of problems. and the offer is John is going to fix this for them for X amount of money.

the market might be every single manufacturer in the US, maybe he just works in the US. and the ones that might buy now, this might be things from signals. it might be people are posting asking for this problem.

so we need to think about signals. we need to map out the market in more and more depth to figure out who is having this problem, and who is having this problem desperately right now.

the hard thing about security is it's usually a little bit like proactive. the security breach happens, they don't really talk about it because they're embarrassed, and then by the time you kind of know about it, it's kind of too late to sell them on the service. so that is the hard part about security.

the next part to that is you need to map out who is the person that would actually approve this. and then you need to map out the internal workings of this business.

let's say for this example, just to keep it really simple, he's only selling to the CEO. so top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. how do you get a CEO that's interested?

the hard part of this is the funnel. so now we need to design a funnel that takes this person who's having this problem through this funnel.

so at the top of the funnel we might have things like signal-based outbound, we might be doing search, we might be doing ads, we might be doing cold email. there is something we're doing to engage with people, to do top of the funnel awareness that hey, you're having this problem, I offer this solution.

and there's a whole other ecosystem of the kind of offers that work with what channels. there's just certain offers that aren't going to sell very well on cold email.

but let's say for example the top of the funnel for John might be someone's hiring for a certain role. there's many different things you can do, this is a very basic example, and he's going to outbound to them.

some people might outbound to people and pitch straight away. if you've ever been pitched to straight away on LinkedIn, like "hey, do you want to buy this service", you're going to understand. CEOs especially, they are bombarded with pitches every single day.

so this is where the funnel comes in. it's very mathematical, how you get people through each particular stage. at the top of the funnel, how can you get a reply which gets someone consistently into a meeting?

a lot of times people do this through lead magnets. how can we offer something for free that gets them interested enough to spend time with you?

so for John it might be, and again this is a terrible lead magnet, because I think everyone offers like a free security audit, a free this. if you're offering this you are screaming into the void.

so for example, we do a lead magnet right now. if you're making over a million a year in revenue, or you raised a million in VC funding, we will sit down with you, map every single potential buyer in your market, map all your competitors, and go through this digital twin of your market and say how we strategise to basically take it. so that is a lead magnet we offer for free for the customers to get a foot in the door.

what I'm trying to get at here is you need to have a hypothesis, top, middle, bottom, of how you get your offer into the market where you get sales. and this isn't going to work the first time, but you need to have a complete hypothesis of how this is going to work.

the framework is pretty simple. we have this prediction of our funnel with our market and offer, and this prediction is made up of many different little predictions. I predict that people have this problem, I predict that this ICP would respond to this. there's many assumptions.

let's look at all these assumptions, let's execute on these assumptions, and then based on feedback we're getting from our go-to-market, how do we calibrate it each week to get closer to predictable revenue? so it is predict, execute, calibrate, predict, execute, calibrate.

and then if you do this long enough, you will get closer to your predictions of "hey, I put X amount of money into this channel, signal-based outbound for example, I hire a sales guy, I have an engineer, I have these tools, and I will consistently book 10 meetings a week going through this funnel". so this is the goal we're trying to get to.

and it is not going to work first time. I'm just saying that off the bat. if you're looking for a fast result where it works first time, that is not going to happen. it's going to be a trial and error process.

let's just take an example of another person, I'm going to say Jacob. so how we'd work with Jacob is we'd use our software to basically map out his whole market, get all their contact information, and we would build this digital twin understanding of their whole market. and based on that we would implement a strategy over two weeks. let's say for example it is signal-based outbound to a lead magnet to cold calling.

after, we would then say hey, this assumption was wrong, these guys don't respond to that, this doesn't work. and just to give you an example, we'd say hey, people are dropping out of our landing page when we tell them pricing, this doesn't work. we'll go through all these assumptions and we'll just calibrate it.

so every two weeks you'll say hey, what worked, what didn't work. I guarantee if you can move faster in the market, and if you keep doing this, you will get to something that predictably generates leads.

this framework works best when you have the skill. the faster you can execute, the more you can calibrate, the more scientific you can be, the more data you can get, the better this system works.

one thing I want to say about this is businesses can be very different. a lot of agency guys, they have one tool in their arsenal, they're gonna sell you on that one tool. but every business is very different. the framing of the offer affects so much, the messaging, the timing of the market.

different marketing channels get saturated, they decay over time. so that's why you have these big businesses that did have product market fit, the internet came, and they don't have product market fit anymore. so you need to be constantly testing this, and you need to act fast enough.

the overall goal for this framework, if you're stuck on referrals, is to get one thing that works consistently. start with that.

once you can say hey, I put X amount of money into this channel, let's say it's signal-based outbound, I get this many replies, that many replies convert on this amount, and I make Y amount of revenue, you just need to keep adding more volume to that.

you need to find the point where it's not returning as much anymore, and then you move on to new channels. it's really that simple.

so basically, in conclusion, three things I would take away:

if you have got this far you should DEFINITELY subscribe to the newsletter here, since the whole thing is me building this engine in public and the next layer lands in a couple of weeks.

thank you.

roman

(PS: want to see your whole market mapped? If you're making over a million a year or you've raised a million, we'll build you a free digital twin of your market: every buyer, every competitor, ranked by who's ready to buy. After that, Scale Intelligence can run it for you as a managed service, or your team can use it as SaaS. Get in touch here.)