Lead Gen New Customer Checklist

Welcome to the Mylance Lead Gen product! We’re excited to partner with you and help you grow your consulting business.

To make the best use of the tool, we’ve put together a checklist to help you make the most of your leads, and convert as many to paying clients as possible.

Every single closed consulting project starts with an intro call. So, we’re going to optimize to get on the phone or video chat and discuss our client’s challenges.

Here are the steps to follow:

Summary of the below:

1. Make a list of contacts: review the leads and select 3-5 contacts from each company
2. Write 1-2 outreach notes
3. Start your outreach via LinkedIn and/or email. Use Expandi or Woodpecker to automate
4. Iterate and refine your outreach until you have success. Test and have patience!

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If you're more of a visual learner, here are 3 videos that walk through the steps:

• Step 1: Make a list of contacts
• Step 2: Launch your Campaign (3 Options)
• Step 3: What Makes a Great Outreach Note, Track and Iterate

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Step 1: Make a list of contacts

Mylance has curated a list of leads that match your ideal customer persona, have budget, often a gap on their team, and are consultant friendly.

As you review the list of leads, you’ll want to click into each one and review the company's contacts list. Your goal is to add 3-5 contacts per company to your list of leads. As you add a contact, we’ll fetch their contact information (LinkedIn link, work email, and sometimes phone number).

Who should I select?

Good question. You want to select the person or people likely to be your role's decision-maker. If you’re targeting small companies (e.g., <20 people) you probably want the founders or C-level. If you’re targeting much larger companies, then you might want VPs or Directors in your function. So if you’re someone who does SEO, you might add the Head of Marketing, Director of Marketing, or even a Marketing Manager.

How narrow or broad should I be with my focus?

You can be a little liberal with this list: not everyone will see your outreach or respond, so feel free to expand the list a bit. Again, 3-5 contacts per company is a good place to start.

Note: you can often work upward within an organization. So if you know the CEO needs to hire you, you can reach out to someone lower in the organization, have a conversation with them, and then get introduced to the CEO. So, don’t limit your outreach to only 1 person per company.

Action items from Step 1:

1. Make a list of 50-100 contacts from your curated leads
2. Review your list of Selected Contacts (found in the nav bar)

Step 2: Write Outreach Notes

Now that we have our list, we’re going to begin outreach. To do good outreach, we need compelling notes. Our goal is to get a call booked so we can close them as a client, so we’re optimizing for calls booked. A good outreach note does the following:

1. You introduce yourself kindly and politely
2. The reader feels heard in their pain (work pain!)
3. You clearly state your differentiated value-add
4. You legitimize your value-add with an accomplishment or example
5. You have a clear CTA

This might seem like a lot, but these notes don’t have to be long. Nobody likes reading a long note. One of my favorite outreaches accomplished all of these things in a casual way on LinkedIn:

My favorite part of this note is that it hits on the user’s pain and really speaks to it in a casual way.

Let me explain: this person’s ICP is an early-stage founder that doesn’t have a Head of Marketing. That means marketing falls squarely on the shoulders of the founder, which gets pretty exhausting as you might imagine. This person hits on that with “Are you personally managing a lot of the efforts?” and then shares an exciting solution “leverage your current resources to maximize your reach.” This speaks to an early-stage founder perfectly because they don’t have the time, energy, or resources to build all new materials.

For your ICP, you want to speak to them. So complete this exercise:

Who’s my customer (in detail):

What is their pain:

How do I uniquely help them:

What accomplishment(s) can I back that up with:

Which could look like this:

Use this template (make a copy!) to work from.

Combine the above sentences into a compelling outreach note that gives them a great reason to jump on a call with you. An outreach note that got a 33% response rate from one of our customers looked like this:

Step 3: Start your outreach

Mylance gives you both the LinkedIn link and email. In the ideal world, you want to create multiple touchpoints with a customer. The more touchpoints, the warmer they get. Thus, your outreach could look something like:

1. LinkedIn connection
2. LinkedIn introduction
3. Email with CTA
4. Follow-up email 1
5. Follow-up email 2
6. Follow-up email 3

That might sound like a lot, but it’s not. Research shows that while 55% of replies come from the first follow-up, sending between three to six follow-up emails can triple your reply rate.

Why? Getting a response is often about timing - catching the person when it’s easy for them to respond. For all you know, they saw your email on the phone while at a stoplight and couldn’t engage, and then forgot about it. Reminders keep you top of mind and allow you to catch them when they can act on your email.

Remember that a non-response is not a “no.”

Should I use LinkedIn or email?

The benefit of email is that you can reach everyone. If you use LinkedIn, only ~30% of contacts will connect with you. That means you are missing out on a huge percentage of the contact list. We recommend connecting with them on LinkedIn, and then sending an email drip campaign with one main message, and 3 follow-ups.

Should I do it manually or automate it?

If it’s me, I’m automating it. I’ll happily pay the $99/mo for Expandi or $55 / mo for Woodpecker (or both!). That way, I spent ~1 hour every month adding the new leads into the campaigns, and they work while I’m sleeping.

Step 4: Iterate and refine

Good things take time. You’re not likely going to nail it the first time you set up these campaigns. That’s why it’s important to:

1. Be patient
2. A/B test

Test your subject lines. Test your copy. See what works and what doesn’t work. However, be careful of small numbers. If you test copy across 25 contacts and see a big discrepancy, it could just be the law of small numbers at work. You want a much bigger sample size to actually be able to draw conclusions.

That being said, be patient. You’re probably not going to hit it out of the park with your first campaign. Have some patience and commit to a few months worth of iterating and testing. Try to enjoy the process: learning what doesn’t work is just as important as learning what does work, and building a company takes time.

What do I do if it’s not working?

The good news is you have data to look at and tweak. If you’re sending out emails, start with your open rate. You should be able to at least get a 50% open rate if it’s a targeted list (we got 79% open rate with our latest customer with the subject line:

So, test until you get a subject line that at least gives you a 50-60% open rate (or steal ours!).

If you have that and are still not getting calls booked, you need to look at your copy. You want compelling copy that gives the user a reason to jump on a call with you. Make it worth it for them! Tell them you’ll share some insights from your experiences. Play around with it. Run a few A/B tests. If you put enough work in, it will eventually pay off.

What happens if it works too well and I close clients?

First, congrats! That’s what we’re here for. Second, don’t take your pedal off the gas. The average client project is ~2 months. And a client can move on at any moment. You want to keep your BD pipeline going so you’ll never have to worry where that next client will come from at any given time.

So, keep your drip campaigns open, keep the outreach going, and take the calls. You might want to ramp it down a bit, but we highly recommend having 2-3 calls per week with potential clients anyways. Build those relationships, and check in with them every few months. That way, you’ll be ready to go when you need them!