Lead generation

Finding out who might actually buy from you, and building the list yourself instead of renting it.

What you end up with. A researched list of companies who plausibly want what you sell, with a reason attached to each.

how do i find companies that would buy from me

What people walked out with

A list you built, not one you bought
A reason attached to every name
What your market actually looks like
What one customer costs to win
Six agents researching at once
The terms read before anything is scraped
Maybe you could roast the idea. Both the idea, maybe even the business model, because I kind of lack one. Denes Kovacs

The wall most established businesses hit is not the product. It is twenty years of good work and no systematic idea of who to call next. One guest had three months of building behind him before he asked anybody whether the thing was worth selling, which is the normal order and the expensive one.

What comes out of a session

“I was thinking that actually I should focus on sales today, because this is something that we actually have never really done.”

Istvan David, whose studio had been running since 2006

A business owner whose company has been doing digital and light art since 2006 finished with a researched list of companies who might want projection mapping, and a picture of what his market actually looks like that he did not have that morning.

The number that settles it

The sharpest session on this subject spent three hours on something that had taken three months to build, and what decided it was not the code. Winning one customer through German search advertising came out at about two and a half thousand dollars, against a subscription that would need two and a half years to pay that back. Anybody can ask for that sum before they build. Almost nobody does.

So ask it early: what does one customer cost to get, and how long do they have to stay before that is paid off. An agent can price the advertising, the competitors and the going rate in an afternoon. Sometimes the answer is that the list was never the problem.

What it costs

The agent’s time. There is no list to buy, which is the point: a bought list is somebody else’s guess about your business, and it is the same list your competitors bought.

What goes wrong

Ask what the market looks like before asking who is in it. Research first, list second. Reversed, you get a long list with no way to judge it.

Run several at once. Asking one agent to do six pieces of research serially takes six times as long as asking six agents. This is the single biggest practical difference between somebody who has done this before and somebody who has not.

Check what you are allowed to collect. In one session a guest read the terms of the site he was about to scrape, and stopped. His words: it was not worth crossing a line for. Terms of service are a real constraint and the honest answer is sometimes that a thing should not be built.