Today, millions of businesses worldwide are delivering excellent products and services. However, a huge majority of them struggle with marketing their value offerings. As a result, they miss out on so much potential traffic on their sites or stores, along with any corresponding sales that come with it. 

If you have experience in sales and/or marketing, you can take advantage of this problem by starting a lead generation business in 2023 to help businesses sell more products and services. In return, you can enjoy a never-ending high-income stream via email, websites, social media, and other channels, just like affiliate marketing. 

However, most people with the skills and resources to offer lead-generation services might not know how or where to start. Therefore, in this post, we’ll share how to start your own lead generation business from scratch in 10 effective steps:

Brush Up Your Lead Generation Knowledge

Lead generation is the process of attracting potential prospects and building interest in a specific product, service, event, or other value offering. This process aims to convert these prospects (or leads) into paying customers. You can do this in different ways, including (but not limited to):

• Paid advertising (PPC)

• Cold calling

• Social media marketing

• Email marketing, etc. 

So, the first step in starting a lead generation business is choosing your channels and methods based on your expertise, experience, and target audience. 

Next, you need to learn what a lead generation business is and understand how it works. Lead generation agencies help businesses from various industries find and attract highly convertible leads. Companies pay you a small fee or percentage of the sales for your efforts.

Choose Your Target Industry and Niche

One of the golden rules of marketing is that you can’t sell to everyone. In the context of starting a lead generation business, this means you should conduct extensive industry and market research to find a specific niche to operate in. 

Ideally, you should opt for unsaturated and less competitive markets or find gaps to exploit in established markets. The simplest way to do this is by determining which industries and niches pay the most per lead. Popular industries include:

• Healthcare

• Insurance

• Finance

• Technology

• Decentralized Finance

Similarly, here are some of the most in-demand lead-generation niches:

• Home Services (Restoration, HVAC, Automation, etc.)

• Legal Lead Generation (Family Law, Medical Malpractice, Divorce, etc.)

• College Admissions

• Credit Cards and Other Financial Products

• Mortgage

• Senior Care

• Matchmaking, etc.

However, regardless of your choice, you should ensure you have sufficient knowledge of the products or services you’re selling. We recommend opting for a niche you have the professional experience to get started while you explore other options. 

Determine Fees and Costs

Lead-generation businesses make money in different ways. Therefore, you should also consider using a hybrid payment model to boost flexibility. Below are the most popular ways clients can pay you for lead generation services:

• A predetermined fee for each lead, regardless of the product or service cost. 

• A percentage-based fee for every product or service sold, usually 1-20%. 

• The full cost of lead generation campaigns (email, cold calls, advertising, etc.) that’s based on your package. For instance, if a package costs $1,000, the client pays $1,000. 

Create a Business Front

Once you’ve determined your niche and fee, you must set up your business front. In the digital age, you don’t necessarily need to rent a big office and invest in expensive equipment. You can do that during the expansion phase. 

You only need a decent laptop and a solid internet connection to get started. However, just because you don’t have a physical front doesn’t mean you need a digital one. In other words, you need to create a website for your lead generation business showing:

• Your niche and services

• Lead generation channels

• Contact information

• Base pricing

• Clientele

• Completed projects, etc.

1. Identify Your Target Audience

By now, you have everything you need to start operations. However, you need to find people to sell to before you can sell anything. In other words, you need to identify your target audience and build relationships. 

To do this, you need to understand the demographics of your client’s potential customers and develop strategies to entice them to buy by solving their problems or helping them achieve their goals. Essentially, you’ll be a marketer and salesman by offering prospects practical solutions and businesses an optimized sales funnel. 

1. Segment Your Prospect List

Once you’ve identified your audience, you need to segment them into different groups based on different factors, such as:

• Location

• Preferred engagement channels (email, call, social media, etc.)

• Products and services they’re interested in, etc.

1. Utilize Different Outreach Marketing Strategies

Lead generation involves employing different outreach marketing channels and strategies. Depending on your capabilities, target audience, and client’s preferences, here are the most common ways you can engage with leads:

• Cold calling

• In-person meetings

• Emailing

• Social media connections, including LinkedIn

• Search engine marketing

• Landing pages

• Lead capture forms

• Influencer marketing, etc.

1. Measure Your Lead Generation Performance

A huge aspect of starting and running a lead generation business involves leveraging different conversion funnel metrics to measure and analyze your efforts. Popular KPIs in this industry include:

• Conversion rate

• Open and read rate (email)

• Return on investment 

• Total lead value

• Customer acquisition cost

• Customer lifetime value, etc. 

Assessing your performance will help you make necessary adjustments to increase your chances of success. 

1. Repeat Steps 6`10

Once you start your lead generation business and set up your physical/digital infrastructure, you'll likely deal with several clients. Hence, running operations would mainly entail repeating some of the processes above, such as target audience identification, segmentation, campaign creation, and performance measurement. 

Now that you know how to start your own lead generation business, you can accelerate your journey to reaping multiple lead generation opportunities and helping different clients grow their revenue. 

If you want to leverage email marketing as one of your lead generation channels, we highly recommend trying out Emelia.