Why Don't Firms Believe in Lead Generation?

Believe it or not, lead generation can actually work. Even for accounting, AEC, or consulting firms. In this episode, John and Mark break down the importance of lead generation, exploring why firms need to take it seriously beyond just waiting for RFPs. They highlight various lead sources, compare inbound and outbound strategies, and discuss effective multi-channel approaches. In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• How we define a “lead” in the context of a professional services firm
• Why many expert firms don’t believe in generating leads
• The point in a firm’s growth cycle where firms explore lead generation
• Various sources that have contributed leads to both John and Mark’s businesses
• Examples of firms that are doing lead generation effectively today

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:19

Welcome back to Breaking Biz Dev. If it's your first time here, thanks for joining us on this podcast, where we like to beat up and break down topics related to business development. My name is John Tyerman, and I'm joined as always by my trusted co host, Mark Wainwright. Mark, what's up?

Mark Wainwright: 0:36

How are you, John? I am doing great. Welcome to another episode. We're going to talk about lead generation today. we're going to poke the bear a little bit about lead generation. Cause I know a lot of firms out there, John, that have no idea what lead generation is all about, that it's not part of how they get new clients. And, you know, they just think that it's all about referrals or, you know, other other stuff, referrals are a good lead generation source, but we're going to dig into that. I think there's a whole bunch of. Lead generation opportunities out there that so many firms turn their back on. So we're going to, we're going to get to it, but I know you wanted to mention something first, so

John Tyreman: 1:19

Yep, we are going to turn some firms into believers of lead generation. But to your point, yes, first, I want to remind folks to please rate and review the show. If you enjoy the content that we're putting out, I'd like to read a recent review from Hannah Smolinski, who says the podcast is pure gold. It's been helpful for my agency as we create our business development processes. I don't know of any other podcast being this transparent and helpful on the subject. So Hannah, thank you so much for the review and for the kind words. That's amazing to hear.

Mark Wainwright: 1:53

flattery gets you somewhere. Absolutely. Yeah, that was, that's so great. Hannah is, a, a professional connection of mine. she has a fractional, financial services. company that she founded and she works with professional services firms, just like the ones, John, that you and I work with, she is an absolute rockstar, her, her, her fractional. CFO organization is called Clara CFO group. She is an absolute monster on YouTube. She has, she has almost 80, 000 followers on YouTube and it has produced, published over 300 videos there and they are. They are super useful. I've looked at a number of them, just little old me and my, you know, sole practitioner practice. I've looked at a number of her videos and thought, Oh yeah, right, great. That totally applies to me. That's not just a, you know, larger firms or different firms or whatever else. That's totally applicable stuff. So she's great. Thanks a ton, Hannah. We really appreciate it. I appreciate it. Great

John Tyreman: 3:00

Thank you, Hannah. all right, so let's, get into our topic today, Mark. We are beating up lead generation firms. Don't believe in lead generation and we want to. Perhaps shed some light onto why maybe they should change their mind. So, but first, before we do that, let's define what we mean by lead. So Mark, what is a lead?

Mark Wainwright: 3:24

question. The eternal question. There are so many definitions for all of these commonly sort of, you know, thrown about terms, leads, opportunities, prospects, you know, all pipeline, you know, all these different terms that are sort of second nature to people like me, people that, you know, are, are professional marketing folks. for the sake of this conversation, and I would say for most of the organizations out there, simply put a lead is a, maybe. Now there's a whole bunch of little, little qualifiers kind of underneath that, but, but I generally refer to a lead sort of in, you know, common language as a, As a, maybe a lead needs to be associated with a person. I, I don't associate leads with organizations. I associate leads with people. And, a lead is, is a yet to be qualified. Maybe, right? So it's someone who comes to your organization. it's, it's someone that maybe you are prospecting with, that has shown some potential interest. And they have yet to go through some filtering, some qualification step, some qualification process. That is an important first step in your. Sales process before they actually get into your sales pipeline, you know, which should be filled with great ideal clients who you can serve, who are going to be good partners, et cetera. These leads, these maybes need to be. Qualified. And I know that, that, you know, John, you have some, some thoughts on thoughts on the world of leads as well.

John Tyreman: 5:14

I think I really liked that definition. The lead is a maybe, I come from a world of lead generation myself. you know, working in marketing agencies, lead generation is a big part of the service that, you know, I provide to, to clients or have provided to clients in some capacity, in that inbound motion. So that's, that's kind of the world that I come from. I know that Mark, you do a little bit more outbound work with your clients and helping them, you know, with prospecting and generating business that in, in that way. So I, I like that we're bringing two different perspectives to this.

Mark Wainwright: 5:48

You brought up the point of, of, you know, since this podcast is built on this whole sort of continuum of marketing to, to sales, you know, we've talked previously about that. That, that one through five, that's that sales related activities are five and marketing, activities are, are related to, more of the ones, right. Lead generation happens all across. I think that that spectrum, and when people who are. Are part of a sales team, whether they call themselves a salesperson or not, right? People who have to, who are responsible for revenue generation. Well, those are sales related activities when they are doing lead generation. That's typically more, proactive prospecting outreach, that sort of stuff on the marketing end of things. There's a lot more inbound where you're seeking to attract. individuals to your firm through, content generation and you know, what, whatever other mechanisms you have to attract, attention and sort of build engagement with your, with your firm, with your brand. So leads can happen anywhere across that, that whole spectrum.

John Tyreman: 6:54

Yeah. And we'll share some examples of that later on. but first I guess, Mark, from your perspective, why don't firms believe in lead generation? Why don't they believe that leads will come to them inbound?

Mark Wainwright: 7:08

Yeah. It's the, it's the strangest thing, but I kinda, I kinda get it. You know, I, I spend a lot of time with, Architects, engineers, other, other experts like that. And I think that that the vast majority of of those individuals and those firms believe that, the attention they get the, the, the. The attraction to their firm has to do with their level of expertise, right? If we are the best architects out there, people are just going to form a line at our front door and they're going to, going to, going to work with us. Right. So, so they're, they're, they're lead generation activities. They're lead generation. Motions are, are, almost non existent or they are part of this sort of hamster wheel where they are constantly going and in searching for and finding open solicitations. So there's, you know, municipalities or. Public or private clients or whoever they are, are, have, have open active solicitations, requests for proposals, requests for qualifications, things like that. and they, they, they have a marketing team who's, you know, the vast majority of any lead generation activities are just going and finding these, these RFPs out in the, out in the ether, out in the world, out there somewhere, whether they're posted online or there's some services that collect them or they. have to search with specific, you know, service, you know, municipalities, whoever they are. So a lot of marketing teams in these specific sort of expert firms believe that lead generation is going and getting the active RFP solicitation that's on somebody's website. And then you drag it back to the office and share it through email with You know, for the partners and you go through some crazy go, no, go process like we've talked about in the past with, with some of our guests and, you know, beat that up, a little bit. So, that's, I think, you know, a lot of the expert firms that I, that I work with, they think that. They'll get clients because of their expertise and they'll just show up some magical way. They'll get these kind of referrals, you know, maybe serendipitous sort of connections, and then they'll go grab these open solicitations, which all sounds completely reasonable, but there are so many other ways to be proactive and to generate leads. And that's a little bit what we're going to talk about today. And I think that different. Different types of professional services firms and different sizes of firms can approach all of this, or maybe even just look at this all a little bit differently. I know you had some thoughts on, you know, maybe different size of professional services firms and how they might sort of approach or think about lead generation.

John Tyreman: 10:03

Yeah. Yeah. The, many of the firms that I've engaged with have been in that mid size. range. And so that kind of got me thinking a little bit about the, you know, the stages of business maturity for professional services and what lead generation looks like. And, you know, it's relative importance by stage. So if you think about, you know, small firms, you know, these are firms, maybe there's. A couple of employees, right? So you hire a couple of maybe their designers or, you know, maybe their, associate architects, if you're an AEC firm, or maybe they're an associate, accountants, maybe they haven't gotten their CPA yet if they're an accounting firm. and typically in these scenarios, new business is generated mostly from the founder's network or the partner's network, referrals. You mentioned RFPs. so those, those, that's typically how new business is one. And a lot of those small firms, that's all that they can handle. what I've noticed is that when firms grow to, to get to that mid sized, that referral well starts to dry up a little bit. And so then it's, then it becomes, okay, well, how else can we generate new business? We want to continue growing. That's our plan. We have all these people that we have on the payroll. We need the revenue to support it. that's where firms start to explore potential new channels to build their pipeline. Perhaps it's investing in content, perhaps it's investing in social media, or perhaps it's investing in an outbound, prospecting type of program. So there's a number of different directions that firms at that midsize level, they can go. Now, As firms grow larger and larger, I'd say that the lead gen has been embraced, by a lot of these large, large firms, they understand that lead generation is important part of winning new business. however, what I've noticed at these large firms is, is there's not enough focus on the offer. what happens is it bloats paid media spend. And these large firms believe that all, all they need to do is dump a bunch of dollars into LinkedIn ads or Google ads, and that'll fuel their pipeline. But it doesn't always work out that way.

Mark Wainwright: 12:21

They're not, they're not focused or specific enough.

John Tyreman: 12:24

right. Yep. You know, raise your hand for a consultation. That's just not good enough of an offer. there needs to be a little more crispy than that.

Mark Wainwright: 12:31

Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. I love how you broke down those different firm sizes. I have, a fantastic client who started off as a, as a small firm and they are, growing, and they were spending a ton of money as a small firm on chasing after, Those very expensive RFPs. And, fortunately when I started working with them, and we started talking about this, they said, well, this is fantastic because there has to be a different way. There has to be a better way of, of growing our business of finding new opportunities. And we can't continue to, as a small firm, we're, we're tough where we're. we're feisty, you know, all those great things that small firms like to say about themselves, but they just have a really hard time competing, you know, in those really formal selection processes. And they're just so expensive. I mean, I've said this in the past that firms of all different types can spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on really complex competitive pursuits where there's no guarantees of success. So that's, that can be a

John Tyreman: 13:33

And it's competitive too. So it drives down your margins.

Mark Wainwright: 13:36

Right, right, right, right. And

John Tyreman: 13:37

up enough.

Mark Wainwright: 13:38

Yeah, we, yeah, right. I gave a, an architecture firm example, different industries approach this differently, you know, and you and I are fully aware that, when we talk about the world of professional services, that there are various industries within that big umbrella that look at all this a little bit differently, architects, engineering firms, accounting firms, law firms, management, consulting firms, marketing agencies. Web developers, you know, everybody who sort of sells their, sells their expertise. They look at lead generation a little bit differently. You know, a lot of these sort of legacy expert firms, law. architecture, accounting. I think a lot of them, really lean super heavily on that whole referral end of thing and connections and, you know, more of the sort of relational stuff like, Oh no, I have to go to a conference and meet people and shake hands. In order to, build relationships and then have that turn into, into projects, but they kind of ignore all these other opportunities for lead generation, web developers, I mean, they probably go to conferences, but I think it would be absurd of them to think that they're going to get all their, new leads through Relationships, you know, they're doing, you know, you have to know that web developers are trying to maximize the digital channels, that they are getting a ton of inbound leads through, search engine optimization and, and content and, all that stuff really working hard on those, those digital channels.

John Tyreman: 15:05

Yeah. And, and I, in marketing agencies too, I would lump in that category, especially because, you know, when you market a marketing agency, essentially you kind of got to show what you do, for example, you know, at hinge it was, let's, let's do a bunch of research and then use that as content because research is a service offering. When I was at Silverback strategies, it was, let's really hone in our, on our paid media strategy for generating leads because we're a paid media agency. today I focus on podcasting and showing my value that way because I'm essentially a, you know, a one man podcast agency. So, you know, there's, they're showing your work through your content and I, you know, that's nothing that's unique to marketing agencies. accounting firms, AEC firms can do that too. You mentioned earlier, you know, these experts think that they can just do good work and the, the, the business will follow doing good work is absolutely part of that, but how do you package that up and show that at scale? And I think that's really kind of the, the key to inbound lead generation.

Mark Wainwright: 16:13

Good. Yeah. And I think the, the problem, all of this is trying to highlight is the fact that firms of any size, small, medium, large firms, professional services, firms in any of these industries. AEC architecture, you know, management, consulting, marketing, marketing agencies are not, employing all of these. They're not exploring and utilizing and leveraging all of these lead generation, opportunities out there. They're doing it very selectively and, and limiting their, their lead generation. So what we, what we want to talk about a little bit more, I think is what. What can they do instead of continuing to turn your back on, yeah, your architecture firm should be generating leads online. Right. Or, your, uh, web development, agency should be leaning hard into referrals, creating a really proactive referral engine inside your organization. yeah, they should be exploring all of these. And I think we're going to, we're going to chat about that. You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 17:13

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 17:27

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 17:37

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 17:43

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 17:46

Yeah, let's do it. So what can firms, what should they be doing in regard to lead generation? I think number one, we, we talked about this a little bit. We, they need to take lead gen seriously. you can generate leads online, um, offline, through other kinds of, of sources. You, you mentioned referrals. I'll give you an example. So I keep track of all the leads that come in through my own marketing and sales pipeline. and I've, I've kind of categorized them by source I have eight different sources of leads that, from the, over the, I think this is two, two years worth of data or 18 months worth of data, 45 percent come from LinkedIn, about 25 percent from referrals. About 11 percent come from existing relationships. I have another podcast called podcasting and professional services. About 7 percent of the leads come through that another 5 percent from Twitter, another 3 percent from this podcast, breaking biz dev organic search is a little low on, on my end, only 2 percent and then 1 percent from Facebook. So. I think that gives you kind of a well rounded pie, some slices bigger than others, but that just goes to show you that leads can come from any number of channels.

Mark Wainwright: 19:02

Yeah, great. I, I love it. And, and what you've, what you've pointed out here, what you just talked through, there's inbound stuff where people are coming to you. There's some outbound motions to that. So those are all blended in that all those are, those are all good, right? Those are all great ways of generating maybes. and, Also, the other thing, as you're reading through that, I'm, I'm trying to figure out how you're connecting all of these leads. I mean, do you have a process where you just, you know, you're one of the first questions you ask them, say, Hey, how'd you, come across me? You probably have some, some mechanisms to, to connect those leads from their source. others, you probably have to kind of just ask.

John Tyreman: 19:42

Yeah, that's a great question. well, first of all, I just want to point out that. Mark, since we started doing this podcast, I've taken outbound a lot more seriously, and I've been applying a lot of, you know, your wisdom that you've shared around prospecting and building out referral sources and, referral programs and things like that. most of that outbound activity I'm doing is on LinkedIn. there's source and then there's motion. So the source would be LinkedIn. The motion would be outbound. And so that's kind of how that's categorized in my system. and that's why LinkedIn is so, so big of a slice in my pie is because that's typically the channel that I'll use for outbound.

Mark Wainwright: 20:21

makes sense. Makes

John Tyreman: 20:22

yeah, you, you mentioned, how do I know which channel they come from, if they're on an inbound, a lot of, a lot of the inbound stuff that I get is from LinkedIn. But if I know that they're in existing relationship, it's not the channel that I attribute to that lead. It's the relationship.

Mark Wainwright: 20:39

Yep.

John Tyreman: 20:40

Or is it a referral from someone if, even if it came through LinkedIn, I'll still count that as a referral because I look at referrals as a separate channel. It doesn't matter what they come through. Now, if someone reads one of my LinkedIn posts and then they reach out to me, whether it's a DM or a comment, and they say, Hey, you know, I'm thinking about starting a podcast, let's start a conversation. Then I would attribute it to LinkedIn.

Mark Wainwright: 21:04

that's good. I, I, I, I can't say my methodology is, is, is as precise cause you know, you love your numbers. Uh, but I, I do, benefit from a pretty broad variety of inbound leads. I have, leads that just send me a note directly, you know, send me an email directly and, Just say, Hey, I, you might be our guy. You might be that you might be the one we need. and I've had leads through, existing relationships, leads, the referrals leads through outbound motions, asking for referrals, doing prospecting sequences, and again, we're not talking today about, you know, how you get new contracts. We're talking about leads. Right? The, the, the projects and the contracts come after the leads. We are strictly focused on, on leads. It's important what happens after you get the leads, but today. We're talking about lead generation. We're talking about just getting all the maybes, getting as many maybes as you can, the right ones, to the front door, you know, where you then need to vet and qualify them. And you need to do that as many ways as possible. If you're, if you are a. You know, a marketing person in a, in an engineering firm. And all you do day in day out is go check the, the, in Seattle, it's called the daily journal of commerce, right? If you go check the DJC for all of the RFP listings, if that's the only way that you come up with maybes, then you are underserving your organization. So we've got a couple. Examples here, John, that you came up with just to kind of ground this whole thing in, in reality, the, the, the two examples you have, you have one from an accounting firm and one from, an architecture firm. I would love if you could kind of share those. And these are examples of firms that you're familiar with who are doing a good job with. Lead generation.

John Tyreman: 23:06

yeah, happy to, happy to share. So first, TriMerit is a specialty tax firm. They specialize in R and D tax credits. they're an accounting firm. They've got about 50 employees. Randy Crabtree, he was the managing partner, transitioned into a new, more external facing role, Where he hosts a podcast called the unique CPA. So for folks that are in the accounting space that are listening right now, they're probably familiar with Randy's show. It's one of the top accounting podcasts. if you go to TriMerit's website, It features not only a chat bot where you can, you can click on the chat button, you can ask a question, you can get feedback in real time. So that's a form of lead generation, but they also have multiple calls to action on their homepage to schedule a discovery call via Calendly. So it's not just, you're clicking to another page and then filling out a form. Right there on the homepage, you can schedule a meeting. So it's reducing the friction. Of point a to point B, because if you have to go, you have to click through to a contact page and fill out a form with a bunch of required fields. Those are all hurdles that you're putting in front of your perspective buyers to actually having a conversation with you. So I think that. Randy and his team over at tri merit do a great job at reducing that friction. but then also his podcast has generated leads. I've interviewed Randy on, on, on my other show. And he he's talked about how that podcast is kind of like transformed his career. So, I think that that's just one example.

Mark Wainwright: 24:49

No, I, this is, it's, it's, it's fantastic. And, and my sarcasm is going to well up here, John. So what you're telling me here is that making it easier for individuals who's was it, who visit your website to be able to contact you actually is, is, is a positive thing. Are you, that's, that's what I'm hearing.

John Tyreman: 25:06

Yep. I mean, unless you want to try to scare your buyers away, right,

Mark Wainwright: 25:11

Right. Have them, have them have to solve some, you know, like, like do like six recapture, you know, sort of. Are you a robot things? If you have to do that 12 times in order to contact you, that's, that's, I'd call that friction. Yeah. That's,

John Tyreman: 25:25

How many pictures have bridges in them?

Mark Wainwright: 25:29

yeah, that's, that's good. So, so multiple calls to action, totally reasonable. Some people out there may think, Oh, that's making my skin crawl. Right. But, it's, it's what you need to, if it's really hard, For someone to find the button to reach out to you, or then if they have to, you know, six clicks in, they find your, your contact us page. And then they have to fill out a, a form that has, you know, seven cells in it. Yeah, that's, that's friction. Just make it, make it easy. and, and then you do your vetting, right? When they, when they interact with you, when you receive an inquiry, then you vet, right? And then you, you have a good way of going through and, and filtering and qualifying those, those maybes. So good. I like it. I like it. Good. So the next one you have is an architecture firm, right?

John Tyreman: 26:14

Yeah. This is VLK architects, which is an architecture firm based in Texas and they specialize in, They focus on educational architecture, specifically public K through 12 schools in Texas. they are running a PPC campaign, a pay per click campaign on Google, and they're targeting the keyword architectural design services. Now this keyword, if you're familiar with SEO, it has commercial intent, which means that folks that are using that key or searching for that keyword have the intent of finding some sort of commercial entity. typically any keyword with the modifier services. On it has commercial intent. Anyways, I digress that keyword has about 400 monthly searches. And according to some of the, SEO tools that I have estimate cost per click around 4 and 50 cents. So

Mark Wainwright: 27:08

So that's some money. That's yeah.

John Tyreman: 27:10

that is some money. So it's not, not a, not a cheap keyword, but again, it's a keyword with commercial intent. When folks click through to their website, that campaign, by the way, drives traffic to their homepage. Now their homepage leads with this video that reinforces their position around educational architecture. the video highlights their differentiator, that they include a past educator on their planning team. So this highlights the depth of their education experience and its impact on the final product, the design of the building. the contact form again is simple. It's also optimized for mobile. And that's, that's important, especially if you're running a pay per click campaign where the traffic is more likely to come through mobile. I know that in professional services, the vast majority of traffic to your website is on a desktop, but that's constantly changing and fluctuating. So making that contact form simple and optimized for mobile, I thought was good. I think this is a great example of highlighting differentiators, leaning on paid media as a lead gen, tool, and then re reducing friction of the contact process.

Mark Wainwright: 28:23

Yeah, this, this absolutely flies in the face of so many firms and individuals I know in the architecture profession who think that, you know, being demure and kind of hard to put your finger on exactly what they do and who they do it for and the language they use and everything else. This flies in the face of it. This says, this is exactly who we are. We're going to run hard at this one specific thing. We are going to. Be overt about our focus, about our expertise. We're going to make it super easy to contact us. And, you know, lo and behold, they're, they're presenting a very clear message. That's obviously, you know, creates, you know, makes it really easy to, to get in touch with them. So. Why not? Absolutely.

John Tyreman: 29:08

Believe in lead generation. It is possible. Here's some examples.

Mark Wainwright: 29:12

Right. It is. It is possible. Right. So yeah, there's, there's a ton of, of industries out there who believe they are in, in a completely relational business, which means it's all backslaps and handshakes, right? None of this, none of these, digital channels are going to pay off nothing on social, nothing on their website, whatever else, so they don't believe that, that, that happens, but they're turning their back on all this stuff. And this, this works for. This works for architects. It works for accountants. It works for everyone who traditionally, has thought that, our only lead generation is, going to come from, the folks that are sitting in my Rolodex, right. There it is that a hundred year old term. So this is, this has been, really helpful. I, my goal with this and John, we've talked about this. My goal is just that more professional services firms of all different types and all different size firms start to regard all these different opportunities to generate leads and then vet them and turn them into great clients, you know, that they just embrace all these different channels, that they're not just stuck in a rut and trying to, trying to generate maybes using the same. Same technique, same channel again and again and again.

John Tyreman: 30:21

Yep. one word of caution before we, before we close out, Mark, it, it, there is a very real scenario where you can spread yourself too thin too. So I think that's just some, something to keep in mind. If folks are listening to this podcast and they want to invest in lead generation, don't spread yourself too thin, focus on one channel and then build from there.

Mark Wainwright: 30:40

right. I think that's, I think that's smart. And, the other thing is that, you know, starting to track just like you did sort of which leads you're getting and then seeing which ones then connect with really successful clients is, is, is important. So that's important. If you are continuing to dump time, energy, and money into lead generation, channels or techniques that aren't really working for you, that aren't. That aren't turning into, into great clients, then you should, you should either question how you're doing it, or you should question that, that lead generation technique and, just in general. So yeah, there's definitely some words of caution, but, explore them all and see which ones work the best. And lo and behold, you may find some, that work incredibly well that you had never explored before.

John Tyreman: 31:21

And that are more profitable than the clients that you'd win under the traditional RFP model.

Mark Wainwright: 31:26

Great point. Great point, John. This has been a great conversation until next time.

John Tyreman: 31:31

Until next time.