20 Ways To Generate Leads, Sales and Clients Without Cold Calling

Every business owner has something in common. Everyone wants more profit, more leads, more sales, more clients, etc. One of the biggest struggles people have, is that they don’t know what to do to generate leads.

In this post, I give you 20 ways to bring in more sales, without cold calling.

I  stress the “without cold calling” part, not because I think it won’t help you close some sales. Cold calling can certainly be an effective way of generating leads but most people pussy foot around and never make a call or have such awful anxiety that they never want to give it a shot.

The beautiful thing is you can diversify your marketing and not rely on a single method!

20 Ways To Bring In More Leads and Sales

1.) Direct Mail

There’s many different things you can do with direct mail. Letters inside an envelope, postcards, EDDM, etc. Conversion rates are usually pretty good, and can provide you with a consistent method to bring in leads and revenue. You just have to close the deal! (Check out my Quadruple Threat Method)

2.) Yard Signs

Sounds weird for online businesses or consultants but it does generate leads. They’re cheap to make, they bring in calls, doesn’t take much to bring an ROI from a few yard signs.

3.) Newspaper Ads

Believe it or not, newspapers still are being sold and read. With the dominance of online advertising, newspapers certainly are struggling to make money. Their struggle is your opportunity with cheaper ad rates. With the cheap price, it might be worth testing the ROI!

4.) Print Ads in Local Magazine

This one is something that is not talked about much but a favorite of mine. Advertising in local magazines is a great opportunity. Almost every decent sized city has a city magazine or some sort of magazine that gets distributed in your area. The quality of readership is typically higher than newspapers, and ad price usually isn’t much higher.

5.) Print Ads in Local Trade Journals

One of the best performing ads I’ve ever done was investing into ad space in a state wide business journal, along with trade specific journals/newsletters. This takes a bit of research but many dentists, lawyers, and higher end trades will receive a monthly or quarterly newsletter. Advertising in these for your services, provides a big ROI.

There are newsletters and journals sent out to people in many different niches. I’ve only tried out a few specific niches but have always had success. I’d recommend a bit of research and try it out for yourself!

6.) City Event Sponsorship

A lot of cities have certain events, festivals, parades, etc. Call up your local city hall and ask about sponsorship opportunities. Usually you’ll pay X amount for a banner or to be included in a t shirt or giveaway bag. This isn’t really for lead generation but more for getting on people’s radar. A lot of volunteers for these events are business owners. Another big bonus is that you will be on the mind of local politicians when a city website or department website needs to be designed. Those are big money contracts.

7.) Join a BNI Group

Business Network International is a group famous for networking opportunities. Chances are there is a BNI group in your area. BNI is a great way to acquire clients and generate referrals but it doesn’t come without a few downfalls. Its’ high pressure referral atmosphere isn’t desirable for a lot of people, especially when you’re just starting out and don’t have a decent personal network.

8.) Join Your Local Chamber of Commerce

For a more relaxed networking opportunity, your Chamber of Commerce is probably more ideal. It is less rigorous than BNI but offers the same if not more opportunity. Great way to meet people in your area that are in a position of influence.

9.) Voicemail Drops

This has become more popular in the last year or two. Basically, what you do is scrape a list of numbers (Mobile Renegade or other similar tool) load them up, record a voicemail you would like to be left, and BOOM. Admittedly, I don’t have much experience in this area but it seems to be working for people that are trying it. If you can’t muster up the courage to pick up the phone and call, this may be an attractive option for you.

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10.) SEO

Maybe you’re in a small city, that’s okay! Having your website rank for your local area or nearby cities can still generate a few calls here and there. Just a little bit of on page optimization may be enough for you to rank very well especially in lower competition areas.

11.) Craigslist, Backpage, Ebay Classifieds

I’ve always liked Craigslist. In fact, a bonus report in my Ultimate Blueprint to Start a Web Agency, I outlined a strategy to use Craigslist to bring in more business. Over time, Craigslist has seen a decline in traffic and a rise in marketers using the platform, but it can still be effective! Backpage and Ebay Classifieds are other alternatives but definitely don’t see the same amount of traffic as Craigslist. It’s free, easy and can bring in some sales.

12.) Joint Ventures

One extremely powerful way to bring in clients is to partner up with someone else that handled a lot of B2B clients. Accountants, lawyers, merchant processing companies. One JV I had in the past was with a merchant processing company. They sent out an email for me to all new customers and would give me the customer information, which I would then call, email and send direct mail to.

This lead to an easy source of leads and revenue. All I had to do in return was to refer business owners every now and then.

Be creative. If you’re doing any sort of networking offline, this is a powerful method to utilize your network.

13.) Social Media

Think about Facebook… how many people are you friends with? How many of those people are in need of your products or services or know someone that would be? Facebook, can be a great tool to boost referrals or direct sales.

Of course, there’s many other platforms like Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter that can work well for you.

14.) Use LinkedIn

LinkedIn could be classified as social media, but I believe it deserves a point of its’ own. Not only is it an effective outlet for marketing content to your network or groups you belong to, it’s a great way to build connections by messaging and doing a bit of networking online.

10 minutes a day invested on LinkedIn, by networking or even cold messaging people to gauge possible interest in what you offer, can lead to a hell of an ROI.

15.) Pay-Per-Click

Google Adwords is what most people think about when you hear PPC mentioned. However, it’s not always the most cost effective choice. You can implement retargeting campaigns, you can use facebook ads for certain locations and demographics, you can use Bing ads as well. If you’re doing content marketing, outbrain seems to be quite an effective tool to boost your top of the funnel leads and let your lead nurturing campaigns go to work.

16.) Utilize Directories and Platforms like Thumbtack and Manta

Building citations has always been a popular task related to local SEO, and while you could generate business from those citations directly, you can use the built in power of both Thumbtack and Manta. Just being on Thumbtack could bring in business for you. I was one of the initial beta testers for the site, and back then it was nice, I didn’t have to pay for anything, they were generating leads FOR ME. Now it is more of a pay to play game, but still effective.

Manta on the other hand has been a generally weak citation, kind of bouncing back and forth in strength. The power of manta doesn’t stem from citation authority though. It stems from the community aspect they have. Taking part of Manta Communities allows you to help and connect with business owners, or generate traffic to your website through content marketing efforts.

17.) Message Boards and Forums

Believe it or not, I get a few people each and every month asking for help with SEO or web design or something else. I’ve turned down the majority but for someone starting out, it can be a good use of your time to start posting on forums.

You can even run sponsored ads/classifieds on some forums like Warrior Forum, Digital Point and others. However, the real opportunity isn’t with marketing forums, it’s with niche forums. Forums like Contractor Talk and others that specialize in a certain field are the ones you want to spend time in.

On one specific niche forum I generated over $15,000 in sales from just 35 posts, replying to people that were asking questions about marketing. Be careful though, the moderators of these forums are aware of the strategy, don’t come across as too promotional or you will get banned in a second.

18.) Email Marketing

There’s a lot of opportunity with email. There’s a few things you can do. You can search Google for whatever terms and location, go to sites and fill out contact forms with your solicitation. You can find their emails and email manually, or you can scrape emails and use a bulk email strategy.

In Ice Cold Email Gold, I give away my strategy for using cold emails to generate clients.

It’s funny, ad spend is decreasing in more “traditional digital methods” but email marketing sees a continued increase in money invested among companies. Do you know why budgets are increasing in certain areas? It’s not because they want to test… it’s because they know it works.

Email isn’t going anywhere, and will remain an effective way to communicate, and market to businesses as well as individuals.

19.) Press Releases

This one probably won’t be an effective tactic 90% of the time. The other 10% though, it can be incredibly effective.

A few years back, press release syndication was a great way to build a lot of backlinks on very trusted websites. I remember the first site I ever used a press release syndication strategy on ended up performing well. I generated over 230K mentions and about 30K backlinks.

Even with those seemingly awesome results, it brought in very little traffic but did account for a sale I made. If I remember right, it was a pretty cheap sale, not sure it was worth the time to be honest.

Nowadays, you need to use press releases as part of a bigger strategy. Have something newsworthy, or take a piece of news and offer whatever newsworthy stance or position or strategy you have in dealing with it. Some people just like doing press releases so they can have the cool “As Seen On” logos.

If you do press releases, you need to do it right, otherwise you likely won’t see any sales from it.

20.) Become a guest contributor

No, this isn’t about guest blogging. Guest blogging is for bloggers to generate traffic to their blog. It isn’t for web design, SEO or marketing companies to generate sales. (Some may want to debate on that)

When I suggest becoming a guest contributor, I’m going back to the point about utilizing trade magazines or trade journals. Offer to write a monthly column or quarterly piece on how the niche businesses can bring in more business.

Those trade magazines and journals are more worried about selling ad space, they don’t want to worry about content. If you can help them, it helps you.

How do you get an opportunity like that? Send email, call them, buy ad space and pitch the idea before you actually buy the ad, use facebook or social media to sniff them out.

Using this method, allows you to generate very high quality leads with little work. It also gives you an incredible position of power when it comes to closing the sale.

Final Thoughts

Never let something get in the way of your dreams. I’m a believer in conquering the road blocks that stand between you and your goals and you should never allow your fear to take over.

Maybe there are methods you don’t feel comfortable with.

The point here is, that you have multiple ways of accomplishing a goal. You don’t need to use one specific thing instead of another. You can use a well balanced strategy with multiple tactics and avoiding the methods you don’t like.

Sitting there and thinking about the one area you struggle with, isn’t an effective use of time. Move on.

There’s plenty of ways to generate sales. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re going to put it into action.