Great ideas and products need to spread and reach the right audience to solve problems and land the impact. Building market traction and getting in leads is on top of mind of most founders, startup teams, and Small & Medium Businesses. There is a plethora of lead generation methods, strategies, and tactics available. At the same time, there are a ton of myths, half-truths, and lies also doing the round. These often distract and mislead well-meaning individuals from pursuing the right path.

In this article we look at the 5 principles that are time tested and proven over and over again. As a founder or a CEO looking to generate leads, you need to etch these 5 principles as brain tattoos to remain focused and make your progress inevitable.

Many prevalent myths sound right and hard to discard at face value. But if we delve into them and scrutinize them via playing them out step by step in our minds, we will be able to see them through. The most dangerous myths often have social proof and the so-called tribal wisdom. If you refuse them, you’ll often go against the popular votes and obvious choices. Debunking these needs smarts and sticking with your decision of banishing them needs mental toughness and self-confidence. Below, I share five key principles that are most critical to getting started in the right way. Let’s take them one by one.

1. There is no silver bullet to generating qualified leads overnight!

Certainly not in this article, nor in any place that claims to have it. 99.99% of those who claim it are just lying and titillating desperate readers by promising the illusion of a ‘secret formula.’ If you look deeper into an overnight success, you will find an incredible amount of hard work with many iterations perfecting the funnel. There’s no other way. Sure, you can be lucky to stumble upon some good combinations once or twice, but luck averages out over time and many trials.

2. Do what other ‘hyper growth’ companies are doing.

Hypergrowth companies are different in two fundamental ways.  First, they are at a different stage of growth. They have likely established a product-market fit for multiple segments.  Also, they have detailed artifacts, funnels, playbooks optimized for each product segment. 

And second,  they have access to significantly more resources. This means more marketing dollars, a bigger and better team, existing customer and partner ecosystems, etc. 

A startup founder or a small team can not play the same game early on. We need to look at what they did when they were taking off.

3. Generating leads and market traction is simple but not necessarily easy.

It’s like hitting a perfect cover drive in cricket. When a world-class batter hits a cover drive, it looks easy. When you ask a batting coach, he’ll say it’s simple: “Follow this drill step-by-step 2000 times”. But doing those drills exactly 2000 times is not necessarily easy. It’s different that one can still enjoy doing those many deliberate repetitions. But it’s not necessarily easy.

Similarly, each specific skill involved in generating qualified leads such as active listening to glean valuable insights, crafting value propositions, writing compelling headlines, crafting persuasive proposals, etc. - all need the practice to reach a level of effectiveness.

4. Activity Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Productivity.

It doesn’t matter if you have checked the boxes on having a baseline sales collaterals, hiring a lead generation team, retaining a digital marketing agency, having content pieces, etc. Many companies have all these things in place but without ‘effectiveness’ in one or more links. So the questions to ask are: Do my collaterals clearly and convincingly bring out the value proposition? If my lead generation team is competent and aligned to get X number of qualified leads out every week? Is a digital marketing agency committing to getting X form fills or marketing leads per month, OR are they more effort-based? Is my content well structured and insightful to spur interest and position uniquely in a prospect’s mind?

5. Speed of Iterations and Ability to Learn fast is more crucial than knowledge.

Even though many marketing methods and digital tools are available, the exact recipe of what works well for your specific situation (market, offering, channels, competition, etc.) always takes iterations. There is no way to know until you try it out for this exact reason. You need to design, prepare, and execute a campaign within a few weeks. Quick iterations help build learning momentum even if you don’t get results initially. But this can happen only with well-designed experiments with explicit hypotheses and variables. As a leader, you should insist on writing down hypotheses for each of the campaigns. We will see more on this in the Analyze and Learn section.