8 Proven Strategies for Generating Quality Leads in SaaS

When I've been in SaaS businesses that are running in full tilt mode,

I've seen eight different ways of generating quality leads online. Here's a big question, though.

What are these eight different ways of generating leads? Which one should you start with?

Because we all know trying to do all eight is a bad idea. And how do you actually ensure

that those leads turn into real revenue? In this episode, I'm going to walk you through the eight

best ways to generate these leads, and then I'm going to walk you through the framework

that I follow to prioritize the right ways to generate leads and start to scale it up.

As you start to see success. When you implement these principles inside of your SaaS business,

you will be able to accelerate your path to the next stage of growth. Intro.

What's everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm T.K.,

And on this channel, I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster

with an unstoppable strategy. Now, if you're to this channel, welcome. I drop an episode every single Sunday

with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business faster.

So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. That way

you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TC Energy.

Now, if you're already part of this community, if you're part of my SaaS,

go to market coaching programs by people. Welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here.

By the time I exited my last company, Tower App, we were using 2 to 3 key lead sources

to consistently generate leads that convert it to revenue. once we exited,

I joined a company called Marketo, and Marketo was around 450 million in error

that entire armies of marketers that were driving demand and Marketo was the OG demand generation platform.

So they knew a thing or two about sharing demand and sharing quality leads.

And over there they were using eight different channels to generate quality leads and pipeline

to be able to take us from foreign 50 million to half a billion in RR.

since Marketo. Fast forward to today. I've helped over 14 companies

get to a million in error. I've also helped six companies get to 3 million in error.

So based on everything that I know, based on all my experience, I'm going to walk you

through the eight key ways to generate leads online and how to convert them to revenue.

And if you watch till the end, I'm going to show you

how to prioritize the right channels and ensure you're successful in them. If you're excited

to get going to smash out like but for the YouTube algorithm and let's

go to the first way to generate leads. The first way to generate leads and my most favorite way

is to post social content. And social content could be on Twitter, it could be on LinkedIn,

it could be on Facebook. Wherever your ideal customer hangs out. And the idea here is to actually post

educational content, helpful content, and drive them to your website

or to a lead magnet so they actually become elite. the second way that you can be generating

leads is off the same vein. You can take the best pieces of content that successfully generate leads for you

and you can turn them into social ads. So let's say you post three times a week, every single week,

you do that for a month. You figure out which one resonates really well

and generates leads for you. Take the best ones and you essentially

go to those platforms. They say, Look, I will give you money. Here's my ideal customer.

Please put this in front of them so I can generate more leads and you can convert

the best pieces of content to actual ads that consistently generate leads for you. next the third way that you can generate

leads online is SEO. And this is along the same vein, except instead of writing

small pieces of content on Twitter or LinkedIn, you are essentially writing long form

blog posts that are educating your customers. key here is

you really want to target specific keywords that your ideal customers

are searching for and make sure that you rank for them so that they actually discover

the blog post that you're posting. And SEO is one of the consistent ways that you can continue to generate leads.

But here's the catch. It takes a little bit of time for it to kick in,

whereas these two are a lot faster and following the same principle. The fourth way

that you can generate leads online is. This is search engine marketing. Same idea.

Instead of waiting to rank on the first page with Google

and showing them that your content is worthy, you can go to Google and say,

Hey, Google, I'm going to pay you money. This is the keyword I want to target. Please show them this ad,

which is my blog post or my lead magnet or my website or my sales page, whatever it may be that converts to real leads.

These four are the big ways that you can generate leads where they come to you.

We call this inbound. These are the best forms of leads because your ideal customers

are out there and they're opting in to your marketing and sales funnel. The reason these are so valuable

is because you're not trying to hunt them down. You're not interrupting their day

on their own volition. They're actually clicking through and becoming a lead,

which means that on the other side, when you are talking to them in the sales process,

the win rates are actually going to be higher because there's high

intent around these leads. These are the best ways to generate leads online.

there are a bunch of other ways that you can do this that are just as good.

But before I go into the next set of ways to generate leads, we pause here for a second.

Are you starting to see the power in this? The power in this is there's

eight different ways of generating leads, but not all leads are created equal. There's eight different ways

you can position yourself in the market, but you have to make sure that instead of people

just scrolling through, they actually stop and become a lead through one of these channels

that you're doing, which means that you actually have to figure out

what do I target, What keywords do I target, Who do I connect with?

Who's made your customer and what do I write? What do I post?

Some of these pieces are things that are skipped. When people start to generate leads,

they just start posting online or they start writing blog posts, or they spend a bunch of money on ads,

but they don't convert into any real leads that are on revenue. Which is why it's super important

that whichever channel that you use, whichever tactic that you use to generate leads,

you first think about who I targeting and what's my message going to be so I can actually

attract their attention. Once you nail that, any one of these channels

could be your horse in the race to actually generate leads consistently.

Now, if you've seen the power of this, can I just get a yes in the comments below

and also smash a like button for the YouTube algorithm? It just loves it when you do that.

Now, also, if you're in this phase where you try to figure out, well,

how do I do content online or what do I say or how do I target or keywords

do I do all of these pieces go into a proper go to market strategy

if you're in that stage where you're building out your go to market strategy,

I have my completely free five point SaaS growth strategy guide that helps

you build a go to market strategy and use the right channels and prioritize the right channels.

You don't have to go anywhere right now. At the end of this video, I'm going to walk you

through my three point framework that I followed a builder go to market strategy.

I'll tell you all about the guide which you can download for free at the end of this video.

Number five is what I built my last company off of. It was outbound.

We were the OG outbound sales engagement platform. And number five is essentially outbound.

So in these cases, you are waiting for people to come to you.

This is inbound, and you're going to all these channels and you're posting content to wait

for them to actually click and become elite. Well, if you don't want to do that,

then you can go to them. That's what we call outbound. Now, outbound

comes in a few different forms. You can call them, you can email them, and for the people

that have really high deal sizes, you can send them a FedEx envelope. That's direct mail.

Now, FedEx Dynamo costs like 50 bucks to send. But if you have 100 K deal or $1,000,000

deal, well, guess what? A FedEx envelope has a 99% open rate. So direct

mail is a really great way to do this. It may feel like a little bit of a lost art,

but it works really well. If you don't have large deal sizes, then you can always do calling and emailing.

Now, in 2025, emailing and calling still works. A lot of people will tell you

outbound doesn't work anymore because of spam filters. Well, I'll tell you what doesn't work.

What doesn't work is loading up 10,000 contacts and just spamming them with eight emails

that you haven't personalized. However, if you really set a target set of accounts

you want to go after and you do a bit of research on them and you send them

a very personalized email with the right messaging that you know will resonate with them.

Then outbound cell works, and it's one of the best ways to turn prospects which are targeted

people that should buy from you to leads, which is people that are saying, Hey, yeah,

I want a meeting and I actually want to learn more about this.

So outbound in 2025 is still one of the best ways of gender

inequality leads and pipeline for your SaaS business. And depending on your deal size,

you can do direct mail. Otherwise you're going to have to do calling and emailing

and some combination of the two in a very personalized way. Number six

now six is really powerful when done right. Number six of generating leads

is partners. Now, if you are selling to a certain ideal customer,

let's just say you're selling a VP of sales. There are other companies

that are also selling to VP of sales. So what you can do is you can go to them and say,

Hey, we would like to partner with you and we would like to sell to your customers.

We are not competitive. In fact, we are built on your platform

or we're integrated with your platform and we are value add, which means that if your customers buy

our solution, then they'll use your solution more. So let's partner back.

In the days of a Tout app, we partnered with Salesforce. We actually use them as a channel,

as a marketing channel to generate leads and opportunities, and it was incredibly powerful.

We knew that if there were a Salesforce customer that salespeople,

salespeople needed to prospect and they needed to use Tout app. And it was an incredible partnership.

But here's the catch, though They will only partner with you if they already see

value on your platform. Meaning if you are just starting out and you have no customers,

these big companies are not going to trust you with their customers.

So they're just going to say, Cool, come back to us when you are ready. And ready is a nice way

of saying you're too small for us. It's not worth it. We don't even know if we can trust you

with our customers. So what's super important is you have to prioritize these

these other channels of generating leads to get to real customers

and a solid customer base, and then go back to these partners and say, look,

we have a lot of mutual customers and they love us. Let's do some business together

and let's actually partner. That's how it works. The reason I know this is

when I was in Marketo, among the 50 other things that I was in charge of,

one of the things I was in charge of was our partner ecosystem and had a $60 million

pipeline number that I had to hit. And in order to hit that, I had armies of people

that would meet with smaller companies trying to understand what's out there and who we should partner with.

But when a company was too small, we would meet with them, but we wouldn't really partner

because they weren't ready yet. But for the companies that were successful on our platform

that our customers already love, we partnered with them and we actually took them to market

and they were able to sell to the customers that aren't their customers yet.

It was Win-Win and it was really, really powerful. The key,

what partnerships is when you do get to that stage, let's just say you are 3 million

or 10 million or 20 million and you go to these partners. What you have to do

is make sure you do a proper partnership agreement. And then on top of that,

you do one of these marketing activities with them. We call this co-marketing.

co-Marketing is when you say, Cool, I'm really glad we're partners. Let's do

content to your audience together or let's run ads with your branding and let's do a webinar together,

or let's create blog posts that talk about our integration. So when they're searching for you,

they find us as well. So what you want to do is want by the time you're partnering,

you are actually mobilizing these marketing motions with them, with their marketing team

and that's what turns partners into actual revenue. The next one

that's also super powerful are events, and this kind of dovetails with partners with Salesforce.

We went to every single Dreamforce and we made sure that we got a booth and we made sure that we hosted a dinner.

Now, here's the thing. Events are super powerful. When done right.

You need to make sure you're going to the right events. We are ideal customers are hanging out.

You also need to make sure you find a way to stand apart from everyone else. worst thing to do is go to an event,

do a sponsorship and look like everybody else that's over there.

So whenever we did events, we made sure that our booth looked different

and we did an entire campaign around it. The first thing we did is we always had an actual activity

at the booth. So for our company we targeted salespeople.

One of the campaigns we ran, which was super powerful, was

we always have this big sign saying, What's the first thing you ever sold? And salespeople would be able to come up

and write on a Post-it note. The first thing they ever sold and stick it on our booth.

And by the end of the three day conference, we would have sticky notes

all over the booth showing the first things that all these salespeople ever sold.

And out of this activity, our sales reps were able to start a conversation with these folks

and talk about how a sales engagement platform would be able to help them.

That is how we differentiate ourselves from just yet another booth. That is an example of one targeting

our ideal customers in the right way, going to the right event and to getting our messaging right,

which is both of them are super important. We needed to have conviction

on our messaging that, hey, when we say this to customers, they would convert

and then we start spending money on these events. Now, if you're a super early,

you can still go to an event and not spend any money in the booth. But the minimum you should do

is at least host a dinner and invite some of your prospects to it. That doesn't cost as much as a booth,

but it's a great way to stand out. Now, if you are at the mid-stage or the latest stage,

when I'm working with founders at those stages, we always follow a three pronged approach

for events. Number one, you should have a booth

with really differentiated messaging. Number two, you should find a way to get on stage.

So you can actually talk about the transformation and deliver

on your strategic narrative and drive traffic to the booth. And number three,

you should host a special dinner, half customers, half prospects, so you can actually engage

with your customers while they're there and also get your customers to sell

to your prospects and actually win deals out of that event. All right.

So that's events and there's a certain way to do it. They are super powerful when done right.

And so one more way you can generate leads for your SaaS business.

All right. Number eight, I left this for all the way to end,

but it's just as powerful. And you can use this at any given stage. Drum roll, please.

Number eight and this is one of my most favorites is customer referrals.

Let me talk about this a little bit. This works at any stage. If you're in the early stage

and you have some customers, you should just email your customer and say,

Hey, are you happy if you're happy? Can you refer us to another person that would get value from our product?

If you have a thousand customers, you have 5000 customers. You should run a campaign

on those customers. You should run a little survey. And on that survey

you should ask them, Are you happy? And if they're happy? Ask them for a referral

and make it super easy for them to actually give the referral. It is completely free.

And guess what? Remember we were talking about win rates. Well, win rates

when it's inbound lead, it's 50%. When it's outbound, it actually drops to 20%.

That's average. And sometimes even lower. Customer referrals are even

higher than inbound because your future customers trust their peers.

So when a peer is referring them and recommending you to them, they're more likely to buy

and they're more likely to buy more. You start to see why not all these channels,

not all these tactics are created equal. They actually have different win rates. They have different yield rates.

are different ways to succeed at them. And also they cost different amounts of money.

And so because of that, while all of these are really great ways to do it,

that 450 million era company that I worked at, Marketo, did all of them

because they could afford it. But if you in the early stages, you got to pick the right ones

in the right order. All right. So those are the eight

different ways that you can generate leads online. Let's recap.

Number one, you could do social content posts

on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, wherever your ideal customers hangout

and drive them to your website or a lead magnet and convert them to leads.

Number two, you can take your best content and turn them into ads,

and that way you're paying the platforms to propagate

your content that you know will convert them to leads. Number three, do SEO.

If you know you're targeting, if you know your messaging, if you know what

they're searching for, well, write content on your website and make sure you rank in page

one for Google and then you will get leads. Number four,

if you don't want to wait around for SEO to work because it could take 6

to 8 months of your results, then just pay Google to say, I want to bid on this keyword

and send them to this page and convert them to leads. Those are all inbound, much higher

content, much higher win rates. Then you can do outbound. You can call them,

you can direct, mail them, you can email them or you can do all three

depending on your deal sizes and what you can afford. Now don't spray and pray

you have to be personalized. The more personalized you are with your messaging,

the more relevant your messaging, the more correct your targeting, the more effective it's going to be.

And you can get 20% win rates on average as you start to get customers using these ways you can do partners.

Go to your partner, say, look, half your customers or a quarter of your customers

or 5% of your customers, our customers, let's partner and give them value together.

It's win win. And once you establish that partnership, then use one of these motions

with their marketing team to generate more leads. Go to events.

If you're just starting out, just go to an event and host a dinner and make sure you make friends and learn.

If you're leader stage, make you do events right. Don't look like everybody else.

Follow a playbook. Make sure you have a proper events playbook to really stand out.

Number eight Go to your customers. Ask them for referrals. Ask them if they're happy first.

And if they're happy, ask them for a referral. Make it super easy for them to refer.

Make it one click and you will get lots and lots of referrals,

which will then get you more happy customers, which will then

in turn refer more customers and it gets a whole flywheel going. And by the way,

the more customers that you get, you can dovetail this back to sharing their success

stories on social, which gets you more leads and more customers,

and it starts to become a flywheel. So I promised you that if you watch till the end,

I would tell you how to prioritize these. Well, if you're still here,

then that means you're getting value. So first, smash a like button

for the YouTube algorithm and just loves it when you do that. any one of these channels

and tactics are good. You can start with any number of these, but some of them

are not the best places to start. So in my opinion and in my experience, there's three steps I always follow

when I'm building out a proper strategy to execute on these channels, posting content, running ads,

doing outbound. Those are all activities. But if you don't have a proper strategy

in place to do these activities, you're just going to be shooting blanks.

So you're going to be doing a bunch of activities. But those leads won't turn into revenue

because they might be the wrong leads or they might not be quality leads, or it might be too expensive.

So there's three steps I always follow when building a proper go to market strategy.

The first step I follow is I build out an ideal customer profile. Ideal customer

profile. The reason I do that is I need to know who I'm marketing to.

The more specific I am about who I'm marketing to, the better my message is going to be.

and the better. My message is, the more likely they'll actually

click on my content and become a lead or click on my ad or click on my link

inside of the Google search results or click on my email with the subject line or talk to me

at my booth or come to my dinner or give me that partnership or actually

get customers in the first place so they can refer me. targeting is super important

and that's the first step that I always follow when building out a proper go to market

strategy to go win in one of these channels. Once I have a proper ideal

customer profile, the second thing I work on is my message. So let's just say

you're going to write a blog post and you know who your ideal customer is. Well, what are you going to say?

What specifically are you going to say that's going to capture their attention

on the social content or the social ads or the SEO

or the blog post or the keywords or even the subject line of your outbound email

or the big sign in front of your booth. Are you even going to the right conference?

So the message, your strategic. I call this the strategic narrative is super important,

and whenever I work with clients, I build out. I teach doing work with them

one on one to build our proper manifesto. A manifesto is their strategic narratives, their value prop.

It's my proprietary framework that I've been using for six years with all those companies

I mentioned in the beginning where I took them to 1,000,003 million and tens of millions of

we are added to existing revenue bases. We properly build out a proper manifesto because that's

what helps them differentiate in all of these channels that they go execute on.

that's the second step that I always follow to make sure I have a proper go to market strategy.

And then the third step that I follow is what I call the Broadway show. The Broadway

show is a consistent set of sales and marketing activities that I run every week to generate leads.

What that means is I'm going to prioritize 2 to 3 channels,

not all of them. And what that means is I'm going to do that daily with myself

or my team or with leverage or with automation. And what that means

is I'm going to look at the metrics and then as it starts to work, I'm going to either scale

or I'm going to iterate. If it's not working, I iterate. If it's working, then I scale.

This Broadway show methodology that I follow helps me first pick the right channel

start testing the messaging with my targeting. And when it works well, I say, Well,

this is working really well. Let's scale it. So for example,

I would start with social content. I would post on LinkedIn or Target the right people,

and then once I know it's working, I would then scale it out with ads. And once

I know that's working, I would then scale it out with SEO and ACM

because they have slower, more speed to results, meaning it takes longer to actually land

on the first page for SEO. But if I know this content works well, I'll invest in SEO

and I'll wait for the results. Six months from now and I'll spend money on the ads

because I know this content converts. Same deal when I know the messaging

is differentiated, it's working. I can then load it up on my subject line for my outbound.

I can call them and that could be the first line I ask them about.

Or I can send them a FedEx Onavo, which is super expensive, but I'm at a point

where I'm not uncertain. I know my messaging works and my targeting is right.

So I will spend the money on the direct mail singles for partners. I can go to them.

I can say, Look, here's who we target and here's why we're different and here's why you should partner with us

and here's all the customers that we have in common already. I come from a place, a position,

and that way my execution is more certain. And same goes for events

and same goes for customer referrals. One of the keys to customer referrals

is arming them with how to actually refer you. So when I know my messaging works,

I just go to like, How are you happy? They're like, Yep, super happy. It's a great.

Can you share this little snippet and referrals to your peers and they'll happily do it.

this is why I follow this three step framework. First, I figure out my targeting,

my ideal customer profile. Then I figure out my messaging. It's like, What do I say?

What's my differentiator? Messaging? What's my value problem? And then I do the Broadway show.

I do a consistent set of activities. I measure the data. If it's working great,

if it's not working, let's iterate. If it's working, cool, let's scale it out.

And over time, we scale out to all of these channels. that's the power

So now you know, the eight key ways you can generate leads for your SaaS business.

But executing on these channels requires you to have a proper strategy. So, you know, the three step framework,

the three key things you have to do to make sure your success in these channels.

It's a fool's errand to go after all eight of these all at once,

unless you can dedicate enough people to it. So pick, pick the right channels,

get the strategy right, start, execute, measure the right things, and then you can scale from there.

Now, you know exactly what the channels are, what my framework

is to figure out exactly how to approach these channels and be successful with them

and scale it out over time. What you may not know is how I think about an ICP

or how do I think about a strategic narrative or what is a Broadway show

and how does all that work? This is why I created my five point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide.

It's an incredible guide. It's been downloaded by SaaS founders like tens of thousands

of times. It's incredible and it has my best resources

across this channel and links to all of them on how to think

about these three core principles and these channels. If you want to grab your copy,

it's completely free. Just go to get unstoppable dot com slash strategy, unstoppable dot

com slash strategy and you can grab your copy right then and there.

If you got value from this video please smash it like button for the YouTube algorithm.

It just loves it when you do that. Also I drop an episode every single Sunday

with actionable strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your SaaS business fast.

So be sure to hit that subscribe button and a bell icon or you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode.

If you have a fellow founder, if you have a team member that would get value from this video,

please share this video with them. We want to help and serve as many SaaS founders and leaders as possible.

We want to help you build incredible SaaS companies. And today,

in 2025, it's a better time than any to be building

software companies, especially with AI. So we want to be here and I want to be here

to make sure I'm supporting you in your journey. Lastly, remember,

everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us,

yours is going to be unstoppable. I'm T.K., and I'll see the next episode of Inside

the five point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide. Say that ten times faster.

Link below. I'll see inside. Take care, everybody. Woo!

Rusty. Let's do that again. What happens

when you don't film for three weeks? Remind me to not take three weeks off again.

Lastly, what else is there?