Lead Generation Basics

An ideal customer profile is a written description of the kind of buyer your product is genuinely good for. Without one, "generate leads" has no target and every list is as good as any other — which is why untargeted outreach performs so badly.

Who:      Regional travel agencies, 2-15 staffDoing:    Building custom itineraries for individual clientsToday:    Rebuilding documents by hand each time a booking changesTrigger:  Peak season, when volume makes the manual process hurtDecider:  The owner, usually also one of the agentsNot for:  Large tour operators with in-house systems          Solo agents doing under ~5 itineraries a month

The two most useful lines are the last ones. Writing down who it's *not* for is what makes a list buildable, and it's the part people avoid because exclusion feels like lost opportunity.

• Directories and trade associations for the industry — unfashionable, public, and accurate
• Map and local business data, when your ICP is geographic
• Professional networks filtered by role and company size
• Reviews of competing products, where people describe their problem publicly with a name attached
• Communities and forums where the work is discussed — join, read, and note who asks the recurring questions
• Existing customers' referrals, which convert better than any of the above

Aim for a first list of fifty specific, named organisations rather than a thousand rows. Fifty is small enough to research individually, which is what makes the outreach land — and large enough for a pattern in the responses.

Early on, outbound is nearly always the right answer, because you need conversations now and you need to learn what language works. Inbound is what you build with the language outbound taught you. Running them in the other order is how people spend six months publishing content aimed at nobody in particular.

1. 01Research for two minutesFind one specific, true thing about them. That sentence is the entire reason the message gets read.
2. 02Lead with their situation, not your productThe first line should be about them. If it's about you, it reads as a template.
3. 03Ask for something smallFifteen minutes, or a single question they can answer in one line. Not a demo, not a trial.
4. 04Keep it under a hundred wordsLonger messages get read less, not more carefully.
5. 05Follow up twice, then stopTwo follow-ups spaced a week apart is diligent. Five is harassment, and it costs you the referral too.

Below roughly twenty active conversations, a spreadsheet is genuinely sufficient. Company, contact, stage, last touch, next action, next date. The only column that matters is next action — a pipeline is lost through forgotten follow-ups more than through lost deals.

• One row per organisation, not per email
• Every row has a next action and a date, or it's closed
• Review the whole sheet once a week, on the same day
• Move to a proper CRM when you can't hold the state in your head — usually somewhere past twenty active conversations