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In this detailed and informative article, Johannes Hoech provides the key to effective digital lead generation.

There’s a story that small- to mid-sized startup CEOs love to tell about the early days of their business: The story of the CEO, alone with nothing but a laptop and a phone, dialing lead after lead after lead until, finally, enough business is inked for the company to start growing legs. Chances are you’ve worked for – or perhaps even been – that CEO.

The idea of going from zero leads to closed-won with nothing but a phone – and actually scaling a startup that way – is central to the lore of the tenacious pipeline building and to “if I could do that then, imagine what we can do now” pep talks everywhere. The problem? It’s rapidly becoming obsolete. Unless you price your offering at upward of around $200K per year, hiring live salespeople to find and close deals is simply unaffordable. Scaling a startup simply doesn’t work that way anymore, especially cloud software products whose average deal prices don’t economically support more then short tele-sales calls, at best.

Let’s talk about why that is, and why, today, success for growth-minded startup CXOs now hinges around one key objective: building an automated lead generation outreach system with verticalized messaging – and executing it at scale.

COVID changes the calculus on scaling startups

A few years ago, if you asked a startup sales rep what their highest-return lead gen methods were, two likely answers would have been:

Lone-wolf prospecting culminating in picking up the phone for a smile-and-dial

Hitting the conference circuit and engaging face-to-face

Then, in 2020…well, you know what happened. “Post-COVID New Normal” discussions are nothing new, but the pandemic’s impact on startup lead gen was so massive we can’t ignore it here. In February of 2020, conferences were a blast, and a wellspring of leads; by April, they’d been slapped with the much-maligned label of “superspreader event.” And with everyone working from home, business-appropriate phone numbers aren’t always available, making cold-calling even more of an uphill battle than it already was. In the cloud software space, all of this converged with a downward trend in price points, which have now gotten so low that one-prospect-at-a-time cold calling no longer scales profitably.

Key points include:

• Verticalized messaging, 2022 style
• Modern verticalized messaging in action
• COVID changes the calculus on scaling startups

Read the full article, Verticalized Messaging at Scale – Key to Effective Digital Lead Generation, on Premenio.com.