"How Do I Get More Leads?"

The conversation begins with a founder of a data management company that serves highly regulated and data-intensive businesses. The company had reached over $30M in revenue but fell back to around $15M following the banking crisis, and the founder has a goal of reaching $100M by 2029. The core problem identified is a lack of leads entering the sales funnel.

When asked how leads are currently sourced, the founder admits that nearly all business development is founder-led — essentially personal outreach via text messages to people already in their network. The advisor characterizes this as 'warm outbound,' acknowledging it works but is not scalable.

The advisor then recommends a two-part strategy tailored to enterprise-level, regulated-industry sales. First, dominating trade shows and conferences, where the target customer base is concentrated, allowing the founder to be elevated and visible in front of a highly relevant audience. Second, building affiliate or joint venture partnerships with 'centers of influence' — complementary businesses that handle elements the company does not, enabling mutual referral and co-participation in deal flow.

To illustrate the power of speaking events, the advisor references Shawn (Shiron), the former president of Real Brokerage, a publicly traded real estate company. Shiron reportedly did 220 speaking events per year, staying for two days at each to personally sell to attendees, which helped scale the company from $200M to $1.2B. The advisor argues that outbound effort should be directed at securing speaking opportunities, which then generate direct deals, surface potential partners, and create an ongoing lead generation engine between events.