"How Do I Get More Leads?"
A founder of a data management company serving regulated industries discusses their lead generation challenges after falling from $30M to $15M in revenue. The advisor recommends a strategy centered on trade shows, speaking events, and affiliate/joint venture partnerships to scale toward their $100M by 2029 goal.
Summary
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.
Key Insights
- The founder acknowledges that nearly all current lead generation is informal warm outbound — personally texting people they already know — with no systematic inbound or outbound process in place.
- The advisor argues that for enterprise-level sales in regulated industries, trade shows and conferences are the highest-leverage lead source because the entire target audience is concentrated in one place.
- The advisor recommends building affiliate partnerships with 'centers of influence' — complementary service providers — as a way to generate ongoing deal flow between events through co-participation and revenue sharing.
- The advisor cites Shiron, president of Real Brokerage, who did 220 speaking events per year and personally sold to attendees afterward, as the key driver of scaling the company from $200M to $1.2B.
- The advisor frames the entire lead generation system as a flywheel: outbound effort secures speaking slots, events generate direct deals, and events also surface potential partners who sustain lead flow between events.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] We provide data management to highly regulated and data intensive businesses. We were well over 30 million with the banking crisis. We fell back down. We'll do around 15 million. Want to get to 100 by 2029. We need more leads coming into the funnel. We're lagging big time. >> How do you source leads right now? >> So most of it's founder. Most of it's just me texting someone on a whim. >> Founder led meaning you. >> Yes. >> Okay. That sounded so fancy. Um like I text people like >> Yeah. >> Got it. So you texting people that you know just because you've been doing this for a while is how you more or less…
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