Mark Edwards talks with Alex Gesell of Imagine Growth, a training institute, focused on the tech sector.
A true digital nomad, Alex lives globally, spending 3-6 months in the most beautiful places from Europe to Latin America, US, Africa to Asia - He has employees on all 5 continents and clients mainly in Europe and the US.
It’s a fully virtual company, which he founded 2 years ago and built from the start with the idea of having a truly global company. It’s a company that embraces the next level of working globally together with no borders and no distance is too far.
To make this work in practical terms, Alex has made a conscious shift to scheduling his business meetings around where he currently chooses to live - whether that’s in Colombia, London or Silicon Valley. 100% of customer conversations are online - There’s literally no need to be face-to-face. Conversely, whenever he has the opportunity, Alex loves to have face-to-face meetings.
Imagine Growth Institute
Imagine Growth Institute is a training institute, dedicated to a very specific target audience - The tech industry, including software & consulting founders and their executive teams.
Imagine’s vision is to help people change the way they do business, from strategic positioning to scaling up their business x2 to x10 times.
At the same time, they work on top leader personal growth on all levels - Alex likes to call this "body, mind, soul reprogramming. Questions tackled are those that face many top entrepreneurs and executives: How do you live an empowered life as a leader and not simply work 100 hours, contsantly stressing out about reaching the next quarterly goal - At the same time, how do you transform your operations for the future?
Alex has worked for 10 years in the tech sector, mainly in the innovative RPA and AI niches. In all the organisations he worked with, he realised that 2 things weren’t working:
- Branding and content marketing - Really creative content to educate the customer about the innovative tech sector.
- Lead generation
The biggest mistake they all made was to be panicking about the results for “this quarter”. And this was true in companies of all sizes - from small companies with 50 people to Microsoft-size corporates.
If you want to really grow your business, this is a strategic essay - a core capability. Producing software is one element, while generating sales is another. The bridge between these two elements is communication with your market through thought leadership and then leveraging this to generate leads.
You need to combine this with smart outreach, not a ‘shotgun in the dark’ approach. It must be specifically targeted outreach so you are adding value.
The Vexed Problem of Too Many Leads
Mark and Alex have a wry exchange here as it's a problem that would be nice to have and enables business owners to cherrypick who they work with.
The problem is that mosty companies don’t have enough leads, so that they tend to end up working with the leads they’ve got, even if they’re not ideal.
This can be a truly painful process in both the implementation and customer satisfaction phases. And the overall result of working with clients who aren’t Ideal Prospects is that, instead of scaling the business, you’re effectively slowing down the overall growth of the business.
So, empowering yourself to reject 20% if not 50% of all leads, means that you only work with clients that you know you can exponentially scale - You can have really valuable conversations with prospects around their challenges and the issues you can help them solve. Prospects value these frank conversations and they build trust. If they’re not a fit right now, you’ve still built a relationship and they come back when they’re more aligned.
And that’s why lead generation is such a strategic topic - Yet it seems to be given the least strategic attention in the software sector, where it has a huge impact.
It's critical companies really understand who their Ideal Clients are and build thought leadership with them. Everything improves by completing this small but essential step. Software companies that omit this key element can seriously damage their sales and credibility. Conversely, if they work on their strategic positioning, thought leadership and lead generation, even if their product is not quite as good as their competitor’s they will gain a compelling competitive advantage.
Some Say Social Media Doesn't Work...
To do social media effectively, you need to first understand the psychology of social selling and how to run campaigns at scale, how to target the right people and how to integrate it all into a scalable outreach model that’s 100% aligned to your business - If you don’t do it like this, it won’t work.
Imagine Growth Institute focuses 80% on LinkedIn and 20% on setting up the lead generation process - So, email outreach, checking to see if there are any other appropriate social media channels, creating a podcast - whatever makes sense for the business they're working with.
Alex believes there's no better place than LinkedIn to create a perfect prospect list that is laser targeted and aligned to your business - This means the right persona, right time and topical themes to discuss.
In effect, LinkedIn is the most up-to-date CRM and it allows you to go to any level of granularity, finding everything you need to know to establish if somebody is a prospect for your company. For example, if somebody is attending a software webinar or event, you know that they are interested in that topic - Right now. And, you can re-target them so you avoid ‘shotgun in the dark’ campaigns.
Biggest Mistakes in Lead Generation in the Software Sector..
Most companies don't have a scalable process for lead generation and for creating authority and thought leadership in their sector. It’s all quarter by quarter; there’s no considered, methodical system. Most companies don’t have a standard SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for their outreach and thought leadership.
They need to have a proven system that works for their specific industry, to handle outreach, thought leadership and lead generation. It should detail who is involved, which tools are required and the individual steps in the process. It should be aligned with short, mid and long-term plans for the business and it should be scalable from 10 to 10,000 and beyond.
There then needs to be a real-time KPI system that continuously evaluates how the business is doing, what were the buying triggers etc. The data creates a learning point to move the company forward.
How do you find the right company to help with this..?
You need a specialist for your industry - Not a generalist - If they don’t have a background in the tech sector, don’t work with them - Also, check if it’s one person in the company - because if it is, you are talking about multi-dimensional issues and trying to resolve them from a one-dimensional perspective.
If it’s not industry-specific it’s difficult to implement and doesn’t always translate cross-industry. Also, you can give people knowledge but if they can’t implement it, it’s of no use to them.
Quick Wins When Getting Started
Quick wins in lead generation are so important because it’s important you get things going in the first three months or nobody will continue to be invested. That’s the reality. So, Imagine Growth Institute focuses on quick results (growth hacking) at the beginning and then moves on to more in-depth processes - This motivates people the most. And also gives you the ‘trusted advisor’ soubriquet.
Thanks, Alex, for a really interesting conversation and great insights :)
Links & Contact:
Alex Gesell:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergesell/
https://imaginegrowth.institute/ https://www.instagram.com/imaginegrowth.institute/?hl=en
Mark Edwards:
https://www.bossequity.com/resources/podcasts https://www.linkedin.com/in/markledwards/
https://www.bossequity.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markledwards/
