How to generate leads
for software development projects

For small’ish software development companies with less than ~200 employees.

The shortest answer for how to generate leads: Engage and build enough trust that someone wants to discuss their business needs with you.

It’s that straightforward. But it’s very hard and complex to accomplish.

But I don’t think this is a super useful answer…. so let’s dive in a bit and get to some more useful tips on how to think about this.

Things you don’t want to hear, but probably know, and will help to accept

Just because you want to generate leads, doesn’t mean you will, at least not within the constraints you’re hoping for. A few important realities if you’re planning to get serious about lead gen:

  1. Marketing lives in the land of low probabilities. The probability for any method and any given stage of conversion are likely lower than you want them to be. Patience and experimenting are wildly important.
  2. Lead gen is hard work. Maybe one of the hardest things you’ll do as a business. If it were easy to generate leads, people wouldn’t put so much energy and resources into trying.
  3. It can be tempting to try to find a silver bullet. Stop trying to find the silver bullet, roll up your sleeves, and start doing the hard work to make progress on your journey.
  4. Lead generation approaches are dynamic. They evolve with buyer expectations, the market, and technology shifts. Get ready to evolve with them.

SRLs vs MQLs

Sales Read Leads (SRLs) are the focus of this article. It’s not that Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) aren’t potentially valuable, it’s just a different focus.

An SRL is generally going to be someone that:

  1. Appears to be a reasonable fit for your company.
  2. Has a need (large or small).
  3. Has expressed interest in talking to someone from your company.

Some basics / fundamentals.

If you want a really simple lead gen strategy, answer these questions:

  1. What problem am I solving?
  2. For whom?
  3. How do I engage them for their current needs?

A few lead gen tips

Let’s tease apart my simplistic answer for how to do lead gen:

“Engage and build enough trust that someone wants to discuss their business needs with you.”

Some fundamental tips for engaging and building trust:

  1. Be helpful. Talk about the things they care about, from their perspective, not yours.
  2. Add clarity. Less words are usually better, especially on first impression.
  3. Talk about things that other companies like yours shy away from (and your customers want to better understand).
  4. Be authentic. Most people can sniff out when you’re faking it, even if they don’t say so.
  5. Let your personality out. You need to show who you are as a company. What you stand for. How you view the world differently. What’s your less-common perspective?
  6. Show, don’t tell. You shouldn’t tell someone to trust you. You should show it. You do this through (1) proof points and (2) teaching them things they want to know about.
  7. Figure out where you add significant value in a less-market-saturated dimension.

Inbound vs outbound

Inbound and outbound are overarching marketing approaches. They’re almost philosophical in nature.

Here’s why…

With outbound, you’re pushing yourself onto potential customers.

With inbound, you’re attempting to attract potential customers toward you.

These two approaches encourage different mindsets and corresponding personalities for the people involved in sales and marketing. It’s not that one person can’t do both inbound and outbound, but they’ll likely have a natural strength and affinity toward one or the other.

As a business owner, you’ll likely want to decide which side you’re going to leverage as your core, inbound, or outbound (check out Inbound vs outbound marketing for more).

A few words about content

The term “content marketing” can be confusing.

Why?

Because most marketing methods will leverage content in some way.

Whether it’s articles, case studies, presentations, landing pages, etc. These are all forms of content. Let’s just assume you’re going to leverage content regardless of whether you focus on inbound or outbound.

Lead gen methods

Let’s introduce some methods for SRL lead generation for your software dev company. You’ll likely find that some of these align better with your mentality and scenario than others. Don’t try to do all of these at once. Select a single primary method and maybe a couple supporting methods for starters.

Inbound marketing for lead gen

The core of it:

The core of inbound is to position yourself ahead of time so that when someone needs your help (either to learn about some aspect of how custom software can help them, or for a specific software dev service that can solve their problem), you’re ready for them. Inbound generally incorporates content and search (organic and/or paid).

Pros:

  • You get to try to be more helpful and less annoying.
  • It can facilitate useful market feedback.
  • It encourages you to be more realistic.
  • It encourages you to add focus and clarity.

Cons:

  • It’s a long journey.
  • It’s a complex method.
  • Trust is limited in the beginning.

More info:

Organic search (SEO) marketing for lead gen

The core of it:

The core of SEO is to try to show up in search engine search results for various topics under the umbrella of software development. The search engine could be Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc. As you might imagine, search engine algorithms are wildly complex and constantly evolving. SEO is an aspect of inbound marketing.

Pros:

  • It encourages you to add clarity to your thinking.
  • It can help you help your customers at a deeper level.
  • You can potentially get in front of people mainly by letting your uncommon perspective out.
  • The decay rate for your effort is often a slow fade as opposed to the impulse-response nature of social media or the on-off nature of paid advertising.
  • You can use it as a foot in the door to increase interest in other topics.
  • It’s a potential way to broaden your geographic reach.

Cons:

  • The goal of trying to rank well for certain topics can lead you astray.
  • There’s a lot of guess work and a lot of noise to sift through to find patterns. Search engine companies (e.g. Google) tend to be pretty cagey about sharing useful information.
  • It evolves very quickly.
  • There’s a massive amount of information out there on the topic.
  • You’ll be hard-pressed to outsource the core content creation aspect.
  • It’s often a long journey, especially when you’re just getting started.
  • You may start attracting people that you don’t mean to.

More info:

Paid search marketing for lead gen

The core of it:

The core of paid search is paying a company that owns a search engine (likely Google with Google Ads, but could be other search engine companies) to show up for software topics of interest, so that someone clicks on your ad, goes to your website, and (hopefully, a small % of the time) reaches out for a chat about their software dev needs.

Pros:

  • Quick way to test the market.
  • There’s an “on/off” switch.
  • They can be throttled (at least at a high level).
  • You can target geographically.
  • You can expand your reach.

Cons:

  • You’ll have to bend… a lot. You’re at the mercy of the whims of a behemoth advertising platform.
  • You have to keep paying the piper, and it’s not cheap.
  • You’ll likely end up relinquishing control of your ads over time, sometimes without even knowing it.
  • Platform recommendations can lead you astray.
  • Platform account managers will probably pester you for an upsell frequently.
  • The platform software can be overwhelming at first. Lots of knobs and dials to play with.

More info:

Referrals for lead gen

The core of it:

There are different ways to talk about referral marketing. The kind we’re talking about here is actively encouraging a person that you have a relationship with to connect you with a person that you don’t have a relationship with. That person might work for the same company as the person you know (internal referral), or might work for another company (external referral).

You’re probably already getting referrals occasionally. And probably passively. The focus here is a more active outbound approach to encourage leads.

Pros:

  • You can transfer the trust you’ve built with one person over to another.
  • You likely won’t need to create as much content as you would for other methods like inbound and organic search.
  • You’ll learn a lot about what resonates and what doesn’t at a very practical level because of 1:1 interactions.

Cons:

  • You’re asynchronous to their needs, so don’t expect any short-term opportunities. You’ll need to nurture them.
  • Your reach / scalability is limited by your network size and quality.
  • It takes a lot of mental strength to put yourself out there over and over and over.
  • It requires an engaging personality.
  • It requires solid verbal communication skills.

More info:

Partner channels for lead gen

The core of it:

The core with partner channels generally is that you’re trying to leverage the reach and scale of a large company that provides a piece of a solution, but doesn’t provide the entire end-to-end software solution to the customer’s problem. Your goal is to provide the rest of the pieces of the puzzle to solve the customer’s problem.

Pros:

  • Access to companies / customers outside your reach.
  • You get to piggyback off the name recognition of the larger partner company (yes, the brand… I know, yuck right? 😊).
  • You may not have to develop as much content as you would for some other marketing methods (e.g. inbound, organic search).

Cons:

  • You’ll need to be very flexible. As your partner changes, you may need to as well.
  • They may decide to start doing some of the work you do, potentially competing with you in some cases.
  • Navigating the partner process may be complex / convoluted because you’re probably dealing with a large company.
  • You might be putting a lot of energy into your relationship with them, often at the cost of building your own independent assets.
  • You may be playing “follow the leader” with them, instead of charting your own path.

More info:

Selling to existing customers for lead gen

The core of it:

The core of this one is about actively selling (vs passively )to an existing customer.

My claim: most software dev companies should be actively selling to existing customers.

Why?

Because you’ve already spent a lot of time and energy building trust with this company. Assuming the company isn’t small (i.e. their larger than ~30 people), chances are they’ve got near-term problems that you could help solve.

Pros:

  • You get to leverage trust from your existing relationships.
  • You likely don’t need to develop as much content as you might for some other marketing methods.
  • You likely have insights about them that many other software dev companies don’t.

Cons:

  • The customer has to want help. Just because you can see a need, if they don’t want help with that need, move on.
  • You’re running asynchronous to their timing because you’re outbound. You’ll need to nurture them over long periods.
  • If you do too much work for one customer, you can become very reliant on them and are more likely to bend to their whims, possibly to the detriment of your company’s well-being.

More info:

Account-based Engagement for lead gen

The core of it:

The core of ABE (Account-based Engagement) is about knowing a small number (starting with say ~10) of companies that are ideal for you to be working with. The word “ideal” has a lot packed into it of course, but the gist is that:

  1. you’re in a relatively unique position to add a LOT of value to this small number of companies,
  2. they have the ability to pay you a LOT of money to do so, and
  3. you want to do work for them.

These companies are generally going to be large in scale.

Pros:

  • You get to focus very narrowly and very deep.
  • It can be useful when inbound /search methods won’t work because there aren’t enough people looking for the things you can help with.
  • Some of the content you create for ABE might be re-workable for use in other marketing methods.

Cons:

  • This is a very sophisticated method for marketing, sales, and business leaders. Probably not a great place to start for those just getting into marketing / sales.
  • The up-front costs can be high, and the sales cycles very long.
  • You’re mostly working outbound, however there are ways to leverage inbound methods for some of it.
  • There’s a potentially large revenue risk if things go south with any one of your accounts.
  • There’s a good chance you’ll end up agreeing to things with some of your accounts that you don’t necessarily want to be.

More info:

Email marketing for lead gen

The core of it:

The core of email marketing for lead gen is about appropriately building your email marketing list to nurture MQLs until they become SRLs. You do this by sharing content. You also need to have a good understanding of why someone would want your help in a year or two if they don’t want it now.

You also need mechanisms in place (like inbound) to get people to sign up to receive such content.

Pros:

  • You have direct access to your audience, so you can win them over with your perspective (don’t abuse it!).
  • You can potentially gather very useful feedback from your customer base.
  • You’re not playing against such complex algorithms as those associated with search engines or social media.

Cons:

  • You still need a mechanism to get people to subscribe to receive your emails (e.g. inbound, SEO, social media).
  • It’s very easy to annoy people if you do something like provide content that they didn’t find useful / helpful. There’s a good chance some of those people you worked hard to get to sign up will unsubscribe.
  • Some people may just decide to just block your domain instead of unsubscribing. Your domain’s reputation could suffer.

More info:

Social media for lead gen

The core of it:

The goal here is to leverage social media (likely LinkedIn) to post content and/or ads to get people to reach out for help with their software dev needs. I’m not a fan of this method for lead gen. That doesn’t mean you can’t try it.

Pros:

  • It’s very enticing to be able to target such a well-defined group of people when advertising.
  • Growing a following (either with a company page or your individual page) helps you get in front of people asynchronously without being super annoying (something other outbound methods struggle more with).

Cons:

  • Paid ads generally aren’t cheap, especially for the sort of audience that you’re likely interested in.
  • Building up a following can take a long time.
  • You’re playing on someone else’s playground.
  • I don’t have evidence for this, but the algorithms (at least as of mid-2023) seem to be skewed toward personal network connections over affinity. I’d like to see a shift toward affinity (i.e. common interests based on role, industry, skills, etc.).
  • If someone at your company grows their individual following and then they leave the company, the following is going to go with them.

More info:

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Case studies with a lead gen focus and software development aspect

So what now?

Be careful how many methods you play with at once. You probably don’t have the bandwidth to experiment with all of them. You’ll likely want to start with one primary method and maybe a couple secondaries.

If you’d like help with some of this, check out RocLogic’s services and pricing, and reach out if you’d like to chat.

Yes, let’s chat

If you’re in learning mode, you may find some of these helpful:

2024-09-27T22:53:32-04:00

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About the Author:

David does no-fluff inbound marketing for engineering / software development services companies. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from RPI, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech, and a Certificate in Marketing Strategy from Cornell.
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