🧩 The 3 lead gen elements you need
Discover simple yet powerful strategies that drive growth and build trust

Better sales stories start and end with the customer.
This week we’re looking into the key strategies that keep your customers at the heart of every decision—helping you generate leads, refine your messaging, and drive growth.
Today’s agenda:
📞 Don’t forget about sales
📈 The 3 things you need to generate leads
🦸 Make your customer the hero
💼 Briefly: Keyword tools, podcasts, & influencers
⏱️ Up & coming: AI mistrust reigns
🤝 Why sales is everything
Are you guilty of undervaluing sales and marketing as a new founder?
You’re not alone, but here’s a perspective you may want to hear:
In a recent episode from the podcast HBR On Leadership (also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify), Harvard Business School senior lecturer Mark Roberge discusses how sales is integral to every aspect of a founder’s role.
🔑 Key takeaways from the episode
Sales is about more than customers: Founders are constantly “selling” to customers, investors, and employees—whether it's motivating your team or selling the vision of the company.
Sales isn’t just persuasion: It’s about deeply understanding the buyer, asking insightful questions, and building trust.
What makes the “right” salesperson: Focus on hiring team members who can both handle customer conversations and extract insights to improve your product/service.
Compensation can drive your strategy: Founders should design compensation to reward not just revenue generation but also key behaviors tied to long-term success, such as customer retention or product adoption metrics.
Know when to scale: Focus more on customer retention and satisfaction to ensure product-market fit before aggressively scaling, rather than solely on revenue milestones.
💡 Making sales a priority helps founders put the right strategies, people, and processes in place to support growth.
🎯 3 elements for lead gen success
There’s only three things you need in order to generate leads for your business.
Yes, you read that right.
Watch my video below to unlock these three key elements. (Hint: They involve your website.)
💡 Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more!
📚 ‘The story needs to be about them’
Inspirational quotes circulating the web encourage us to “be the hero of our own story.”
Marketing says no—your customer is!
StoryBrand facilitator and podcaster April Sunshine Hawkins shared her specific framework for more concise and effective brand messaging with HubSpot.
Hawkins’s 3 tips
Be mindful of what you’re selling: Your customers can tell when you’re selling something you don’t care about—it’ll be much easier to connect and build trust if you love what you do.
The customer is the hero: Your customers need to feel like you get them—and to accomplish this, you need to reframe your story to be about them.
Marketing = storytelling: Think of it like a novel—there’s a hero, an “insurmountable challenge,” and a successful ending.
Briefly
🔎 Is your keyword strategy getting stale? Think beyond Google Keyword Planner with these 19 innovative tools and strategies
🎙️ Podcasts can help businesses build their brand and engage with customers. Here’s how to create or improve your show
🤳 Influencer marketing is transforming media and PR—read more about its power and how to implement it here
📧 Did you know you can import email from other accounts into your Gmail? Here’s how to do it
🧑💼 New research reveals that a balance between office and remote work is the “most promising path forward”
Up & Coming
Is mentioning AI detrimental to your business?
Research shows that not only are consumers still skeptical of AI, but the use of AI terminology decreases their purchasing intention.
💡 The solution? Accuracy and transparency—and avoiding overusing the term without any real meaning or intention behind it.