Last updated on February 28th, 2025 at 12:37 am
Lead generation is a complex process.
You need a wide range of skills in order to get it right.
That’s why today we are going to discuss the five key lead generation roles that you need to fill if you want to consistently bring in high-quality leads.
Introduction to Lead Generation
Okay, so before we get into the lead generation roles, let’s make sure that we are all on the same page regarding the terms that we are going to be using throughout this article…
What is a Lead?
A lead is someone who has:
- Expressed an interest in your business
- Give you their contact details
A person needs to meet both of these criteria in order to be considered a lead.
Meaning:
People who have visited your website but left without subscribing to your email list are not leads – they are site visitors.
Likewise, random acquaintances you have met throughout the years aren’t leads either – they are personal contacts.
It’s important that you use the correct definition of the word “lead”.
Otherwise, you might end up tracking the wrong metrics, which will then lead to even more confusion.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of converting a potential customer into a lead by persuading them to give you their email address.
What is a Lead Generation Funnel?
The best way to generate leads online is by creating a lead generation funnel.
Here’s what that looks like:
- You create a lead magnet
- You create a landing page for that lead magnet
- You drive traffic to that landing page
Once a person gives you their email address in exchange for your lead magnet, they become a lead and progress to the next stage in your sales funnel.
How Does Your Lead Generation Funnel Fit Into Your Sales Funnel?
We believe that the best way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.
It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to grow ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than seven years.
The Value Ladder sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait – You offer the potential customer a lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product.
- Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product.
- Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product.
Ideally, you also have a continuity program, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
The reason why the Value Ladder sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
- Start the relationship with that person by providing free value
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
- Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage
Here’s how Russell explains it:
So how does your lead generation funnel fit into all that?
Simple:
Your lead generation funnel is the first stage of your Value Ladder sales funnel – the Bait stage.
It’s important to always view lead generation in the context of your entire sales funnel.
After all, the goal here isn’t to collect as many email addresses as possible – it’s to obtain the contact details of your dream customers so that you could sell them your products, generate revenue and make a profit.
The 5 Most Important Lead Generation Roles
There are five key lead generation roles that are required to build an effective lead generation funnel:
- Subject matter expert
- Funnel builder
- Designer
- Copywriter
- Marketer
Depending on your skillset, your budget, and the amount of time you have available, you can:
- Fulfill all five roles by doing everything yourself
- Fulfill some of the roles and pay other people to do the rest
- Fulfill none of these roles and pay other people to do everything for you
There’s no right and wrong answer here.
Every individual situation is unique, so you need to find a setup that works for you.
Now let’s take a closer look at each of these five key lead generation roles…
Lead Generation Role #1: Subject Matter Expert
You will need someone who is a subject matter expert in order to create a lead magnet that provides an effective solution to a problem that potential customers are struggling with.
For Example:
- In a health and fitness niche? You will need health and fitness expertise to create an appealing lead magnet.
- In the business and finance niche? You will need business and finance expertise to create an appealing lead magnet.
- In the dating and relationships niche? You will need dating and relationships expertise to create an appealing lead magnet.
…etc.
This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often people go into niches they are not familiar with, then struggle to generate leads because they can’t create effective lead magnets.
Of course, it is possible to build a business without being a subject matter expert yourself, but understand that this approach will require more upfront investment.
For Example:
There are quite a few male entrepreneurs who have built successful eCommerce businesses in the makeup space despite having never used makeup themselves.
If you are in a similar situation where you are going into a niche without having the expertise required to create an appealing lead magnet, you need to be willing to pay a subject matter expert to produce one for you.
Continuing with the example of male entrepreneurs selling makeup online, offering a free guide with various makeup tutorials would make sense for such a business.
In theory, the entrepreneur could put together a guide like that themselves after watching a bunch of YouTube videos on the topic.
In practice, however, they would be much better off simply hiring a makeup artist to create the guide for them.
Also, note that the more advanced your potential customers are in that field, the more money you will need to invest into creating an appealing lead magnet if you are not a subject matter expert yourself.
For Example:
Imagine that a software engineer realizes that there’s a need for an app that would help plumbers manage their plumbing businesses.
Unless that software engineer is an ex-plumber themselves, the odds are that they don’t have enough subject matter expertise to create a lead magnet that would appeal to their target audience.
In that case, they need to be willing to invest in hiring someone who has that expertise and can create a lead magnet for them.
Say, if the engineer wants to use an ebook as their lead magnet, they should seek a writer who has previous experience in the plumbing industry.
Obviously, hiring someone like that is going to be much more expensive than paying a random writer from UpWork to produce something basic like a “How to Fix Your Leaky Sink” ebook.
But guess what?
Plumbers who run their own plumbing business aren’t interested in reading about fixing leaky sinks. They already know how to do that!
That’s why attempting to save money by hiring the cheapest writer possible is going to be counter-productive – the lead magnet simply won’t be effective.
So make sure that:
- Your lead magnet addresses a problem that your dream customers are struggling with.
- You either have the expertise required to offer an effective solution to that problem or have the money required to hire someone who does.
Lead Generation Role #2: Funnel Builder
You will need someone who knows how to build lead generation funnels.
They should:
Understand How Funnels Work
It’s not enough to be able to put together a lead generation funnel – one needs to understand the principles behind it.
Be Familiar With Various Lead Generation Funnels
“Lead generation funnel” is an umbrella term that includes all funnels that are designed to bring in leads:
- Squeeze page funnels
- Reverse squeeze page funnels
- Product launch funnels
- Book launch funnels
- Webinar funnels
…etc.
Which lead generation funnel is best suited for the product that you are selling?
Know How to Use Funnel Building Software
Designing a lead generation funnel is not enough, one also needs to be able to actually build it using software such as ClickFunnels.
Also, depending on the funnel building stack the person uses, they might need familiarity not with one app but with several – they might need to connect the funnel builder with an email marketing app, an eCommerce app, etc.
Be Able to Set Up and Run A/B Tests
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a conversion rate optimization technique that marketers use to increase the conversion rates of the various web pages in their sales funnels.
Here’s how it works:
- You create two variants of the same page – variant A and variant B. There should be only one difference between them. That’s the element that you are testing.
- You split the traffic equally between variant A and variant B.
- You analyze the results, see which page has a higher conversion rate, and keep the winning variant.
Note that properly setting up a test like that and then correctly interpreting its results requires a solid understanding of A/B testing statistics.
Be Familiar With Conversion Rate Optimization Principles
The problem with A/B testing is that there are countless things that one could test.
However, while the testing choices are infinite, your company’s resources are finite.
That means that the person doing A/B testing can’t just test random things and hope for the best – they need to be familiar with conversion rate optimization principles.
Lead Generation Role #3: Designer
Every step of your lead generation funnel needs to be well-designed. Otherwise, you will come off as unprofessional at best, a sketchy scammer at worst. Aesthetics matter!
Fortunately, our software comes equipped with pre-designed page templates that are already optimized for conversions.
All you need to do is edit them according to your needs using our user-friendly page editor.
This drastically reduces the level of design skills required to build a sales funnel that both looks good and converts well.
Lead Generation Role #4: Copywriter
Copywriting simply means persuasion via the written word – convincing people to do what you want them to do at that stage of your sales funnel:
- Click on your ad
- Subscribe to your email list
- Open your emails
- Click through to your sales page
- Buy your product
Each of these steps is crucial for generating revenue because the subsequent steps and therefore the sale relies on it.
Be prepared to either master copywriting yourself or pay an expert copywriter to craft the copy for you.
Lead Generation Role #5: Marketer
You will need someone who is able to drive traffic to your lead generation landing page.
This could mean:
- Running paid ads – Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads are the quickest way to generate traffic. Paid traffic is immediate, targeted, and scalable. However, it also requires an ad budget, so you need to make sure that whoever is running ads for you knows what they are doing. Keep in mind that it’s easy to burn your entire marketing budget on ads without having anything to show for it.
- Partnering with influencers – Influencer marketing is another quick way to get traffic. All you need to do is find influencers that your dream customers are following and then strike deals with them where they give your lead magnet a shoutout in exchange for free product samples or monetary payment.
- Building a social media presence – You can also build a social media following of your own on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. This takes time but once you have a solid social media presence you will be able to generate traffic without having to pay those platforms for each and every click.
- Building a blog – You can use search engine optimization (SEO) to build a niche blog that gets organic search traffic from Google, then direct those site visitors to your lead generation landing page. This takes at least 6-12 months, but once you get your blog off the ground, you will continue receiving search traffic for as long as your content continues to rank for the target keywords.
- Recruiting affiliates – Affiliate marketing is a way to tap into other people’s audiences by persuading them to promote your product in exchange for a commission on each sale.
We recommend you to start with Facebook ads because it’s the fastest way to see whether your lead magnet resonates with your dream customers.
You can either learn to run ads yourself or hire a paid advertising expert or an agency to run ads for you.
Once your lead generation ad campaign is profitable, you can start experimenting with other marketing channels.
Again, with each new channel, you can either learn to do it yourself or hire someone else to do it for you.
Additional Skills That May be Required
It’s worth noting that creating a lead magnet may require various additional skills depending on the format you choose.
For Example:
Producing a video lead magnet, such as a video masterclass or a video course, will require knowing how to prepare a filming set, shoot the video, and edit it.
This is something that you should keep in mind when considering various formats for your lead magnet.
Is it something that you can produce yourself or will you have to outsource some of those tasks?
Can You do it All by Yourself?
Once you realize what is required to consistently generate high-quality leads, you might start feeling overwhelmed.
Is it even possible to do it all by yourself??
The answer is yes.
In fact, if you are just starting out as an entrepreneur, we recommend you to do everything yourself even if you can afford to start hiring from the get-go. Why?
Because you need to understand every aspect of your business if you want to be able to then effectively delegate those responsibilities to someone else.
And you can’t truly understand something you have never done yourself.
We advise getting to a level 7/10 in all of the aforementioned lead generation skills so that you would become competent in bringing in high-quality leads on your own.
Then start delegating these tasks to people who are level 10/10 experts at them.
This could mean working with freelancers, hiring part-time or full-time employees, or outsourcing to agencies.
Doing that will allow you to gradually replace yourself so that you could spend less time working in your business and more time working on your business (e.g. creating a vision, setting goals, developing systems, etc.).
Want Russell to Show You How to Build Your First Sales Funnel?
Let’s keep it real:
Building a sales funnel from scratch can seem like a daunting task.
That’s why we created our 5 Day Lead Challenge where Russell walks you through it step-by-step.
You will learn how to:
- Generate unlimited leads
- Create your first lead magnet
- Build your first sales funnel
- Create a simple 6-email follow-up sequence
- And launch your funnel
…in just five days!
So don’t hesitate.