Lead generation and partnerships

Referrals are lovely and they are not a channel.

A channel is something you can turn up. Owned properties, vendor and referral partnerships, and researched outbound from your own domain are the ones that compound instead of evaporating.

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How we do it

5 steps, in this order.

  1. 1Count what already worksBefore building a channel, find out which existing source actually produced revenue. It is rarely the one people assume.
  2. 2Pick one channel to make repeatableOwned lead-gen property, partnership motion, or researched outbound. One, built properly, beats three half-built.
  3. 3Build the assetA property you own, a partner agreement with real mechanics, or a research process that makes outbound worth reading.
  4. 4Send from your own domainDeliverability, warmup, and a volume that stays under the threshold where you become spam.
  5. 5Measure to revenueLeads are not the metric. The join from channel to closed deal is the metric.

What you end up with

  • An honest audit of where revenue actually came from
  • One channel built end to end, with its assets
  • Partner mechanics written down, not just agreed verbally
  • Outbound infrastructure on your own domain
  • Channel to revenue reporting

Questions this answers

What people ask before they call.

How do I turn anonymous website visitors into an ABM program?

Treat it as a data pipeline, not a campaign: identify the company, enrich it, score fit and intent separately, route the accounts worth a person's time, and measure what happened. Most of the build is exclusions such as customers, competitors and bots, and routing is where automation should stop.

Read the full answer →

How do we build a lead source that isn't founder referrals?

First find where revenue actually came from, by tracing your last ten closed deals to their real origin. Then pick one channel to make repeatable, whether an owned property, a partnership or researched outbound, and build it properly before adding a second.

Should outbound email come from our main domain?

Most deliverability advice says to use a separate sending domain to protect the primary one, and at high volume that is right. At low volume, with researched and personal messages, your own domain can work, provided authentication is set up, volume ramps slowly and a person handles the replies.

Do referral partnerships work for early-stage SaaS?

They work when the mechanics are written down: what the partner gets, when, and for which deals. Partners listed on a slide with nothing agreed rarely send anything. Start with one partner whose customers already need you, and count deals sourced rather than introductions made.

Updated

Copy this into your agent

Find out where your revenue actually came from

Most teams are wrong about this, and it is the cheapest thing to check before building anything new.

I want to build a repeatable lead source, but first I want an honest answer about where my revenue has actually come from. Work through this with me one step at a time.

1. Ask me to list my last ten closed deals and, for each, how the first conversation started. Push me for the real origin, not the attribution label.

2. Group them by true origin. Tell me which sources are repeatable, which were luck, and which depend entirely on one person's network.

3. Tell me honestly what share of my pipeline would survive if that one person stopped selling.

4. From what you now know, pick the single channel most likely to become repeatable for a company my size, and say why the others are worse bets right now.

5. For that channel, list what I would need to build before it could produce anything, in order, and tell me which step teams usually skip.

6. Tell me what I should measure to know within a quarter whether it is working, and what number would mean I should stop.

Where you are guessing about my business, say so instead of guessing.
Works in Claude, or whatever you already use.

The other five

PositioningNobody can repeat what you do. LaunchLaunch day is covered. Week two isn't. SEO & contentContent is a backlog nobody owns. Paid acquisitionYou're buying clicks, not customers. Marketing opsYou can't join spend to pipeline.

Tell us what you’re trying to move.

Fifteen minutes, no deck, no prep. If it isn’t a fit we’ll say so on the call and point you somewhere better.

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