How do you get sales leads?
Get sales leads from the places where your buyers already show a need: people you have sold to before, introductions from customers, public posts where someone asks for help, job ads for the work you do, and searches for what you sell. Pick two or three of these, work them on a fixed weekly schedule, and track which one produces conversations per hour spent.
A sales lead is a person or company that might buy and that you have a way to contact. Teams then sort them by how ready they look. Our post on 15 free buying signals a small team can act on lists the signals that move a name from maybe to worth a message today.
Most posts on this topic list sources. The harder question for a team of one to five is which source to work first, and when to stop. The table below answers the first, and the scorecard after it answers the second.
Which of the 10 ways to get leads should you start with?
Start with the sources that cost nothing and already know you (rows 1 and 2), add one repeatable source you can work daily (rows 3 to 6), and treat rows 7 and 8 as slow investments. The deciding facts for each:
| Way to get leads | Cash to start | What it needs from you | Works best when | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Old leads and closed-lost deals in your CRM | $0 | An hour sorting records by why they went cold | You have sold for a year or more | Old contact details; skip anyone who asked you to stop |
| 2. Introductions from customers | $0 | A specific ask for one named type of person | Customers know peers with the same problem | A vague ask gets a vague answer |
| 3. People asking for help in public | $0 | 20 minutes a day of saved searches on LinkedIn, X, Reddit or forums | Buyers describe the problem online | Each community's rules on promotion |
| 4. Job ads for the work you do or automate | $0 | A weekly job board search | Hiring shows budget for the problem | Write to the hiring manager, not HR |
| 5. People engaging with competitors | $0 | Watching competitor posts, reviews and comparison threads | Your category has known leaders | Stay factual about rivals |
| 6. A targeted list plus cold email | Data tool credits | Verified emails and a set-up sending domain | You can name the role and company type exactly | Email law and deliverability |
| 7. Your own LinkedIn posts, then talking to engagers | $0 | Two or three posts a week for months | You can explain the buyer's problem well | Slow to start |
| 8. Search pages for what you sell | Writing time | Months before pages rank | Buyers search for your category | Slowest to pay back |
| 9. Partners who sell to the same buyer | $0 | Two or three firms with a different product | A buyer needs both of you | You must send leads back |
| 10. A Google Business Profile | $0 | A complete profile and a habit of asking for reviews | Customers search for a provider nearby | Only for businesses that serve customers directly |
Two rows need a note. For row 10, Google's page on improving your local ranking says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Its Business Profile guidelines say you can create a profile if your business has a physical location customers can visit or travels to customers where they are. For row 8, our sibling post on SEO for lead generation works out how many leads one page can bring before you commit months to it.
Rows 1 and 2 also came up in a practitioner thread. In one r/sales thread from March 2026 about a shortage of leads, we read the 67 comments the archive returned, several of them flagged by the subreddit's bot as likely AI-written. Two suggested working closed-lost deals and dead leads first (one commenter's view: "Closed/lost is a great place to start"), two said referrals from customers, two said to contact people when something had just changed for them, and five argued the real problem was leads not being captured or followed up quickly. That is one thread, so treat it as what practitioners report, not proof.
How do you know which lead source is working?
Count conversations per hour, not leads. A source that gives you 200 names and one call costs more than it looks. Here is a four-week scorecard for a sample founder, Priya at Acme Analytics. All figures are invented to show the method, and Priya's time is valued at $60 an hour.
| Source (sample) | Sent or asked | Replies | Calls booked | Hours | Calls per hour | Cost per call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Closed-lost and old leads | 40 emails | 7 | 3 | 4 | 3 / 4 = 0.75 | (4 x $60) / 3 = $80 |
| Customer introductions | 8 asks | 3 intros | 2 | 1.5 | 2 / 1.5 = 1.33 | (1.5 x $60) / 2 = $45 |
| Public requests for help | 60 messages | 9 | 4 | 10 | 4 / 10 = 0.4 | (10 x $60) / 4 = $150 |
| Bought list, cold email | 500 emails | 5 | 1 | 6 | 1 / 6 = 0.17 | (6 x $60 + $99 list) / 1 = $459 |
Read it in two ways. By cost, introductions win, then old leads. By supply, they lose: Priya has a limited number of old deals and happy customers, so both will run dry within a month or two. Public requests for help cost more than three times as much per call as introductions ($150 against $45) but never run out, so that is the source to make efficient. The bought list is the one to drop. If you are tempted by lists anyway, our guide to where to find cold email leads without junk lists shows how to build one from signals instead.
Run your own version for four weeks before you judge any source. One week is too few calls to tell anything apart.
Is lead generation illegal?
No. Finding and contacting potential buyers is legal; the rules cover how you contact them and what data you use. This is a summary, not legal advice.
- Email in the US. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide says the law makes no exception for business-to-business email. Each separate email in violation can bring penalties of up to $53,088, and opt-out requests must be honoured within 10 business days (figures as shown on the page, checked 5 Nov 2026).
- Email in the UK and EU. The rules depend on whether you write to a company or a person, and on your lawful basis for holding the data. Our post on GDPR, UK PECR and CAN-SPAM compared covers the differences.
- Phone calls and texts. Don't rely on the email rules above: check the rules for marketing calls and texts in your buyer's country before you dial a list.
- Platform rules. Each platform's user agreement and each community's own rules apply on top of the law, and moderators enforce them: in the r/sales thread above, two replies were removed for self-promotion or spam. Read those rules before you post or message there.
What percentage of leads turn into sales?
We found no reliable single figure, and the two well-known numbers below measure something else. Ruler Analytics' 2026 conversion benchmark is a good example: its 4.9% average for organic search counts a qualified lead or sale as the conversion (the page doesn't state the denominator; it reads as conversions per visit), not leads that become customers. The 2007 InsideSales.com and MIT lead response study behind the five-minute rule states plainly that it did not address close ratios.
Definitions also differ: one team calls every form fill a lead, another only counts people who have agreed to a call. So measure your own rate by cohort. Take every lead created in one quarter, wait one full sales cycle, and divide customers won by leads created. For example, 60 leads in January to March and 4 customers from that group by the end of June is 4 / 60 = 6.7%. Do it per source, because the rate for introductions and for cold lists will be far apart.
A lead log and weekly routine to copy
Block about two and a half hours a week and keep the log below. The log is what makes the scorecard possible.
A weekly routine for one founder: Monday, one hour on rows 1 and 2 (five old deals, two introduction requests). Tuesday to Thursday, 20 minutes a day finding people with a reason to talk and writing to them. Friday, 30 minutes updating the log and counting calls per hour by source. For the introduction requests, our sibling post on how to ask clients for referrals has scripts. When a lead agrees to a call, talk a little less than feels natural: in Gong's 2025 study of sales calls, reps who won deals talked for 57% of the call on average, against 62% in lost deals, though Gong says that difference isn't massive and that consistency matters more.
If the daily search is the part you never get to, Siela's Lead Finder runs it from your website: it suggests who to reach, looks for reasons such as people asking how to solve the problem you solve or hiring for the work you automate, and saves every lead to its CRM with the reason it was picked. In Find leads only mode it sends nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Who are leads in sales?
A lead is a person or company that might buy from you and that you can contact. A prospect is a lead you have checked for fit, and a qualified lead is one that has a need, can decide or influence the purchase, and has agreed to talk. Teams draw these lines differently, so write your own definitions down and use them every time.
What is the 70/30 rule in sales?
Sandler Training uses it to mean spending about 70% of your time with a new prospect listening and asking questions, and about 30% speaking. Gong's 2025 analysis of 326,000 sales calls of at least ten minutes found sellers talked 60% of the time on average, 57% in won deals and 62% in lost ones. Gong concluded that the biggest separator between high and low performers was how consistently they stuck to their sales process.
What is the 3-3-3 rule for marketing?
There is no single official version. One common version for outreach is three touches, across three channels, at least three days apart. Treat it as a rule of thumb for persistent but polite follow-up, and change the numbers to suit how quickly your buyers reply and which channels they actually read.
How do I get leads with no budget?
Start with people who already know you: past customers, old deals that went quiet and introductions from happy clients. Then add one public source you can search daily, such as posts where people ask for help with the problem you solve. Each costs time instead of money, so log your hours and compare sources by calls booked per hour.
How many sales leads do I need?
Work backwards from customers. Divide the customers you want by your lead-to-customer rate for each source. If your log shows that 1 in 15 leads from introductions becomes a customer and you want two customers a month, you need 30 such leads a month. Measure the rate per source, because they differ widely.
Sources
- FTC: CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Gong Labs: Mastering the talk-to-listen ratio in sales calls (published 21 Aug 2025, modified 4 Mar 2026) (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- Ruler Analytics: Conversion Rate Benchmarks (5+ million conversions, 13 industries) (26 May 2026)
- InsideSales.com and MIT: Lead Response Management Study (James Oldroyd, Dave Elkington) (16 Oct 2007)
- Google Business Profile Help: Tips to improve your local ranking on Google (checked 5 Nov 2026)
- r/sales: Does your job have a lead problem? If so, how do you get around it? (47 comments listed, 67 returned by the archive) (24 Mar 2026)
- Sandler Training: 3 Types of Questions to Help You Stop Talking and Start Selling (4 Aug 2016)
- Google Business Profile Help: Guidelines for representing your business on Google (checked 5 Nov 2026)