I had a call recently with a client, the owner of an accounting firm who’d made great progress with her marketing. We’d worked together on her new messaging, refocused her audience, and she rebuilt her website based on that strategy (using Claude to help!)
And she had the assets. She’d created a useful free assessment with a video, blog, and email sequence to support it; she built a clarity review to give her unique audience insights into their take home pay; and she’d gathered testimonials and Google reviews from clients.
She’d implemented her marketing actions from the Progression Model, and now it was time to move forward.
How to get more leads with these assets?
Creating a useful scorecard, guide, assessment, or download doesn’t mean people will automatically find it. You know this, so you’re starting to think about ideas like ads, cold email, bought lists, direct mail, or creating another asset.
Some of those may be useful at some point. Before adding another marketing activity, though, it’s worth looking at what you’ve already built and asking how you can get it in front of more people.
After all, five minutes of reaching out to a personal human is more valuable than five hours of reaching out to people who’ve never heard of you.
You may need to take your twenty seconds of courage to do it: but it will be far more effective in the long run.
The three fastest places to look for leads: Referrals, Networking, and Former Prospects
If you want to generate leads quickly, there are three areas to look at first
- Referrals and strategic partners
- Events and networking (this includes speaking and podcast guesting)
- Former leads or prospects
The one you focus on most will depend on what you already have around you.
Some accounting firm owners have years of old enquiries sitting in their inbox or CRM. Others have strong relationships with people who already work with the kind of clients they want. Events and networking can be useful too, particularly when they put you in the room with the right people, although you’re naturally working around dates, travel, and the time involved.
For many firms, referrals and strategic partners are the strongest place to begin, especially once you’ve done the Progression work. I know, you’re thinking, “We did all this work simply for you to tell us to get more referrals?” But when I say referrals and strategic partners, I don’t mean “waiting for people to refer to you”. I mean going back to those relationships and strategically asking for help.
When you do go back to those relationships, it’s with much more than “Do you know anyone who needs an accountant?” You’ve got clearer messaging, a more specific audience, and useful assets people can actually share. A referral partner can send someone your assessment, invite you onto a podcast, introduce you to a business owner in your niche, or simply point someone towards your website knowing there’s something relevant waiting for them there.
That gives you a practical starting point before you begin thinking about all the people you could reach more broadly, which is where the hot, warm, and cold categories come in.
Look for new leads in Hot, Warm, and Cold categories
Hot Leads: These are the people closest to you. They might be current clients who could refer someone, previous enquiries, people you sent proposals to, or someone you were introduced to and never quite managed to have a proper conversation with.
Warm leads: These are a little further out. They’re people who already know or work with your ideal clients, such as referral partners, consultants, coaches, podcast hosts, software providers, or people you’ve met through networking.
Cold Leads: These are the people who have never heard of you.
Cold marketing can be appealing because there are simply more people available. You can buy a list containing thousands of contacts, send a large email campaign, or put an ad in front of people you’ve never met.
It’s also appealing because it removes the fear of rejection. You don’t have to reach out to that business owner you met a few months ago, and looked in the eye and shook their hand. You don’t have to imagine them saying no. You don’t have to worry about being salesy or spammy because these cold leads will probably never write back, anyway. (You see where this is going!)
Those people – the cold leads – have no context for who you are yet. They don’t know whether you understand their business, whether your resource will actually be useful, or whether they trust you enough to hand over their email address or book a call. All that takes time to build (hence the progression model).
When you want (or need) to generate leads more quickly, start much closer to the people you already know.
Go back to the people who already know something about you: “Do you want to pick this back up?”
The great part about your new asset, or assets, is that it gives you a natural reason to reconnect with people.
Think about the person who enquired six months ago and then disappeared. The proposal that didn’t progress. The introduction where you sent one email and never got a response. The person who liked what you were offering but the timing wasn’t right.
It’s easy to mentally file those people away as lost opportunities. In reality, you often have no idea what happened after that last conversation. They may have got busy, had something more urgent happening in the business, forgotten to reply, or simply decided they would come back to it later and never did.
Now you’ve got something new and useful to send them.
You could say:
“I know we spoke a while ago. We’ve created this new profitability assessment since then, and I thought of you because of [what we talked about].”
That’s enough. You don’t need to turn it into a long follow-up sequence or find a clever way to reopen the sale. You’re getting back in touch with someone who already has some context for who you are and giving them something relevant.
The accounting firm owner I was speaking to had exactly this situation. Someone had been introduced to her through a trusted contact, but the conversation never got going because the person didn’t reply to the email. We talked about going back to them with the new resource, because they aren’t really a cold lead. There’s already a connection and a reason for getting in touch.
Ask the people you know for help: “Would you be willing to share my asset?”
There’s something much easier about sending a campaign to hundreds of people you don’t know. Asking an actual person you know, “Would you be willing to share this?” makes you feel more exposed, because you care what they think. But because you care (and presumably they do as well), those personal conversations can be incredibly effective.
You might ask a current client whether they know another business owner experiencing the same problem. You might ask a referral partner whether the resource you’ve created would be useful to any of their clients. You could ask someone in your network whether they know a good podcast you could appear on.
The message can be really simple:
“I’ve created this free assessment for [type of business owners], and I’d love to get it in front of more people who’d find it useful. Do you know anyone it might help?”
Or
“I’ve created this free assessment for [type of business owners], and I’d love to get it in front of more people who’d find it useful. Would you be willing to share it?”
That’s a very normal thing to ask when you’ve created something genuinely useful for the audience.
This is something I’ve done myself, many times. And I understand the feeling before sending the email or message of wondering whether it’s a bit awkward, whether they’ll think you’re asking too much, or whether they’ll simply ignore it.
Sometimes people do ignore it. Other times you ask one small question and it leads somewhere you hadn’t expected.
I once emailed someone I already knew to ask whether we could offer something from PF to their community. I was nervous about sending it because I didn’t know whether he’d be interested, and I remember sitting there for at least 20 minutes, staring at the email, hesitating over the ‘send’ button. Finally I thought, “Well, what’s the worst that can happen – they say no, and I’m right back where I was!”. They ended up saying yes, and asked if they could have me on their podcast and do some speaking to their members, too.
You aren’t able to predict which conversation will lead somewhere, which is why having the conversation matters.
Connect with people who already reach a similar audience: “Could I be on your podcast?”
The next group to think about is people who already spend time with the kinds of clients you want to reach.
If you work with dental firms, think about who else works with dental firm owners. If your ideal clients are agencies, look at the consultants, communities, software providers, and podcast hosts who already speak to agency owners. If you work with therapists, there will be coaches, marketers, communities, and other specialists who are already connected to that world.
Those connections can give you ways to get your expertise in front of more relevant people.
You might appear on their podcast, contribute something useful to their newsletter, speak at an event, share one of their resources with your own audience, or find something you could collaborate on.
With this client, we talked a lot about podcasts because the accounting firm owner had been a guest on podcasts before, and she was open to being on more of them. But she said, “If I think about approaching people for podcasts, I don’t know what I would suggest as a topic.”
The key is to make it really easy for the person you’re suggesting this to. In her case, she’s going to come up with three or four specific topics based on the financial issues her clients actually talk about.
A broad topic like “financial visibility” doesn’t give a podcast host much to picture. Something like “Why your [type of business] is growing while your bank balance is getting lower” would give them a clearer idea of the conversation and whether their audience would care about it.
This is also where the marketing work you’ve already done becomes useful in ways that aren’t always obvious.
Someone receives your podcast request and looks at your LinkedIn profile. They see useful posts about the issues their audience has. They click through to your website and understand who you work with. They find an assessment, guide, or other resource that shows you’ve thought carefully about those problems.
All of that makes it easier for them to decide whether they want to introduce you to their audience.
Use social media to share the useful parts of what you’ve created
Once you have a good asset, there’s a lot more you can do with it than repeatedly posting a link to download it. Take the useful ideas inside the asset and talk about those.
If you have a scorecard, you could take one of the questions and explain why you ask it. If it’s an assessment, share a common result and what it tends to mean. You might show a screenshot, explain one of the benchmarks, tell a story about something you discovered when working with a client, or record a short video about one small part of the process.
We do this with PF’s free website reviews.
It’s a simple way to give you a review of what’s good, and what needs work, on your website. A 5-8 minute Loom video recorded just for you.
And most of the time, the things you need to fix come down to one of five things – the same five things, over and over. So we’ve shared posts about the things we see coming up most often when we review accounting firm websites. (Read one here from Karen)
You can read that content, go back to your own website, and check it yourself. You get something useful even if you never request a website review from us.
Often, of course, reading it makes you curious about what we’d notice on your website, and you ask for a review.
Your prospects will be the same.
There’s a lot of content available once you stop thinking of the asset as one link you need to keep promoting. A useful guide or assessment might give you ideas for several LinkedIn posts, an email, a video, a blog, or a podcast topic. You might also use it when following up with an old prospect or give it to a referral partner who wants something useful to pass on to clients.
This is what we call the Content Stacker. You start with the useful thing you’ve already created and think about all the different ways you can share the thinking inside it. Speaking of resources, you can download the Content Stacker checklist – and it includes a downloadable Claude Skill, too.
It also changes how social media fits into your Reach activity. Posting twice a week is useful, but there’s more happening around the posts too. You’re connecting with people in the niche, commenting on conversations you genuinely have something to add to, following relevant people, and sending a message when there’s a good reason to.
Over time, that means someone may already have seen your name or read something you wrote before they ever receive an email from you or get introduced by a mutual connection.
In the same way, you can use moments or mentions from others to get more reach. If someone invites you onto a podcast, share the episode afterwards and talk about something useful that came out of the conversation. If someone includes you in an industry guide, thank them and share it with your own audience. If you speak at an event, follow up with the people you met instead of letting those conversations end when everyone goes home.
The accounting firm owner on my call had recently been featured in a guide created by someone else who works with the same audience. We talked about sharing that feature on LinkedIn, thanking the person who included her, and finding out whether they had a useful resource she could share in return. That’s the kind of thing that can lead naturally into another conversation or collaboration later.
You’ve already got the connection, so see where else it can go.
Keep building the longer-term Reach too
There’s still plenty of value in the marketing that takes longer to build.
SEO can help more of the right people discover you through Google and AI search. Consistent content helps people become familiar with you over time. Paid campaigns may become useful when you’ve learned more about the messages and resources people respond to.
Those things can carry on alongside the more immediate work of reconnecting with people, asking for introductions, building relationships with people who reach a similar audience, and sharing more of the useful thinking you’ve already created.
If you’ve done the Progression work and you’re ready for more leads, start with the people and connections already around you, then keep widening the circle from there.