If there’s one thing that separates thriving businesses from those that struggle, it’s lead generation—the art of getting more people interested in what you’re selling. In $100M Leads, Alex Hormozi, whose businesses generate $200 million annually and over 20,000 leads daily, reveals his systematic approach to filling your customer pipeline.
Hormozi argues there are only four ways to let people know about your business: warm outreach, cold outreach, free content, and paid ads. Read more below in our overview of his book.
Overview of $100M Leads
In $100M Leads, Alex Hormozi explains that leads are, by definition, the lifeblood of your business—without them, you’ll never make a sale. By focusing intensively on lead generation, you can quickly multiply your revenue, reinvest it into getting more leads, and keep on growing.
Hormozi is a serial entrepreneur whose businesses earn $200 million in annual revenue and, he says, get over 20,000 leads daily. He’s also the author of $100M Offers, in which he explains how to craft your core business offering. $100M Leads builds on that wisdom: Hormozi packs it with marketing frameworks, best practices, and rules of thumb for getting more people interested in what you’re selling.
In our overview, we’ll detail Hormozi’s approach to lead generation in three parts:
- Leads and Lead Magnets—what they are, why lead magnets work, and how to make one
- How to Get More Leads—how to market hard and smart, and how to get leads in four ways (warm outreach, content marketing, cold outreach, and paid ads)
- How to Scale Your Marketing—how to multiply your marketing efforts by using customers, employees, agencies, and affiliates to expand your reach
Leads and Lead Magnets
Hormozi writes that a lead is someone you can reach out to. Your Facebook friends are leads; your old college classmates are leads; your colleagues are leads; your email contacts are leads.
You don’t want just leads, though—you want leads who are interested in what you’re selling. Interested leads are more likely to become buying customers, fueling your business. But according to Hormozi, getting interested leads can be difficult in today’s hypercompetitive business landscape. This section will cover his advice for surmounting this challenge by using a lead magnet to attract potential customers. We’ll define lead magnets, explain why they work, and describe how to create them.
What Lead Magnets Are and How They Work
To get more leads, you need a lead magnet. Hormozi writes that a lead magnet is a product or service, like an ebook or consultation, that solves a small but significant problem for your potential customers. Businesses exist to solve problems for people, and the problem your lead magnet solves should point to a larger problem that your business’s core offer solves.
For instance, a life coach might use an ebook about building productivity habits to help people wrangle their to-do lists. In turn, that ebook would show them how much they still have to learn about getting stuff done, pointing them to the coach’s course about professional development or her one-on-one coaching calls.
By solving a problem for someone, your lead magnet gets them interested in your business. Someone who’s interested will more likely buy from you. In other words, a good lead magnet increases your potential sales by increasing your volume of interested buyers. It does this by providing so much value for free that people think to themselves, “If this is the free stuff, the paid stuff must be amazing.”
How to Make a Lead Magnet
How do you ensure your lead magnet is valuable enough to attract interest? Hormozi says to start with a precisely defined problem your leads face (like lacking good productivity habits). Then, design a product or service that solves it and also makes the lead realize that they need your core offer too.
Hormozi writes that one effective way to do this is to provide one key step of a multi-step solution, like offering just the first module of a leadership course, to leave leads wanting more. Then, your core offer would be the whole paid course. Another option is to make a lead magnet that points out the symptoms of a larger problem. For example, a business consultant might give a free assessment of a startup team’s working practices that shows them how much better they could be performing—if they hire the consultant.
How to Get More Leads
So far, we’ve looked at why you need interested leads and how lead magnets work. In this section, we’ll turn to Hormozi’s methods for finding leads and offering them your lead magnet. We’ll start with his practical principles for marketing success—how to work so hard and smart at lead-getting that you can’t fail. Then, we’ll explore two categories of lead generation: private marketing (warm and cold outreach) and public marketing (free content and paid ads).
How to Market Hard and Smart
How can you fool-proof your lead-getting efforts? According to Hormozi, all you have to do is work hard—by increasing the volume of actions you take—and smart—by making those actions more efficient whenever possible.
First, Hormozi writes, the simplest way to succeed in marketing is to take a lot of actions. This works because the more effort you put in, the more leads you’ll attract—and the more leads you attract, the higher the chance that you’ll get customers. Given this, Hormozi recommends following his “Rule of 100”: Do 100 marketing actions every day for 100 consecutive days. This might mean making 100 cold calls, spending 100 minutes creating content, or investing $100 in ads daily. Whatever you do, do it at high volume and do it consistently.
In addition to taking massive action, you need to take action efficiently. According to Hormozi, this is because for any marketing action you take (like cold emailing), doing more of it becomes less efficient after a certain point. Say you’ve cold emailed 1,000 potential leads, and only 50 show interest in your business (a 1/20 conversion rate). More of the same action won’t change that rate, but smarter action will. Smarter action comes down to experimenting with new approaches and testing to see which do a better job of getting leads interested. For instance, you might experiment with the wording in your emails to discover how to make them more effective, so the volume you send doesn’t go to waste.
Now that you understand how to take action, let’s talk about the different kinds of marketing actions you can take.
Get Leads with Private Marketing
Private marketing is marketing to people via direct, one-to-one communication. You do this through channels like email, mail, direct messages, and phone calls. Because this form of marketing is more personal, it can be very effective and is a good way to start learning how to market, Hormozi says. Below, we’ll cover two kinds of private marketing: warm outreach and cold outreach.
Reach Out to Warm Leads
The simplest way to get leads is to reach out to people you know (warm leads). These are people who’ve given you permission to contact them—your friends, family, followers, current customers, previous customers, and anyone else in your existing network. As Hormozi explains, warm leads already trust you to some degree. They’re more likely to be interested in your business, and because of that, you might be able to skip the lead magnet and go straight to the core offer.
Hormozi says you should reach out to warm leads systematically. Make a list of everyone you know, and then reach out to 100 of them each day (recall Hormozi’s “Rule of 100”). Do this until you exhaust your contact list. If someone doesn’t respond to your first two or three outreach attempts (such as messages or calls), move on to the next lead.
When you contact a warm lead, don’t directly pitch your offer to them. Instead, strike up a friendly conversation for a few minutes by asking how they’re doing and listening actively. Once you’ve built rapport, ask if they know anyone who might need what you offer, framing it in terms of the problem you’re solving for people and the value that solution provides. Hormozi writes that by not pressuring people directly, you make them feel more comfortable. That way, they’ll have an easier time referring you to others or expressing their own interest (since they won’t feel pressured to).
Reach Out to Cold Leads
In contrast to warm outreach, cold outreach means contacting people you don’t know and trying to interest them in your business. According to Hormozi, cold outreach can scale more easily, since there are more people you don’t know than people you do.
However, cold outreach is a good deal harder because it requires you to overcome a few challenges: finding a way to contact people, getting them to pay attention to your message, and sparking their interest in your offer. Hormozi offers three key tips for accomplishing this:
- Use list brokers: businesses that sell email lists, often grouped by demographic (like residents of Atlanta, Georgia) or affinity (like dog lovers). Alternatively, you can manually find emails and other contact information by searching social media profiles.
- Before you contact a lead, research them and use what you find to personalize your approach. For instance, if you learn they’re also a business owner, you might compliment their work in your message. Hormozi says this makes cold outreach feel a bit warmer.
- If a lead doesn’t respond to your first message, follow up at least two to three times. If they still don’t respond, move on to the next person. If someone does respond—for instance, by replying to your email—you’ve got an interested lead.
Get Leads with Public Marketing
Public marketing is advertising to many people all at once. Because of this, it’s less personal than private marketing: You have less chance of interesting any given lead. But, Hormozi says, it also scales better because you can reach far more people en masse than through one-on-one communication.
You can do public marketing with warm or cold leads, and it involves mostly online efforts—Hormozi specifically discusses how to do content marketing and how to run paid ads.
Post Content Online
According to Hormozi, posting content to build an online audience is the best thing you can do to get more leads. This is because it scales well: The more people who like and share your content, the more people it’ll reach. In turn, some of those people’s contacts will like and share it as well, spreading it further.
How do you get this cycle going and build a huge audience? Hormozi writes that you just need to post tons of content that provides tons of value. Freely giving useful content shows people that you have a lot to offer, which earns you their interest—and in time, their business. For instance, many fitness influencers post videos showing how they eat, how to do specific exercises with good form, and so on. Giving away this free content builds them an audience to whom they can later sell a supplement, a training program, or fitness merchandise.
Before you start posting content, you need to know how to make it. Hormozi writes that every piece of content should do three things: grab interest, keep interest, and satisfy interest.
Grab interest: Get people’s attention by using topics they’re interested in, and tailor the content format to the platform (videos on YouTube, text on LinkedIn, etc.). People will look at stuff they already like in formats they already like, so make more of that—don’t reinvent the wheel.
Keep interest: Make people curious by using unresolved questions and storytelling—like how a good novel keeps you reading with cliffhangers. People who want to know what happens next will keep paying attention.
Satisfy interest: Deliver on your hook, making people feel rewarded for giving you their attention. This completes the “loop” that good content puts people in, encouraging them to behave the same way again when they see more of your content.
For instance, say you’re a lifestyle influencer. You might: 1) grab interest by making an Instagram reel about a personal breakthrough you had with your morning routine, 2) keep interest by saying you’ll explain the steps you took to get there, and 3) satisfy interest by telling the full story of how you found your perfect morning routine.
Hormozi says that your audience decides if they’ve been rewarded, not you. When your content is consistently rewarding, your followers become more likely to buy from you and to share your content, which helps your audience grow. Every person you add to your audience is a lead that you can reach out to.
Run Paid Ads Online
Hormozi’s last method for getting leads is to use paid ads. This means crafting and running multimedia advertisements (using text, images, and video) on online platforms like Instagram or YouTube. These platforms already have huge built-in audiences, and you pay the platform to show your ads to those people.
Hormozi writes that unlike his earlier volume-focused methods, the trick with ads is to focus on cost-efficiency—ads need to provide a good return on your investment. You have to spend money to run ads, and many of them will fail. For this reason, they don’t need to be perfect. What matters more is speed: Rapidly create multiple workable ads at once, test them out, and double down on the ones that work (while cutting those that fail). This way, you’ll lose some money but make back more in the long run.
So, how do you run ads efficiently? Hormozi explains three basic steps:
Step #1: Choose the right platform. Look at major social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, all of which have massive existing audiences (everyone with an account). Hormozi advises starting with a platform that has plenty of the sort of people you want to reach (like beauty consumers on Instagram).
Step #2: Target the right audience. A platform’s targeting tools are basically filters that you use to narrow your search for the right people, much like the filters you use while shopping online. According to Hormomzi, the “right people”—your target audience—are people you think are likely to be interested in your business.
Most targeting tools use demographic filters, like age, income level, and interests. Use these filters to reduce the platform’s large audience to only the people you want your ad to reach. For example, if you’re advertising yoga classes for the elderly on Facebook, you’d use filters that target people over 60 who’ve shown interest in yoga and can afford your classes.
If you don’t want to do this manually, Hormozi says that most platforms will make you a “lookalike audience,” or an audience that shares demographic similarities with a list of contacts you provide. Make that list using all the lead contacts you have from warm outreach, content marketing, and cold outreach. This way, the people who see your ads will be similar to your already interested leads.
Step #3: Make your ads. After you’ve targeted the right audience on the right platform, you need to craft effective ads. Drawing on the principles of marketing titan David Ogilvy, Hormozi breaks ads down into three components:
- Grab their attention: Immediately signal to the viewer that your ad concerns them in some way. For instance, you can appeal to their identity (“Cat owners…”) and location (“…in Los Angeles”).
- Offer them value: Convince people they should be interested in what you’re offering (lead magnet or core offer) by playing up its benefits and playing down the work involved in reaping them.
- Tell them to act: Lastly, tell people exactly what to do next. Make it simple and specific, like “Click this button.” Ideally, Hormozi says, you should direct them to a webpage that lets them enter their email address in exchange for your lead magnet.
How to Scale Your Marketing
We’ve covered Hormozi’s four marketing methods; now, let’s look at how to scale them. According to Hormozi, you can’t scale on your own because one person can only do so much marketing. When you’ve done all you can, it’s time to get help—and there are four kinds of entities who can increase your business’s reach: your customers, your employees, marketing firms, and business partners.
Scale With People: Customers and Employees
First, you can rely on happy customers to naturally spread the word about your business. People who’ve bought from you and thought your product or service was excellent will say so, telling friends and family about it. To earn good word of mouth, just give people a fantastic experience being your customer—provide them with a great product and treat them well.
You can also hire employees to help with marketing. To do this effectively, Hormozi says, you should clearly document your marketing processes (what you do that works for you), give new employees a hands-on demonstration of how to implement your marketing methods, and ask them to do the exact same thing. This ensures that your employees will get results similar to yours.
Scale With Businesses: Marketing Firms and Affiliate Partners
Beyond using customers and employees, you can pay marketing firms to teach you about how they advertise. Hormozi says you should tell them upfront that you want to learn their methods, then offer to pay them to teach you. This way, you avoid becoming dependent on an outside business for your marketing success, and you can also train your employees to do what you learn.
Lastly, you can partner with other businesses and entrepreneurs to promote your business to their audiences. Think influencer marketing—not everyone you affiliate with will be an influencer, but they’re a powerful way to get your business in front of more eyeballs fast. You can collaborate with anyone who has an audience, though; the affiliate just sends their audience your way (like with a sponsored post or video), and you pay them for every lead that you successfully gain through their outreach.
