The IT sector is one of the hottest sectors for B2B opportunities globally, especially in the North American market.

But one of the biggest challenges in the IT sector is generating leads because of high demand and where ever there is high demand there is a lot of competition.

Now high competition doesn’t mean you should back off – it means there is a lot of opportunity in the market for your services but you have to take a different approach which would help you to stand out from generic marketing campaigns that your competitors are running.

Now there are various ways to generate leads for your IT services business, but I will discuss the ones that we are using at Clicksuggest for our IT clients and we are booking tons of high-quality appointments for them.

So, let’s go!

1. Personalised Cold Emails

Whenever I talk to founders or marketing heads on my sales call, the number one channel for their It company is cold outreach!

But they have a very low reply rate and conversion rate from cold emails… and it’s not the problem with cold emails! but how you are using the cold emails!

We at click suggest having a 20-35% reply rate for our IT clients – and when I tell this to IT marketing heads they get shocked!

But it’s very simple! we are not doing anything magical or using any advance software for our outreach. we are only personalizing our emails to the point, that they don’t feel like generic emails but highly personalised.

Our team takes extra time to launch the campaign but whenever we launch a campaign we ensure that it’s super personalized because no one wants to reply to generic cold outreach.

It’s simple if you cannot spend 5 minutes researching your prospects they won’t spend 30 seconds replying to your outreach message.

Cold outreach is a big topic in itself, and cannot be explained in one blog or video, but if you are interested in learning more about cold emails make sure you check our cold email blogs where we share real-life tactics that we use to generate 500+ appointments for our clients per month.

2. Cold Calling

Cold calling is the second-best channel for IT companies and the reason is you want to build close connections with prospects in the IT sector.

This is the reason why most IT companies prefer cold-calling but there is only one big drawback to calling and that is – it’s expensive, you have to hire an expert cold caller pay for their salary, and find phone numbers that can be a little bit expensive than cold emails.

But again cold calling can bring you the highest number of appointments than cold emailing and also help you qualify and unqualify leads on the call itself, this would help you to save tons of time in taking unqualified appointments

You can use B2B phone numbers with data providers such as Apollo.io, Lusha, and Zoominfo, but one thing to remember here is that these databases are not fully updated and verified, so you have to verify them.

3. Referrals

Before I go into any other marketing strategy for IT, I want to emphasize highly on referral business. In the IT sector, there is a lot of competition and in this competition, companies find it difficult to find and hire good IT staff and heavily rely on referrals.

When I say referral I don’t mean you stay dependent on your current clients, but make partnerships with other agencies in different spaces.

For example, our IT clients have partnerships with Marketing agencies, and the marketing agencies have tons of clients and whenever they get a client for IT, they refer it to our clients.

Now I will give you my favorite technique for getting clients from referrals, I work for free for a few agencies or at a big discount, and in turn, they refer the clients to me, both winning

So go out there and build a solid referral partnership for your business and you will never be out of business

4. Linkedin DM’s

Linkedin DM’s might not be the best strategy to sell IT services, but why leave it behind, we should always use different channels when it comes to generating leads.

My favorite part of LinkedIn is that it’s easy and very simple, you don’t have to worry about deliverability like in cold emails.

It’s a very cost-effective and easy use to platform and the reply rate is much better than cold emails because you can spam people on Linkedin and if you have a good profile on Linkedin, you can not only get a better reply rate but good conversation as well.

You can use tools like Heyreach and Dripify to automate your LinkedIn outreach process. It can be very time-consuming to generate leads on LinkedIn if you don’t have automation in place.

But again you don’t have to send generic automated messages as you might look salesy and no one likes a salesperson.

5. SEO

If you read any of my blogs you will notice I always tell people to focus on SEO, even if it takes time or brings slow leads, at the end of the day SEO is super important.

SEO is not only important because it brings you leads but it also builds social trust, your consumers go from consuming your content to buying your service when your SEO is strong.

If you want to become a strong brand, you need strong SEO, all strong brands that are doing 7 figures in revenue have a strong SEO presence.

I know it takes time but at the end of the day it’s worth it 100%, you should hire an SEO agency and not do it yourself, because there are multiple things that you need to focus on in order to rank in Google, so its better to leave it to an SEO agency.

6. Omni Channel Approach

Most outbound experts would tell you to focus on a channel approach, get good at one channel, and scale it, but in today’s sales world, it’s one of the worst sales advice.

If your prospects are on different platforms, you have to be on those platforms as well because the more touch points you can make with your prospects the more you can become familiar and the more you can close the deals.

So if your prospects are on LinkedIn, you should be active on Linkedin and reach out to them on Linkedin, if they are on Twitter or X then you should be selling them on X.

With a multi-channel approach, you should reach out to prospects through multiple channels, such as cold emails, cold calls, LinkedIn DMs, content marketing, and ads.

This will help you to build social trust and will help you to avoid burning through your TAM quickly.

7. LinkedIn Ads

When it comes to my IT Clients I’m not a big fan of other ad platforms, only Linkedin.

The reason – LinkedIn is filled with decision-makers, and the best way to reach them, is through paid ads and LinkedIn is the best place to do it.

My clients are getting amazing results with LinkedIn Ads but again, it’s very expensive and it should not be your goal if you are just starting out or you don’t have a big budget aside for ads.

I recommend going with LinkedIn Ads only when you fully utilize other outbound channels to their maximum capacity.

And please don’t run generic LinkedIn ads, run ads with lead magnets, social trust, case studies, testimonials, and free resources, your main goal should be to attract potential buyers for your IT services.

8. SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

When you go to Google and search for any product or service, you will always see promoted links or ads and this is one of the strategies you have to use for your IT services.

This is the only type of ad strategy I care about and why?

Because people are searching for a problem and have a higher intent to purchase and if you show up in the results you have higher chances to close the deal.

This is why I like SEM and should be used by all IT companies. But remember if you are doing organic SEO and SEM, you are gonna get even better results.

Conclusion

Finding leads for IT Companies is very simple but the more you invest in the outbound infrastructure the better, as IT service is considered one of the most difficult industries to crack in.

All the methods mentioned above are still working great and are used by the big IT companies to generate pipelines for their services.

My advice would be to Start small, find a winning angle, and then scale it slowly.