How to Scale Your Lead Flow Without Paid Ads: What’s working in 2025

Struggling to scale your lead flow? Here’s the repeatable process we use to consistently generate sales appointments.

After working with over 1,000 businesses and training thousands of entrepreneurs, we know exactly what it takes to build a lead generation system that actually works. This episode is packed with tactical steps you can apply immediately. You'll learn the step-by-step framework to build a scalable lead generation system using direct outreach, LinkedIn, cold email, and virtual assistants. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to optimize an existing outreach process, this episode will show you how to create reliable lead flow and convert more prospects into booked meetings.

Keypoints & Chapter Markers

Introduction

B2B Lead Generation: The Ultimate Lead Generation and Appointment Setting Guide

How We Get 100+ Sales Appointments a Month Using $6hr Setters

How We Get Over 1,000 leads a month WITHOUT ADS

LinkedIn Strategy to get 10x B2B Clients (It's EASY!)

Download The Free Outbound Sales Playbook:

• Master cold outreach, close more deals & drive revenue to your business using The Outbound Sales Playbook. Battle-tested on over 1,000+ businesses and proven with over 100M data-points, this Free E-book will give you the tools you need for predictability and scalability in your marketing and sales efforts. Disclaimer: Only download if you want more customers!

Join The Takeover Community:

• Sign up for The Takeover newsletter and get the latest marketing tips, sales strategies, and business insights delivered straight to your inbox. Join a community of entrepreneurs & high-performers dominating all areas of Sales & Marketing. Sign up for the newsletter.

About The Hosts:

• Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

About PEMA.io:

• PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

Transcript

00:00
So what matters more than anything is that you're doing  the right person  with the right message at the right volume. So now that you have that, you have a high volume, what you also need to have is what pieces are automated, what pieces are manual, and how are the processes to scale this? There's a lot of networking type of messages out there, but if you can cut through the noise with a message that focuses on the pain, it shows them clearly how you can help them get to their ideal outcome.

00:28
With a very clear call to action to get on a call, you are for sure going to get people saying yes to your outreach messages.  Welcome to The Takeover with Tim and Cindy, where we show you how to dominate every area of life  and business. Let's get with it.

00:45
We've done work with over 700 businesses and entrepreneurs and we've trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and businesses on how to grow and scale.  Most of them come in with a lot of confusion around what channels, what strategies they should go to. And it's actually pretty straightforward and clear  the step by step on what you would do to grow and scale a business either from zero or for somebody who's already at, you know, six, seven, eight figures. So where would you think about the first step?

01:13
and then how to go from there when it comes to generating leads. Yes, absolutely. The first step that we would go for in terms of channels specifically, because a lot of people have confusion around where do you start, right? Which channel  is the best to secure leads consistently? And we'd start with direct outreach. It's with outbound. The reason being is because outbound  is low cost.

01:38
It allows you to test your systems and perfect your systems for not only lead generation, but also on the sales side, right? Because if you have leads coming in consistently, you can perfect your sales process. You can perfect your messaging. You can identify which audience or which industries perform best. So what I love about Outbound is it allows you to really narrow down on what your ideal client or ideal customer avatar is, which with a lot of different channels,

02:06
costs a lot of money to figure that out. With Outbound, through testing, through perfecting your systems, you can distill the data down to what industries perform best, what messaging performs best, what is my ideal client in terms of maybe revenue, company size, all of that good stuff, so that you can then, once you've perfected your systems through Outbound, you can then move into other channels like paid ads.  Paid ads, you have to spend money to test. have to have

02:36
revenue to test paid ads, but starting with outbound, now moving into paid ads, you have more data and information on who responds, on who's buying, on who your ideal client avatar is  versus trying to start there first. Trust me, you're going to spend a lot of money on ads, testing, if you are starting off with paid ads, which is where a lot of people go wrong. They want to start with Facebook ads. They want to start with Google ads. They want to start with a lot of paid channels.

03:05
which is great and all, but you're going to spend a lot more money if you haven't down outbound first. Yeah. And even the sales process, because your profit margins are so much better  on outbound. Your cost per meeting, cost per client acquisition  is a lot lower with outbound. So you can actually kind of make mistakes  with outbound. Direct outreach.  with outbound and direct outreach.

03:30
You can kind of make mistakes as you're building your sales process, your warm-up process, your nurture sequences, all of that. And you're still going to be profitable. With ads, if you don't have that stuff dialed in right to the get-go, mean, Google, Meta,  they will drain your bank account  faster than you can get clients, that's for sure.  And what I love about what you said about this is once that's dialed in, you take all the data, the information,

03:54
and now you can run ads with it and pay. And that's the same thing with the sales process. You can take your sales process, your nurture sequences, all of the information you've learned about being directly connected to and reaching out to these prospects. You just have so much more data that I don't think you would get that kind of granular person to person data, even if you did ads from the get go and you had a bunch of money to spend. Because when you're doing direct outreach and you're reaching out to people directly, you're having conversations with them through email, through calls, through...

04:24
all these different pieces that you're learning about that avatar in such a powerful way that we've seen every time you have a successful outreach outbound campaign going and you get it working and dialed in, you then go run an ad campaign and it just performs super well. Because you have data. You have data to back it up. Absolutely. And as you start to actually message these people, that's where you're going to test your assumptions to see what do they actually resonate with? Is this my ideal client? Is it not?

04:52
There's a lot of testing that happens up front. The target pool, think,  an advanced thing that we're going to give people here, and we've never shared this anywhere outside. But if you're doing outreach LinkedIn  and you're doing outreach email, if you target the same audience on email with an active, you're going to find that that active in 30 is actually going to give you really high quality, high responsive emails too. Yes, absolutely. And so...

05:19
What we're talking about here for LinkedIn, when you get something working really well on LinkedIn, duplicating that with the cold email outreach is incredibly easy. And you're gonna attract different people in LinkedIn than you're gonna attract in email. So we always start with LinkedIn if possible  because we can get results a little bit quicker. But once we get something working on LinkedIn, we can literally duplicate the exact same  thing with a few tweaks  and get it to perform.

05:48
on email really quick. Yes, absolutely. 100%. And it's interesting. They're very similar channels, but different. But as you mentioned, what works on LinkedIn, 95 % of the time works really well on email, as you mentioned with a few small tweaks. So again, there's a lot of testing that happens up front, and this is not a get rich quick strategy that we're sharing with you all. We're sharing how do you...

06:11
scale your lead flow in a way that is reliable, predictable, and allows you to have that consistency. So yes, it is going to be work upfront, but through testing and through actually going through the process that we're sharing, you're for sure going to get results. So I want to qualify that. So here's the formula that you can use for really good messaging for direct outreach. You start with a pain point question. You then relate it to what else is happening in the market. You then position an outcome.

06:39
what you're going to help the client achieve with a success story and you end with a call to action. So here's it in an example. Say for example, I am a marketing agency that helps real estate agents get leads.  I'm going to start with the pain question. Are you seeing a decrease in the number of leads reaching out for your service?  If I'm a real estate agent that's facing that, that's going to resonate with me because it's a pain point. It's a problem.  Second, I'm going to relate it.

07:05
related to what else is happening in the market or other people that are facing the same thing. So I could say other real estate agents in your space are getting tumbled by the ever evolving changes of social media algorithms and search engines. So now what I've done is I've listed the pain point. I've related it to something that's happening in the markets to show this person, Hey, you're not alone. Other people are facing this issue as well. Then I'm going to go into the outcome, the ideal outcome that they want.

07:34
And I'm going to add in either a success story or a way that I can help them achieve that outcome. So it could be  maybe it's real life example. Maybe it's  results that I've helped my clients achieve. So it could read something like, we recently helped a real estate agent in your space wake up to a calendar filled with three to five prospects daily for the last month.  So they never have to worry about where their next lead is coming from. So I painted the outcome with

08:03
a success story or with a way that I can help them. Then I'm to end with a call to action. If you're open to seeing what this looks like, happy to carve out some time to show you what day and time works best. So again, that formula is the pain point question. You're going to relate it to what is happening in the industry right now. You're going to offer them the ideal outcome that this prospect wants and add in a success story or a testimonial if you can in that space. Metrics.

08:29
If you can qualify as much as possible, that's great. And then end with a call to action. If you use this formula, ladies and gents, it is going to 10x the results that you get from your direct outreach, period. Because the majority of messages that are out there are, hey, I do  social media, search engine optimization, websites. I do all these lovely things. Do you need any of them? Or do you want to get on a call to discuss? Or it's a lot of networking type of messages out there. But if you can cut through the noise with a message that focuses on the pain,

08:59
It shows them clearly how you can help them get to their ideal outcomes with a very clear call to action to get on a call. You are for sure going to get people saying yes to your outreach messages. Okay. So with this, you have the target pool, you have the messaging as you start to put this out, you start to send the messages to this target pool. Maybe it's through LinkedIn or you emailing them this message. You're going to start to get data. You're going to start to get leads, booked calls.

09:26
You want to start to track that and you want to put it into a process or system that can be repeated. Because ultimately, if you have your data points and you have this system where, know, I reach out to a hundred people, I send 90 % of them this message, I get five leads and say it's three booked calls. You know that if you reach out to another hundred people, you're going to get those same metrics, another hundred people, same metrics. So it starts to become a process that you can repeat.

09:53
Okay. And with this repeatable process, allows you to ultimately scale your lead flow, right? During months when say it's December and people are busy, you still have that reliability and predictability on how to scale. So you need to create a process for yourself and for your team that you can reliably reach out to a hundred people to get three booked calls or however the math makes sense for you as you start to do the testing and

10:16
At first, it might be you doing the reach outs. At first, you might implement some software that's going to send out the messages and you're gonna respond, but ultimately, we want to create a system that we can have somebody take over it. Maybe it's a virtual assistant or somebody on your team that can do the reach outs to then book the calls on the sales team's calendar.  So you have to have a repeatable process and you have to execute on this process consistently. Because we'll see some people do it for a month or two,

10:45
They're getting results, they're getting leads and then they stop. And of course, what's going to happen with your lead flow? It's going to be up and down.  So how do you create a system that you can reliably reach out to say it's 10,000 people every month, month over month and get the same outcome? Because that's how you actually have consistency and reliability in your lead flow.  Hey there friend. If you're enjoying the podcast so far, make sure that you are subscribed so you never miss an episode.

11:13
Subscribe and follow The Takeover with Tim and Cindy wherever you are listening.  New episodes are released every week.

11:23
we know the data shows that we get a ton of meetings from LinkedIn, we get a ton of meetings from cold email, all these platforms. And so the reality is there is more money exchange on LinkedIn than any other platform. And if you are not using this platform, if you are not getting a lot of clients from it, it means you're leaving a lot of money on the table and your competitors, they are using it, they are getting clients and they are taking the market share 100%. When we kind of think about

11:51
different targeting parameters within the LinkedIn world. mean, you have industry, what's the industry I'm going after? You have parameters like company size. Hey, if I want companies with a certain amount of budget.

12:03
I'm probably going to go for bigger company size type companies. There's also other, you know, we have titles and there's different kinds of pieces. You can even do what's called if you have their premium account active in the last 30 days. So these are people that have posted on LinkedIn's platform in the last 30 days, which means if you reach out to them, the likelihood of their response is going to be a lot higher. So there's a lot of other features within LinkedIn, but if you use those ones and it really well,  you're going to set yourself up for success. So

12:33
How do you see the team using these kind of main filters to really create different types of campaigns? Yeah, the goal with identifying your ideal customer avatar is to pick out your target pool, right? So this is the group of people that we're going to reach out to with our LinkedIn prospecting or outreach. I think the common misconception is to make it very niche, to go really small and just to have

12:55
like a couple hundred people that we can reach out to, people are going too small in this targeting parameters. And that's why their outreach is one not sustained and that's why they're not seeing success. So you actually want to have a pool size that is large enough to sustain long-term outreach. And then also broad enough for you to reach people in your target markets, right? So don't go too narrow here. Make it.

13:17
actually broad enough to reach a good amount of people. So as long as you can identify the general sense of, what are the titles that I want to reach out to? What general company sizes are my ideal prospects in? What industries are they in? And then as you start to run outreach for a few months, you can start to pick out, oh,  these people from this industry with these titles are responding the best and I'm getting the best leads and booked calls from these. Let's double down on that.

13:43
Versus trying to refine and fine tune right at the start. So rather go broad at the start, get a larger pool size,  launch your outreach and then refine or narrow down based on data. And I think that's any good marketing is you want to first get flow where we're just get a high volume of outreach and leads and meetings  and then refine.

14:07
too often we see on any marketing activity where people try to get the perfectly refined, ideal customer from the get-go. And there's two problems with that. Number one is you're building that perfect client off of lot of assumptions versus building it off of real-world platform data.  The second problem with that is you never actually get enough flow, AKA leads and meetings,  to be able to make those changes and those adaptations. Because a lot of times, we've had a lot of clients tell us is,

14:36
They actually had assumptions about who their client was and it wasn't until after they had been running outreach with enough flow for a while that their assumptions for who their client was were actually inaccurate and they made adjustments on who their ideal client was based off of that data. So number one,  make sure you are going broad enough and getting flow and then  you refine that to be the perfect lead. You don't start trying to get the perfect lead. You start broad and then you refine.

15:03
So what matters more than anything is that you're doing  the right person with the right message at the right volume. So now that you have that, you have a high volume, what you also need to have is what pieces are automated, what pieces are manual, and how are the processes to scale this? For instance, we personally  use the first few steps automated, the reach out, the connection, the first message, and then when they respond,

15:30
Interested not interested tell me more whatever that would be  then that kicks into a manual process where we actually have internal appointment setters that have those Conversations then we want to map out. What are all the responses? This is what's known as a conversation tree That's what allows you to have quality control at scale  You might just be one person or two people but say you want to build a team and there's ten accounts That you're doing outreach with or there's 20 accounts or there's 50 accounts. How do you scale while keeping quality control? How do you scale?

16:00
How do you pass this on to your appointment center?  Keep the quality, the same level of quality that you would do if you were manually responding, but do it at scale. And that's going to be through having pre-created responses to all of the messages. And of course, you want to make it human. It's not going to be exact cookie cutter. It's just pre-created. And then you're going to still be human.  You're still going to read the message. And  oh, that's great. That's awesome. But you kind of have the frameworks pre-created for all those responses. That's what allows you to do things at scale.

16:27
When you're about to do a bunch of activity, reach outs, call outs, well whatever it's gonna be, the quality of your list, who's on that list, the people you're targeting,  that is such a crucial component to your outreach. Now you're never gonna get this perfect.  A big mistake that I see people make all the time is they try to get their lead quality perfect right off the bat. And as we always say  at our company Pima, is you wanna get flow first.

16:57
And then you want to refine that flow because if I have a lot of flow of meetings and a lot of flow of interest, I also have a lot of data points. I understand what's working, what's not, what's good, what's not. And so I don't want to take too many of my assumptions into building my prospect list. I want to be a little bit more broad with my assumptions. That way I can get a higher flow of leads when I get going and then refine it from there. But the first thing you want to do is make sure that you do have a quality

17:27
Prospect list, know, whether it's company size Industries titles you're going after make sure to spend some time  to ensure that you have a good quality prospect list that is also a big enough audience that I can not just get meetings from it now and next month and six months from now, but once I get it working and I want to double triple  10x my lead flow I got to make sure whatever prospect list that I'm starting with

17:56
I can grow it and it can become bigger and my audience pool is bigger. And that's kind of what I was saying before is too many people try to niche down way too much from the get-go and they either can't get it to work or they get it to work and they can't scale it because they've limited who they're reaching out to. So a lot of the reasons why people are not successful with lead generation or appointment setting  is that they try something for one week and then they switch the process or the strategy the next week  or they're not doing enough follow-up.

18:24
But essentially you need to have a consistent process that you are committing to follow over a set period of time before you determine whether something works or not.  so consistency in the message that you're sending out  and how many follow ups that you're doing. Consistency in how you're reaching out to prospects and converting them into booked appointments. So map out what that consistent process looks like.

18:51
And if you are hiring a Legion agency or hiring a VA to do it for you, make sure that you're holding them accountable to following that process. If you don't follow up with that prospect, you don't really know if you're able to convert them or not. So the money is in the followups. Make sure that you are touching base with your prospect  one, two, three, four times. We recommend actually four touch points with the prospect. Of course you can spread them out, but that allows you to keep top of mind with your prospect.

19:20
And in the event that people are busy, which they are, they might see your message if they don't respond, people appreciate a follow up. And that can actually help to boost your lead rates as well. So don't expect to just send one message and for the leads to come streaming in, you have to be consistent in how you follow up with prospects to get them to say yes to your offer. Do not be scared to follow up because the money is in the follow up to get the lead. Number one, to get the interest.

19:47
And number two, once you have the interest to convert that lead into an actual booked call. Once somebody has shown interest or they've said, yes, I want to meet, they've sparked that interest. You want to get them as soon as possible to schedule a call. If I show interest today and it's Monday, don't wait until Friday or even until Wednesday to like send me a link to book a call with you.  So the faster you can get that call to action in front of the person.

20:13
the faster they're gonna convert and actually the more effective it's gonna be to converting them into an actual appointment. So this is where the process comes into play. How quickly are you responding to leads that are showing interest? That is gonna make a big difference in your appointment setting. The second part to that is the call to action. Just making it very, very clear.

20:32
If you want somebody to schedule a call, provide like a calendar link or make it really seamless and easy for them to take the next step in the process. If there is friction and you have to go back and forth about times and, well, what day works for you? And then the person's not active on the platform anymore. And now it's been a week and they're not a hot lead anymore. It just like will destroy your entire process.  So for sure you want that timing. You want your CTA or

20:58
call to action, which means like, what is that next step you want the process or the prospect to take? Make it very smooth, very easy, make it seamless for them to take the next action. And then the third part to that is what we call the rule of seven. So essentially a prospect has to see your message or see your ad, something. They have to see it at least seven times to build trust and build familiarity and authority. So putting yourself in front of your prospect  as many times as possible  is also going to

21:28
help boost that lead to booking ratio. So this could be as simple as retargeting or your content showing up on their feed or even those follow-ups like we were mentioning, the more your prospect can see you, the more effective you are gonna be in converting them from a lead to a booked appointment.