“We need
the leads.”
You built the machine. You hit the million, and boy did it take a lot out of you. Now you’re ready to go again, and the only thing missing is the leads. Five plays to start this week, then the sequence that makes them compound. There’s no cold calling in any of it.
Start with play 1 ↓Five demand plays. Start this week.
Each one has a today action, because someday in a firm like yours means never.
Ask AI to scout your buyers
Open Claude and point it at your own website. Ask it to read the site the way your ideal buyer would, then tell you where more buyers like that gather. Copy this in:
Warm the list you already own
Old quotes, the deal that died at 90% certain, the form fill that went quiet last October, the clients whose work just ended. Every name on that list already knows you, and no competitor can touch it. Referrals got you to the million, in fairness, but they’re fragile. This list is yours.
Go back with new value, never “just checking in”, and never a pitch. You know the reaction a pitch gets: right, you’re trying to sell to me. Not interested.
Publish more than feels comfortable
Most owners post twice a week, see nothing, and decide content doesn’t work. Neil Patel’s team ran the numbers on posting frequency:
| Posts per week | Avg. followers (all platforms) | Monthly brand-search visitors |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 5,194 | 302 |
| 10 | 8,042 | 634 |
| 15 | 11,587 | 591 |
| 25 | 19,531 | 2,833 |
| 26+ | 53,002 | 6,037 |
Neil Patel’s published analysis. Take the exact figures as directional. The principle is what counts: more good content, more people typing your name into Google.
Before you panic at 26 a week: that’s one strong piece repurposed 15 or 20 ways. And it only compounds if the message is good, which is what the sequence below is for.
Get found by AI
AI recommends whoever it can verify: reviews, community recommendations, media coverage, awards, backlinks, published thinking.
Your competitors are knocking on your customers’ doors the whole time anyway. Now they can knock through the AI too. Most of them are building none of these signals. Handy, that.
Offer a freebie people would queue up for
Build the thing your ideal client would swap a real email address for. One narrow, urgent problem: a board-ready risk one-pager, a renewal comparison sheet. And be honest, would you give your real email for it? You keep a decoy address for downloads. So do your buyers.
This play has form. One founder joined my free 5-day challenge because he’d “lose very little by taking part.” It won him a client, and that client paid for his first programme with me. Then test: two titles, two formats, see what your market actually wants.
Now. You know what would make all five work twice as hard?
A sequence underneath them.
Plays on their own buy you a busy quarter. Then marketing drifts back to what it’s always been: haphazard, disjointed, leads you can’t trace.
And I know what you’ve already got. A vendor program, a content library, courses coming out your ears. That’s the mountain. A sequence tells you what to do with it, and in what order.
Five moves. Take them in order, because each one feeds the next.
The five moves, in order.
Skipping ahead to the visible ones is how the last attempt died. Start at move 1. It’s the one everyone skips.
Do the brand strategy first
Twenty-five years in business doesn’t mean this page exists. I sat with the co-founders of a €1.1M, 13-person Irish IT firm who’d never once written it down. We built it in a day, and every decision after got easier, because there was finally something to decide against.
What’s on it: purpose, vision, mission, values a client would notice in how you work, and one brutally specific ideal client. That firm picked 30 to 60 users at €1,000+ a month, and every scrap of marketing since aims there. Bonus: it tells you which noisy, mispriced clients you’re allowed to outgrow.
Nail the offer, then the message
A buyer can’t evaluate “monitoring and tickets.” He can evaluate an outcome. One MSP owner said it best: “What we’re really selling now is technology success. It’s not about, we’ll install an antivirus for you and call us if you have a problem.” Same engineers, very different contract value.
Three assets, in order: the offer written as an outcome, the brand story with your client as the hero (I guide clients through this with my DRAMATISE™ framework), and the one-liner: “You know how [your ideal client] struggle with [the expensive problem]? We make sure [the result they’d pay for].” Say it at your next event. You want “how do you do that?”, and a polite nod means keep sharpening.
And if you suspect you’ve been handing this stuff away at your prices, this is the move where that stops.
Find your onliness
Clients don’t care how long you’ve been in business or how many certs are on the wall. They tick the box, then look for a reason to remember you. And every competitor already claims experience, fair prices and the extra mile.
So finish this sentence and defend it: “We’re the only firm that ___ for ___ in ___.” If a competitor could honestly say the same, keep sharpening. Your niche, your method, your tone, your guarantees, your team on camera: somewhere in there is a sentence only you can say. Then lock it into a one-page style guide so everything you publish looks like you.
Get visible where your buyers already are
“Why would they be interested in us? We’re invisible.” Meanwhile, as long as someone can ransom their business, they’re interested. Buyers take 2 years to switch provider, and the stubborn ones take 10 or 15. Visibility keeps you in the running until the incumbent fumbles, and then you’re the firm they already trust.
Profile first, then my 7C Success Strategy: Clarity, Content, Connections, Comments, Conversations, Community, Conviction, and the eighth C, Commitment. The best 15 minutes in this whole move is daily commenting where your buyers are, booked like client work. Your team are firefighters. Marketing loses to a live fire every time, unless it’s in the diary.
Build the engine
Lead generator, landing page, nurture emails. The AI-scouted list from play 1, the reopened deals from play 2, the followers from play 3: without this, they leak away.
Keep two plays running each quarter. Host your own event, work the room with your one-liner, send something bulky through the letterbox if your market is local (one Irish MSP’s drop was still ringing the phone a decade on). Cold calling stays off the list: you hate getting those calls, and soon you won’t need to make them.
The day it works is a specific feeling: “The sales have come in and I had no part in it. And how exciting is that?”
The hard part is holding the plan in place.
You could do all of this yourself. You’re smart, and you’ve built harder things.
But marketing loses to technical work every single time both land on your desk. You’ll reopen three deals with play 2, feel great, and then a migration eats six weeks. As one owner put it: “It’s a bit like losing weight. We all know what we should be doing, but we don’t necessarily always stick to the plan.”
Here’s how I work. You and your team do the work, because nobody knows your firm like you do. I map the sequence with you, hand you the frameworks, and hold the priority in place while your world drags you back into the weeds.
Two things worth sitting with. Every month the gap between the MRR you have and the MRR you want stays open, that money’s gone. And a firm that makes its own demand is worth more on the day you sell it. One founder called that “the money shot right there.”
I’m Deirdre Martin. 20 years in banking and financial services, Level C Certified Brand Strategist, creator of MOMENTUM Marketing™. Allergic to fluff.
Want a guide through it?
Book a call. Bring your numbers and the play you started with. I’ll bring questions, and I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help. If I can’t, you leave with a sharper plan anyway.
Book a call