B.O.O.S.T. Podcast
B.O.O.S.T. Podcast
Scaling with Soul: Lead Generation That Connects and Converts feat Jensen Savage | EP 161
From avoiding common pitfalls to leveraging automation without losing the human touch, Jensen Savage shares actionable insights that blend data-driven lead gen strategy with authentic storytelling. Whether you're a solopreneur or scaling a team, this conversation will help you rethink how you attract, engage, and convert the right clients without burning out or selling out.
We cover:
- The #1 mistake service businesses make when generating leads
- How to balance lead quantity vs. quality in a crowded market
- Smart ways to use automation and AI while keeping it personal
- The power of storytelling in building trust and driving conversions
- Real-world strategies for scaling quickly and sustainably
Jensen’s approach is bold, honest, and refreshingly human for entrepreneurs ready to grow with intention.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensensavag%D0%B5/
Website: https://www.savagegrowthpartners.com/
Let's Stay in Touch!
I think focusing on the wrong metrics is definitely one of the biggest mistakes that service-based businesses make. For example, looking at just cost per lead instead of how are certain leads converting when it actually all shakes out? How much profit are you making from certain leads from certain channels? So I think you can't just look at one metric in a silo and let that be your North Star all the time. I think you've got to kind of see the whole ecosystem so that you're considering all the right metrics and making decisions based on those.
Kelly (Host):That was Jensen Savage. She's an entrepreneur and marketing strategist known for scaling service-based businesses through data-driven growth strategies, impactful branding, and results-focused leadership. In this episode, Jensen helps to obtain more leads. I'm Kelly Leonard, and this is The Boost Podcast.
Announcer:Welcome to the Boost Podcast, the podcast created to ignite your business and career potential. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur, launching your entrepreneurial journey, an established business leader, or early career professional, we've got you covered. In each episode, host Kelly Leonard and her guests dive into one aspect of Kelly's signature Boost framework, ensuring you get practical and actionable insights, tips, and takeaways to build your brand, optimize relationships, obtain more leads, secure thought leadership space, and tap into new markets. Get ready for bite-sized, power-packed interviews with entrepreneurs and business leaders. Greatness awaits you. So let's boost together. And now, here's Kelly Leonard.
Kelly (Host):Jensen, it's good to see you. Welcome to the Boost Podcast. Hello. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. And for folks who are hearing your name for the very first time, tell them a bit about yourself.
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah. So in a nutshell, what I do is marketing for service-based businesses who are looking to go to seven figures and beyond.
Kelly (Host):Excellent. Love it. Love it. And so I'm a big fan. Well, maybe I'm biased because I run a service-based business and have lots of clients who run service-based business. And so when you think about in your journey in this work, what are is like one of the biggest mistakes that service-based businesses make when they're trying to generate leads.
Jensen Savage (Guest):I think focusing on the wrong metrics is definitely one of the biggest mistakes that service-based businesses make. For example, looking at just cost per lead instead of, you know, how are certain leads converting when it actually all shakes out? You know, how much profit are you making from certain leads from certain channels? So I think you can just look at, you know, one metric in a silo and let that be your North Star all the time. I think you've got to kind of see the whole ecosystem so that you're considering all the right metrics and making decisions based on those.
Kelly (Host):Well, and that's great. And so when you talk about metrics, so like what are some of the various metrics that people should be focusing on?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, so that's a great question. I mean, there's so many, but taking a step back and looking at the view of the full funnel of people coming in to when they actually pay you, some things you want to look at are cost per lead is something you should consider, but you should also be looking at your click-through rate. How engaged are people with ads that you have out there? Are they actually engaging with what it is that you have to say? So maybe you're not getting in front of the right people at all. Other things you should consider are your close rate. You should also consider your lifetime value. When you do close somebody, how much is that person bringing into your business revenue-wise, not just today, but also six months, eight months down the line? So there's a lot, but you have to look at that whole funnel and see all the different metrics along the way. And Usually the data kind of tells a story.
Kelly (Host):The data, love it. Well, and I guess that presupposes people are tracking data, right?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yes, yeah, yeah. That's the little asterisks we have to put. You gotta know, you gotta actually have access to this stuff in order to be able to take a look at it, but.
Kelly (Host):Yeah, and so even from that perspective, so because so many of the folks who listen to, while we have a varied audience, but a lot of the folks are perhaps small micro businesses, single person run organizations. When you think about even tracking metrics, are there particular tools that you think are really good for smaller businesses to integrate into their processes?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, that's a really good question. So Of course, it's going to depend on your business size and model, all that. But I do think that there are some tools, especially that have come out in the past couple of years that can tie together a lot of different data points in a helpful way, especially if, like you said, you are just a single person or maybe a couple person business to where you don't need to have some enterprise level data warehousing solution sort of thing. But something like high level is something I've seen a lot of smaller businesses have success with to where they can look at those big metrics from their marketing. They can see how much are we spending on this marketing channel? How much have we closed from this specific channel? What's our close rate? All that important high level, no pun intended, information that they need to know. Awesome.
Kelly (Host):And so one of the metrics that you mentioned was close rate.
Announcer:And
Kelly (Host):I know oftentimes we get hung up on just filling the funnel as much as we can. Let's just get the high volume, high quantity of leads. But how do you balance lead quantity with lead quality, especially now in a competitive marketplace?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's always a balancing act to try to strike, especially when You know, you mentioned it is a competitive marketplace where there's maybe a lot of businesses that are offering something similar. But I always highly recommend adding in qualifiers to whatever marketing is that you're running. So let's say you're running a lead format on Facebook. I recommend having at least a couple questions to weed out leads that are just a complete not fit. So if you are selling, let's say, solar panel installation, if somebody is a renter, there's nothing that you can do with that lead. So that's a good way to kind of make sure that the leads that are coming in are at least to some degree qualified, right? So like they're a homeowner or they have certain size home or whatever it is. So I think as far as quality, That's a good way to weed out the non-qualified leads. But as far as quantity, the best way is always going to be just having high quality ad creative. So if you are running ads, no matter where, if you just need to have ads that are really compelling, you can't just have templated ads that look like everybody else. So you really kind of have to stand out and have high quality stuff in order to generate a lot of leads. And the best way to do that is to kind of look at what other people are And ultimately just kind of test and see what it is that moves people in your market.
Kelly (Host):Okay. And so even that, like what does testing look like from your perspective?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah. So testing, it's a big kind of question. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's also a big difficulty that a lot of service businesses face is like, how do I actually dial in something that works? And am I spending too much on testing? Am I not spending enough? the good thing is, especially if you're kind of more in a local market, you can test on a pretty low budget of even as low as like $20 a day. Let's say you have a new campaign you want to run or new ad creative that you want to throw out there and see if it works. You don't need a huge budget to test things out, but basically kind of in a nutshell, the best way to test is to have kind of things to compare it to. So like, let's say you have an ad that's worked really well in the past. It's like, okay, well, we have this other idea for an ad that's kind of similar that we want to test it out against. And so you run the two things at once and just look at the different data points and see, you know, what ends up being more effective. And then you take the winner and do the same thing over and over. But yeah, that's testing in a nutshell.
Kelly (Host):And, you know, so the thing that comes up for me that I'd really be curious to get your thoughts on is even in this testing process When you think about for those folks who are leveraging, let's say, social media to run some of their ads, like how much impact does like even our awareness of the algorithms? Because isn't it possible that the algorithm could like have a. a really dramatic impact on the effectiveness or not of an ad. And so if that's the case, how do folks even navigate the nuance around algorithms?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, yeah. And that is an excellent question. It's becoming increasingly relevant, even within the past couple of months. I've kind of seen in the marketing world and with even our clients that we've had to make changes with because, I mean, the algorithm is kind of just this big you know nebulous thing that's behind a curtain that nobody truly fully understands we just kind of try to make sense of it based on what we're seeing but as far as using the different levers that we have control over i mean looking at facebook ads for example you know there's the advantage plus targeting and you can put in you know interest to target or completely go broad or you can allow it to expand your audience or not. But it's pretty hard to say because I've truly seen completely different things work for different businesses. And so I think that just goes back to testing things like that as well, experimenting with targeting completely broad or targeting a home improvement or something that's relevant to your offer. But yeah, it's really just trying to strike the balance between what ads you're putting out there and then also how the algorithm is going to take what you've spun up and spin it back out to the audience that it identifies for you.
Kelly (Host):Yeah, I could definitely see where the frustration may lie and just trying to, because it's this constant game. And no sooner you maybe determine oh the rules of the game and then the rules change and you're like oh exactly yeah so one of the things that you mentioned in your introduction that really piqued my interest and I'm sure will pique a lot of our listeners interest is this whole scaling to seven figures and so from your perspective what are some of the most effective lead generation strategies that you've used to help businesses service businesses in particular scale quickly
Jensen Savage (Guest):yeah I I would say as a whole, finding a way to stand out. I would say if I were to break it down into one core concept, that's what it would break down to be. Because I've scaled so many different businesses and we've pulled different levers to different degrees. We've allocated budget differently. But ultimately, I think something that has never really failed is identifying that unique value proposition and really leaning into it hard. Because... to grow exponentially, you have to have something that's different than everybody else. Otherwise, you're just gonna be commoditizing your service and just racing to the bottom, which makes growing a lot harder because even if you are getting more clients or customers, you're still kind of walking in the wind trying to make more money.
Kelly (Host):And so, okay, so the unique value proposition, how does one practically define what that is for their business in a way that is meaningful and that can help them to lean into that value proposition.
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, so I think a couple of things. I think the first thing is taking inventory of what you have in your business. And what I mean by that is, the resources that you have. So let's say you're a small business owner, maybe you're a one person show, what skills or unique resources or connections or whatever it is that you bring to the table that actually makes you stand out. So maybe let's say you're running a real estate marketing agency. Let's say you were a top producing real estate agent. Like that's something you can totally lean into that other real estate marketing agencies don't have. Maybe the core of what you offer is ultimately the same or similar but you can spin it up in a way where it's like this is a lot higher quality it's a lot more personalized to you know your business because i actually have been there i understand that sort of thing so kind of just taking inventory of the unique things that you actually do bring to the table so i think that's one thing the other really big part too is doing your research and understanding your audience to know what it is that they actually care about because there might be something unique about your business but your audience doesn't care about that thing, you know? So I think doing research and really identifying those pain points and triggers and values such that you're able to kind of tie your unique aspects of your business to the desires of your audience. And then you kind of can bridge that gap and build something that's actually unique.
Kelly (Host):Is it ever odd or unacceptable to just simply like to even ask past clients, like what they found to be your unique or what caused them to want to do business with you? Like, is that also perhaps a way of being able to identify? Because I think oftentimes when it's our baby, like we think the baby's beautiful, right? And so it's not until you perhaps get objective feedback from someone to say, oh, okay, this is what I like about your baby.
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, no, I think that's an excellent thing to do. Actually, I'm a big proponent of getting feedback. Um, and I think, uh, an objection that I've got when I brought that up with business owners. It's like, I don't want to be annoying or I don't want to bug people. But really, if somebody's had a good experience with your business, a lot of the time they're happy to help. They're happy to provide some brief feedback of like, you know what? I really liked that you guys did this. This was awesome. And that way you can kind of take that feedback to the bank and roll that up into whatever marketing or sales efforts you're doing too.
Kelly (Host):And so still on this concept of unique value proposition, because I know also, sorry, Storytelling can play a role in this to some degree. And so from your perspective, what role does storytelling play in lead generation? And then how can businesses really craft compelling narratives that are designed to attract and convert the right types of audiences?
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think storytelling can kind of bridge the gap in a prospect's mindset. in a way that not a lot of other things can. Because you can really tell a story that resonates with your ideal prospect, because ultimately they're asking themselves in their head, like, does this work? And will it work for me? So if I can show them a story of like, Hey, we took John Smith and we helped him lose 30 pounds in eight weeks. And that would be a little too fast, but you know, and now he feels a lot better. He's able to hang out with his kids and blah, blah, blah. And it like, I'm hitting all those pain points. I can really kind of bridge that gap and take them on this kind of narrative journey versus just saying, Hey, you know, we have a workout program that's really good, you know, because it's like everybody talks about their features. But I think if you're able to build that compelling story that really resonates with a lead, that's kind of where you can stand out and actually build, you know, more of a brand versus just a service.
Kelly (Host):Yeah, that's good. And so even when we're telling the stories, are we telling the story as the service provider or even in your example that you shared, is it the client who's telling the story to make it seem like to bring more realistic, I guess, a face to an outcome? Yeah. Okay.
Jensen Savage (Guest):Yeah. So if you can have more... customer or client led stories, all the better. Something that I've had a lot of success with is doing like an interview sort of testimonial or, you know, story with a client or customer where you kind of have a general flow of, you know, here's this here are the things that I want them to highlight. Here's the kind of transformation that I want them to talk about that they've had and just kind of guide them, but like mostly letting them tell their story. That way you can make sure that, you know, they're not getting super off track and you still get the good stuff that you need for, you know, marketing and sales collateral, but they're still being able to kind of authentically show, you know, exactly what their experience has been and be able to really understand illustrate that transformation in a way that, you know, as a, as a business, it's, it's always easy to say, you know, Oh, we did X, Y, and Z, but to have like an actual person that's like, Oh, here's John from any town, Pennsylvania. And he's going to talk to you about how this could happen for you and how this happened to him, you know? So definitely, definitely a big proponent of the client led storytelling.
Kelly (Host):Awesome. Well, Jensen, this was a great information. If folks are listening in and they want to tap into your genius, what's the best way for them to reach you?
Jensen Savage (Guest):So you can look me up on LinkedIn and connect with me there. Jensen Savage. You can also check out my website at savagegrowthpartners.com.
Kelly (Host):Awesome. Well, I appreciate the work that you do. Thank you for the way that you serve small, medium, and large organizations. Yeah,
Announcer:absolutely. Thank you for tuning in to the Boost Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and rate the show and share it with a friend. Also, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Every other week, we'll empower you with practical, actionable insights, tips, and takeaways to boost your success.
