Lead Generation is the lifeblood of any small business, whether you are a self employed business owner or large multi national.
But how does it actually work, what is the process of Lead Generation and how is that done in 2017?
My Obsession With Honda Moped Engines And Your Business Lead Generation.
As a child I was always obsessed with finding out how stuff worked. I was that kid taking apart Honda moped engines in the kitchen on a Saturday when my mum popped out shopping, this ended up in later life with a compulsion to deconstruct stuff – to find out what was going and how or why it worked.
My mum was always a bit vexed with me – as there was nearly always a pool of oil on the kitchen floor when she returned to the house after a few hours at Tesco. This obsession caused me some problems in later life when I discovered computers, I actually really enjoyed taking them apart over the weekend. No just apart but in bits.
Once, when working for Commercial Union I dismantled the ‘company laptop’ and was forced to take it back to the office on Monday morning with a blank face “I dunno why it won’t turn on it just won’t” – I never did take an employers machine apart again. That was 1991 and a Toshiba Laptop was an expensive bit of kit.
What Has This Got To Do With You And Lead Generation For Your Business.
Leads, new enquiries, potential customers putting their hands up to say ‘yeah I’m interested in that’ is a fundamental part of your role as a self-employed or small business owner.
My bet is that you are currently spending money on promoting your business, this money, often hard earned has been taken and used by a third party. Which on the face of it seems a fair exchange, you handed over some cash and expected something in return, my bet continues; the money you have traded will not have produced the results you expected.
Has your phone rang since you placed the ad in the paper, and if so has in rung in proportion to the spend on advertising – has the number of leads gone up since the ad appeared?
What about your online advertising? If you are using a directory listing or pay per click or even some kind of social media marketing. Is it working – is your phone ringing more since you started doing this?
Generating Leads For Your Small Business Has Never Been Harder.
I’ve been around for long enough to know that things are changing, the 80/20 rules for getting new leads is now 90/10 or even 95/10. Social networks are taking more and more attention from conventional media.
Kids are now able to get sponsership deals worth many hundreds of thousands based on an Instagram account, but your small business is struggling to make the phone ring – that’s the shift. Modern day marketing has to adapt to some age old principles and not be replaced with modern tactics.
* Principles are fixed and don’t change that often.
* Tactics change all of the time.
Why I Love Taking Things Apart – And Why That’s Good For Business.
When I left Commercial Union (now merged with Aviva) I moved to manage my own teams (still with the habit of taking things apart) and spent hours testing options like the phone and direct mail with different members of sales staff, and testing all sorts of things in order to generate leads. Of course some of these would not work now as we have different approaches but without testing you just don’t know.
Breaking things is not a good way to learn about solving mechanical problems, yet without taking things apart there is no way of know how it works, dismantling and rebuilding your existing processes is a great way of truly understanding where the pinch points and problem areas are.
The need to test stuff and work things out has led me to here and now .
