Do you believe in the ‘Field of Dreams’ approach?
This is where people or businesses build their presence online, or build a variety of marketing initiatives, and then sit back and wait for new customers to knock on their doors. They believe that this is enough effort to build a business.
Hence the belief that ‘If you build it, they will come’; the Field of Dreams’ approach.
I am now experiencing this going a stage further with Lead Generation companies. They appear to have a similar approach. The latest I have seen was a video of the owner saying how effective their cold calling process is (cold calling is for another blog!) He explained that his strategy can ‘continuously feed new leads into your pipeline and, therefore, have consistent sales coming into your pipeline and so we have solved that challenge’.
Well, not really.
The supposition is that if you have leads you will automatically have sales.
You see, if you have no skills in sales and selling you have collected all these leads and have little chance of converting them into sales. You will have spent all this money on the cold calling, and all you have is cold leads, no sales, and no business.
If you have some sales skills, you may be able to convert some of them. However, you are probably wasting more than half of the opportunities you have accumulated, wasted half the funds you have invested.
My advice would be, until you have had some sales training or coaching and learned how to convert a significant proportion of those leads, then don’t waste your money on expensive marketing or lead generation.
By all means invest in a variety of marketing and lead generation ideas, whether you do them yourselves of outsource them, but first, make sure you are skilled at opportunity or lead conversion. Make sure you can negotiate and secure (close) the best deals.
I will not attempt a sales pitch here, but, before you invest in such initiatives, find yourself a good, ethical and experienced sales coach or trainer and book yourself a course or session with them!