When you are in the ‘leads’ game, like we are, meaning you have a business that produces a buyers list with decision makers who have the cash right now and they want to buy what you sell.

We make regular calls to companies outside of the members of leads4biz who can supply to our buyers and sometimes they think it is too good to be true and say a load of tripe, like:

“Sorry we do not pay for clients”

Don’t pay for clients? Really?

So you don’t make cold calls, customer service calls, send out email marketing newsletters, have a website, pay for SEO, have a contract with a digital marketing company, pay for radio ads, or magazines, have a sales team with company cars, pay for exhibitions, run seminars, do mailshots through the post service, play golf with clients, go to network events in the early mornings and the evenings as well?

But you are right YOU don’t pay for lead generation to find new clients, they are all born knowing who you are and what you do!

Or when they say; ‘We have enough clients thank you!”

They must have missed the basic economics lesson at school where they explained the basics of capitalism and how growth, boom and bust is hardwired into the very fabric of democratic societies, and if you are not learning and growing you are dying!

They say that most people are poor because they think everything is a scam.

“Imagine being sat in a pub in 1980 and a completely inebriated stranger comes over to say to you “Nike Sports mate, get 100 quid in there!  You won’t regret it lad <hick>!” You can be forgiven for scoffing:

“What, those naff shoes that baseball players wear? You will never get into a pub with them on mate ha ha ha!” and getting back to your beer, your friends and the single life.

However, fast forward to 2020, 40 years later, you are middle aged, married with 2.5 kids, a mortgage and a car with monthly payments, petrol, insurance etc. Well that 5 million quid that you own in Nike Sports, would come in handy now eh?!

Oh, to have a time machine and go back in time! `

‘Only fools and Horses work’, is an entrepreneurial mantra to many self-employed people, and a TV show for most Brits, and it tells that if you use your noggin, you won’t have to sell time for money in a job that makes the boss rich and you gift him or her a better life than you.

Because hard work on its own rarely means residual wealth!

The challenge many startups have today is the fine line between a product so novel it needs a manual for most to get there head around, or a ‘me also,’ ‘everyone has done this already and we can too,’ kind of business startup.

We are bordering between the two paradigms with leads4biz.

We offer advertising on a website, sure many understand that, yet we are so different. We also have a process that finds buying requests. It is here that you sometimes start to lose people, especially investors, as they probably have not come from a direct sales background like I have.

When the brain is introduced to something new there is a handbrake turn moment where your brain is forced out of kilter!

In 1990, on leave from the Army, I was sitting on a train with one of my friends and he kept closing his eyes like he was in deep thought, then opening them again with a look of abject horror and then laughing like crazy. Well nothing ventured nothing gained, we had to ask what on Earth he was doing. He told me:

“Close your eyes and imagine the train travelling in the opposite direction then open your eyes quickly and look out the window”.

Well I went all for it, and it took about 20 seconds to really convince my brain that the train was heading in the opposite direction of travel, then I opened my eyes quickly and it induces a kind of panic in your brain where you have convinced yourself of one thing, but now the opposite is happening, and it makes you feel quite sick! Try it I dare you! DO NOT TRY WHEN DRIVING YOU WILL CRASH!!!

Sadly, rather coming from a seat of valuable learning, my friend just did it to enhance his own state of drunkenness, whereas for many years it puzzled me how we can convince our brain the opposite of the actual truth so easily, and how many suffer from limiting beliefs that are just not there? Or how many people dismiss out of hand a good opportunity because they are so convinced the world is not a nice place and no one speaks true anymore?

It is very much like the moment we say to business owners:

” Yes, you register on the site, add all your business details, then we share you to all our traffic and social media reach”.

They understand that, no problem.However when we introduce the opposite angle, for example:

I was recently talking to a Marketing company:

“OK great add your business to the site and don’t forget to tell us a few things you are buying when you register.”

Sounds easy right? Huh! People have that train direction experiment moment where all has gone blank,

“er.. Marketing” they say.” Dubiously.

Then you must be tactful and ask; “But you are a marketing company, this is what you sell yes, but we are now looking for what you buy. Surely you don’t need more marketing, do you?”

“No, erm, what do you mean ‘what we are buying,’ we are advertising on your site are we not?”

“Yes you are being advertised on the site, but we are also a business matching website, you and your business must have to buy products and services of other business to make your business work, even marketing companies need computers, mobile phones or contracts, IT help, stationary, tea and coffee, drinking water, event hire, exhibition goods, legal services, accountant, taxi services, desks, serviced offices etc.”

The list could go on. Then they pipe up:

“OH! You mean what we are buying in?“

If ‘in’ is the magic word that I am forgetting to use and it is just that simple word that will change our fortunes around and make people understand quicker that we are an advertising and a sales leads site all in one, then how silly would we be to ignore that 2 letter word; ‘in’?

In business, we all must try everything to make our offering understood and not oversell, and the last takeaway is never to dismiss, out of hand, any opportunity until you understand it 100 percent. It could easily be another customer for you now, or a Nike share from 1980!

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