When we look at business plans; so many startups spend a lot of time thinking how they will find new clients through lead generation activities

Marketo, a leading lead generation company online describes Lead generation as:

‘The marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline.

I really hate the word ‘Stimulating’ as used in their home script.

It makes me think of how some would have to be extra charming, have to use N.L.P. tricks to ‘convince’ or use more marketing for products and services that are in the main mediocre.

Someone once said: better to have a mediocre product and fantastic marketing than a fantastic product and mediocre marketing.

As a UK Government recognised SFEDI start-up mentor you always feel a bit like a judge on an inane reality talent show on the television, when you meet start-ups in their embryonic stages, so many entrepreneurs are excited about something you know will never sell, as you know their competition better than they do, or you just are not at all enamored by their idea and you know not many others won’t be excited either. Yet their business plan is heavily dependent on a massive marketing budget to ‘shove it’ into their target market.

There is still a massive industry for ‘selling shovels’ a term which originated from the gold rush Sutter story. So many businesses selling ways to get people interested in your product, to ‘stimulate interest’ to try get the ‘toddler to eat the vegetables’ because many business people believe toddlers and most business people are akin in intelligence and do not know what is good for them.

Lead generation is akin to selling stepping stones or boats to get across the river because you want the fruit over the water, the boat salesman and stepping stones company hate it when a smart entrepreneur strolls over and offers to sell you the fruit they started growing a while back on your side of the river, saving you time and money!

In the early 1980’s I was the European salesman for a well know vacuum cleaner company from the USA selling to UK consumers in their homes. In my training which was a week long, was intensive and innovate at the time, incorporating many clever psychological sales tricks (yes, I am cringing too, I was only a naive 20-year-old then) that built up the value of this cleaner to ten times what a similar system in the shops was worth. I sold 15 in my first month.

Then one afternoon I met a service engineer who told me they manufacture them for less than one tenth of what we sold them for. After that the magic was gone, I struggled to sell any more, much to the dismay of our manager at the time.

Point is; with clever lead generation, which at the time was knocking on doors and giving away tickets to a competition where people could win a prize if we could get into their homes which was very successful at the time before street canvassing became really frowned upon, plus good sales people with all the best closing techniques and psychology, sell almost anything and make good profits.

But the longevity of such a business will be your karma.

The ‘make a better mousetrap’ is an old age adage that is still uber-relevant in today’s marketplace. Your success starts in the lab/shed/workspace where you have come up with a prototype that will solve a massive problem and/or improve life for human beings, that and smart marketing will assure your success.

‘Don’t try to be better, be different’ Steve Jobs said, if you have something really new that’s half your marketing budget right there.

In the internet age, online marketing has taken a lot of the dominant foothold that sales people once held, if you have an amazing ‘different’ product or service and I stress the point does it solve a universal problem? Then you can create a simple very inexpensive video and tell your story as a human who suffers from this eternal issue and this is your answer which endears you to the audience and relates well to them then you can easily go viral and be successful really quickly.

Where was all the lead generation and selling stepping stones and shovels in that plan?

If someone walked up to a gold prospector around 1849 in San Francisco who was just about to buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of equipment and told him I know where tons of gold is just sitting there waiting to be picked up, you don’t even need a shovel, sieve, mule or cart, follow me, do you think your prospector will need to be ‘stimulated’ or ‘convinced’ to buy?

No nor do we, you are offering the end product, the goal quicker

We offer sales leads on demand:

Which is what leads4biz offers. We are a sales Leads directory. On the surface we are a global business directory , where we share our members pages to our 500,000-real people on social media, however, behind the scenes we find the things our 5,000 plus listed members are buying each day, and send these leads to our pro members giving them sales leads each month to just call and go see. No cold calls, business networking at silly hours, no blogs and social media. Taking you straight to your goal quicker.

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