They say that every day we face a decision with two possible outcomes, and whichever one you take splits you up and there now becomes two of you and each one lives in a new parallel universe totally unaware of the others.

Imagine a world where the seller is the customer and vice versa.

You wake up and realize you have no coffee, so you go out and sit on your market stall and you wait until the coffee man comes to sell you coffee, and then you change your sign because you are ready for lunch and the sandwich lady sees your sign and comes over and offers you a range of breaded meats and confectionery.  

The entire market is made up of people sat in their stalls, which they pay for every month, waiting for the right seller to come to them, and sellers wander around looking for the buyers in their stalls.

You need a new car so you go online and create a website that attracts sellers of cars who click your contact button and drive to your house and take you for a test drive.

Google exists in this universe but it is used mainly by buyers who have to battle their competitors to get top ranking for their buying request websites. Enter the word ‘Computer’ into the search engines in the seller’s universe and there are 20,000+ results for people wanting to buy a PC.

It gets quite frustrating sometimes when you need a product or a service and no one comes to you, so you hire a ‘buying coach’ and go on seminars on how to attract buyers for what you need more effectively. You have to become a master in B.E.O. (Buyers Engine Optimization) to get anything you need online.

For a seller these are heady days. Most sellers wake up about 10am, watch TV, play with the children, read the papers and then pop out to work for an hour, have lunch and then and play golf. They don’t know what lead generation is. Marketing in this universe is purely for buyers while sellers are all wealthy and in the main happy.

Only the top 2% of society are chosen to become sellers, mainly from elite families and upper middle class education. The rest of society, the working class, are buyers of products and services. The sellers are made people from the day they are born.

This Universe has a Charles Dickens who through eloquent fiction fights against the system and tries to educate the world about the poor buyers and their good and misinterpreted souls.

Is this all too much? A little Orwellian perhaps? Back through the wormhole to our universe.

In 1998 I was a sales representative for an office machines company and was given a laptop. I was so excited. I believed this would be the answer to all the sales leads generation woes most of us had in our work.

‘Why oh why’ could we not get more qualified sales leads with whom we could make a 5 minute call to and go and sell to. I hated all the cold calling and canvassing, knocking on business doors in the 1990’s and chatting with secretaries to find some information about what they are using as automation in their offices and get back to the office and try day after day to get an appointment with the decision maker.

Qualified sales leads were the best. It meant you had a 95% chance of selling because the person really wanted what you were selling anyway. Tt was just a matter of which product they wanted and closing the sale; it was ‘easy-peasy’! But sales leads only made up only about 20% of your actual leads and the rest came from arduous work.

This laptop was going to connect me with all the buyers out there. It was going to be my little dream machine making my work so much easier!

HOW WRONG WAS I?!!

All the laptop did was create more work for me, as I had to add into a C.R.M. system how many cold calls I made and how many doors I knocked on each day as well as my appointments. It became my personal policeman, not my little leads genie!

When I searched online for ‘buyers,’ I got sellers, pages and pages of them, but no buyers anywhere!

The laptop also made me paranoid. I was unaware of all the competitors we had until I looked; Pre-internet ignorance was bliss!

If we could somehow connect everyone who wanted to buy something today, to the people who wanted to sell something now, wouldn’t that be amazing? Just like an amazing dating website that somehow could find your dream partner in a day, which would be something worth investing in right?

Am I stuck in the wrong universe?

Well the hard part about this is you have to create a network. They say the wealthiest people create networks so I started to create a network in 2009 when I first became aware I was marketing online.

 I created, by accident, an online business directory. To me, it was my own C.R.M. system until people started joining as members. Fast forward to today and we have these business directories in 11 countries with nearly 6,000 members and 35,000 visitors each month and each day we market these businesses who joined us free to our 500k social media reach.

This reciprocation means when we ask our members what we want to buy, and they have no issue telling us all their buying requests for their business B2B, and for themselves B2C.

 We then publish these leads with description, where, when, and decision makers names with contact details for buyers to cherry pick, call and sell to.

‘If you can’t move the mountain, make your own!’

See our alternative universe leads list here now.