Up until the advent of the Social Media age, around the start of the 2000 AD, most companies had a Marketing department and a Sales department. Marketing did brochures, articles in magazines, ads on radio and television, sponsored the local football team and generally managed the brand message.

Sales relied on marketing for leads and made appointments with potential clients off the back of these ‘sales leads’ and sold the product or service. Nice and simple back then or, at least, it was if you had a great marketing team which meant that the sales team were never short of people to see as you were fed warm leads all the time.

The fact was that marketing went stale in the 1980’s and 1990’s and was not enough on its own to feed the hungry salesman and consequently Sales Managers saw their teams with not enough leads meandering up from Marketing to keep them active, so Sales Managers started encouraging their team to do their own sales leads generation.

Across businesses, this Sales Leads Generation took the form of an office day and canvassing.

Your office day was usually once a week and you had to make a certain number of telephone calls to your database and to your competitors database. At the end of this exhaustive day banging phones, your manager would critique your activity and make sure you had enough meetings booked through your calls to be out for the next 4-5 days.

Canvassing was done between appointments and it meant calling on businesses in the area where your last meeting was and where your next meeting will be, to try to get an IN with a decision maker and find out as much information as you can to help you make an appointment with a decision maker to sell to that business.

Some research company offered a report in the mid 1990’s to suggest that if Sales People were sat in front of decision makers instead of doing lead generation they would be 5 times more efficient and the business so much more profitable.

So we glared back at Marketing and asked ‘what are you doing’? And Marketing was silent.

Then came Social Media, the elixir of business, the answer to every sales person’s dreams. Marketing can now reach the world online and get a website and post blogs and do online Press Releases and generally find hundreds of leads for the happy salesman to go see.

It never happened!

The Internet just amplified what was already happening in the business world. The companies with the most money paid Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies to make sure they were top of Google and Yahoo and had more staff to do the content, and capitalism was alive and well!

Google thought ‘well this is hardly fair is it’? and tried to make their search engines more fair for all and offered the smaller company with more commitment and passion the top spot. In theory that was supposed to happen with all their algorithms, however you only have to look at their annual turnover to see how much of the top spot is given to those who pay the most!

If you are a startup or small business, you have less chance now than you did 10 years ago to get your message across on social media. There are over a billion websites now and most of the civilized world uses Facebook, and what was free ten years ago is certainly not free now; edge rank, the free broadcasts from your pages and profile, are less than 2% now. Shareholders and the Orwellian pigs are alive and well in California!

You have to offer inspired content that is a mix between the inane superficial reality TV/ pop star style fashionista, and to the other degree with super intelligent never seen before content, this will really help you; you need to see this click bait’ to get anywhere online these days.

You need a marketing superstar who in reality would be wealthy and famous by themselves by opening their own word press site for $20 and posting a few revelations on Facebook, blogs that will change the world on their website, publish super sexy pics on Instagram and monetizing their online estate. But you want this person to work for you for $40k a year??!  Good luck finding this person!

Experienced Digital Marketing Managers even in Southeast Asia start at $80k per year because they know they can get your sales team more work than they can handle and your profits would be well in excess of what they expect as a salary.

That is of course if you are prepared to wait and have the mindset of not today and more tomorrow, and to be patient to the degree of nearly going out of business before your social media superstar influencer can develop your business a decent brand feeling that results in natural sales. If you are starting out at nothing, well it could be years!

Most start-ups don’t have the money for 1 year let alone many years before people trust their brand enough and approach you to buy from you. Ask the top Fortune 500 how long it took to develop a brand that they just nurture each day now.

When starting out in business it is how you spend your first amounts of money and your time that is absolutely pivotal to your success. Every business failure I have ever researched spent too much on the wrong things in the beginning.

Sales Leads Generation is how you find people to sell to, sometimes we cannot see the wood for the trees and solutions are often in front of you that you just don’t see.

If someone says they have a lead for you, in reality they are offering you a chance to sell to a decision maker without any of the laborious time and money expensive activities that you do that often make the end sale hardly worth the effort (once you understand net profit in business) so if it was me and someone tells me they have a lead for me I would jump as high as I could, drop everything else and follow the lead for a fantastic net profit.

See our list of leads right now, it may be the most profitable 2 minutes for you this month!