If you’re a director and/or leading a sales team, I’m guessing you might not relish the first part of the prospecting journey – the bit where you have to find the doors you can knock on, then create enough of an impression to build some initial trust/rapport so it doesn’t get slammed in your face. You’ll probably want to crack on with what you do best, closing deals and delivering the products or services your business offers.
In my experience, finding out who a potential client is, how you can reach them, catch their attention and then angling what you say in a way that gets them to buy into what you do generally isn’t the task of most business leaders’ dreams. I guess that’s why a lot of people are baffled when they find out how much I love the whole lead generation process. Yes, it’s a challenging process to devise, manage and nail, but for us at neptik – we love it.
It’s been a core part of my entire working life. We use skills I’ve developed over many years in business development to identify, validate, engage and generate solid B2B leads for neptik’s clients to convert into new customers.
For most people, lead generation seems to be something they endure rather than embrace. It’s often perceived as one of those ‘have to do’ rather than ‘want to do’ aspects of new business. As a result, it can sometimes be deprioritized and treated as a reactive rather than proactive element of the new business ecosystem. This approach can have a negative impact on business growth. Not to put too fine a point on it – not giving lead generation the focus it deserves, and demands, means that your ability to maximise sales is being compromised. Just to reassure you, I’m not here to convert you into worshippers at the ‘Church of Lead Generation’. No, I’m here to help you do what all businesses need to do – convert non-customers into customers. And not just do it, but do it better.
Being as lead generation is not something most people want to hear about in microscopic detail, I thought I’d try an analogy to bring this subject to life. The title of this post is ‘Breathing life into your new business strategy’, and I chose this because this analogy will use our respiratory system as a way of representing the lead generation process.
Lungs perform an essential, life giving function, always on, always in the background, whilst the brain and heart [essential also] seem to grab all the headlines. So, comparisons here between lead generation and sales and marketing, for example?
Breathing, ostensibly, is a relatively straightforward affair. No-one really gives any conscious thought to it. But, when you look into it, it’s a highly complex system – many processes working together to ensure we get the oxygen we need – the interaction between, and coordination of, so many different ‘moving parts’ is a marvel of nature.
And it’s the same with lead generation [don’t laugh, hear me out] – at a superficial level it’s about having lists and turning them into prospects. But take a closer look and there are so many different processes needed to ensure that the prospects we deliver to you have quality and quantity.
But now for the real kicker. Imagine this – you ask your lungs to work, say, one day in five. Oh, and by the way, you tell them they can take holidays, and work flexitime.
You’re probably thinking ‘Well that’s a ridiculous scenario’, but, in truth, this is what happens in most businesses week in, week out. In order to focus on sales and marketing, we often pause lead generation. We all know that our heart and brain, if starved of oxygen, will fail, and yet most businesses seem OK with the notion of starving themselves of viable prospects and feeling [hoping?] they can soldier on and prosper regardless.
As you’ll gather, the gist of this post is that lead generation should not [in fact cannot] be something you turn on and off or seen as something which is not quite as important as other components of the sales and marketing mix if you want to maintain and grow your business.
So, if you want to improve your chances of success and be able to identify and convert more valid and viable prospects, then you have 2 choices. Choice #1 is that you create an in-house team of specialists and give them the most up to date training and tools to help them do their job. Choice #2 is that you move the lead generation process to an external partner, like neptik.
The benefits of #2 are many and varied, and we don’t want to take up any more of your time explaining these right now [we have a series of upcoming posts which will take you a more detailed tour of the neptik way and how we can specifically be of help].
So, if this post’s got you thinking about the consistency, regularity and reliability of your business’s lead generation activity and you’d like to know more about how we help B2B businesses get more customers, why not contact me and have a chat – ben@neptik.com
