Everybody has heard the sayings;
“A plumber always has a dripping tap” and “A cobblers shoes are always poor”
Essentially these mean that people who work in a trade are the worst at fixing their own problems. And yes I have to say that we have fallen into this trap as well. Over the last few months, we’ve stopped generating our own B2B leads. This wasn’t a strategy or planned, but was just something that occurred during a busy time.
I spend days telling our clients that they always need to be generating B2B sales leads, especially when they are busy as this is what drives the growth of any company. I always tell people that it’s a lot harder starting again after a break from lead generation than it is doing a small amount continually.
This is exactly what we are finding now. We’ve missed out on deals with companies we were speaking to regularly, who have bought from our competitors because we weren’t speaking to them at the right time. Our pipeline of future opportunities has gone cold and needs a lot of chasing to warm up again. Our website visitors are down by 60% and incoming enquiries are down by 90%.
All of this has happened because we haven’t been doing our own lead generation for a few months.
The reason I am writing this blog today is that one of our prospects has just put the go live date on hold because they are very busy. There sales people can’t do any more sales appointments for the next 2 months. After talking with the Sales Director, the pipeline for the last 2 months of the year isn’t very good, they are just very busy now.
Nothing I could say would make him look at starting lead generation now, starting to engage with a view of filling up the pipeline for the last 2 months of 2012, he wants us to start then and immediately fill up the pipeline.
So what I will say to people, and a lesson I have recently learnt is even if you only do a little during busy times it will ensure you don’t have the quiet times and save a lot of effort.
