Download this article as a PDFA managing director once slid a spreadsheet across the table to me with the air of a man showing me the scene of a crime. Four hundred leads, he said, bought and paid for over six months. Names, job titles, email addresses, a tidy column of dates. I asked him how many had turned into customers. He looked at the sheet for a moment, then at me. “That,” he said, “is rather the problem.”
It is a scene we come across more often than you would think. Lead generation has become an industry in its own right, and a useful one. But a lead is only the very start of the journey, and somewhere along the way a lot of businesses have started treating the start as though it were the finish.
The tip of the iceberg
Generating leads is a real skill. Content, search, email, social: there are plenty of ways to attract the interest of someone who might one day buy from you, and firms who specialise in it are good at bringing people to the doorstep. The trouble is that the doorstep is as far as it goes. A name and an email address is not the same as a customer, and the distance between the two is where most of the actual selling lives.
Quality is the whole point
We have always cared more about how many leads convert than how many arrive. A thousand names mean very little if not one of them was ever going to buy. It is far better to have ten conversations with people who have a real problem you can solve than a spreadsheet of four hundred who once downloaded a guide. So we start by understanding your business, your goals and where you sit in your market, and then we go looking for the people who are genuinely a step away from becoming customers, rather than simply a step away from unsubscribing.
Bridging the gap
The work that turns a lead into a sale is unglamorous, and it is the work most often skipped. It is the follow-up that comes when it should. It is the second and third conversation. It is understanding where a particular buyer sits in their own decision and giving them the next thing they need, rather than the thing you happen to want to say. We treat ourselves as the bridge between your business and the person considering it, and we walk them across it, one useful interaction at a time, until buying from you feels like the obvious next step rather than a leap.
Through the door, not just up to it
That is really the difference. Plenty of firms will bring leads to your door. Rather fewer will guide them through it. Our approach pairs the older craft of picking up the phone and building a relationship with the newer tools of digital marketing, so that nothing generated at the top is quietly lost in the middle. The aim is not a longer list. The aim is revenue.
The managing director with the spreadsheet did not have a lead problem. He had four hundred of them going spare. What he was missing was everything that happens after the lead arrives, and once that was in place the same market that had produced a dead spreadsheet started producing customers. Generating interest is the easy part now. Converting it is where the value sits, and it is the part we are built for. We are your sales team, and we get you sales.
