I'm not complaining though - I now know what my business' nemesis is, and I'm grateful for the inspiration. So yeah, keep them coming! 😄
And get yourself a daily helpful article at https://martinstellar.com/nice-people
The Sales for Nice People Podcast
Ep 47 - I've found my nemesis, it's automated lead gen practices (aka spam at scale)
So you can get me unlimited appointments, automatically booked into my calendar, but you haven't even seen that I frequently puffed about how I don't like that kind of practice. Welcome to episode 47 of SIDS for Nice People, the daily podcast for ethical entrepreneurs who want to sell more of their work without violating their values. I am Martin Stiller, I help nice people sell more. And yeah, it's very popular, it's very prevalent these days to get automated lead generation set up. And they will send out thousands of messages each week and they will book appointments into your calendar automatically and you only have to pay on results. It sounds so good, but stop and think for a moment because this person who sends me that DM saying, "Hey, I can get you appointments as many as you want." Didn't realize that they're sending it to a guy who is not very much in favor of the practice. In fact, it's all over my blog and in the sales club coach app, it is on my social media channels. So this is very, very badly targeted lead generation. And if I were to buy this lead generation from this guy or girl, I would be getting the same badly targeted appointments in my calendar and I'd be wasting all my time talking to people who are very likely not the right fit. So yes, of course it makes sense to get lead generation. You do need to have boats lining up with the canal. If you want to have those boats pass through the canal, you need leads at the top of the funnel if you want to have buyers turning into clients. But is lead generation really the biggest problem? Because in most cases, almost all businesses lose deals that they should have gotten. There's always people who disappear, even though they were very key. There's always people who push back on pricing because yeah, it sounds good and we need it, but the money. And there's always long sales cycles. These are three reasons why the bottom of the funnel is very often the biggest bottleneck. It's a leaky bucket. And if you then go and put more leads at the top of the funnel, put more people into the bucket, you still don't fix the big costly problem of getting those people to turn into clients. So the question I'd like to leave you with today is what actually is the biggest problem? Is it that you don't have enough leads or is it that you don't have enough buyers turning into clients? And if both are the problem, question is which problem should be fixed first? Because whether you're using agency to generate leads or you do social media content, you always have to invest time and probably even money to get those leads. And if you don't have a good conversion rate, if you don't convert enough buyers into clients, then you have an inefficiency in your sales process. Now, you have to decide for yourself, but I've always wanted to first fix the most costly problem. And considering the fact that generating leads has a cost one way or the other, the inefficiency of not converting the people who should buy, that is the first problem that I would want to solve. So I'll leave you with that. This is sales for nice people. I will see you again tomorrow.