I have a question: Why is lead generation a business?
Does the idea of companies offering lead generation as a service seem a little peculiar to you? It does to me. At least it seems peculiar now. A year ago, who knows. I might not even have given it a second thought. For those of you who have escaped the virtual avalanche of emails from these service providers I will attempt to explain their offerings, at least as I currently understand them. They seem to be offering one of two types of products. The first is a list of suitable contacts for my business that I can purchase from them. The other is their service for tracking down leads and warming them up – priming them for me to deliver my pitch and close the deal. At first glance, this seems like a brilliant idea.
After giving it some thought however, what struck me was that these people – total strangers to my business and to my products – would be able to identify these valuable prospects when presumably I have been unable to do so for myself. Do they know something that I don’t know? Have they some secret customer detection power that I, with years of experience in developing my product with my customer in mind, do not have? Or are they just tapping into the fact that attracting customers is really hard for me?
Perhaps purchasing a contact list might be a good idea if I am moving into a new market and I am unfamiliar with the organizations in the area. It might speed things up if I don’t have to compile the contact information of the decision-makers myself. But my question is: how would I know if the organizations and the people on the list are actually my customers? Would I be paying for something of no value to me?
Should I not be able to study the business environment and identify those who would be most likely to become my customers?
Of course if my approach to adding new customers is to send unsolicited email invitations to try my products then this certainly might be the easiest solution. It rather seems like the machine gun approach though. You know, fire as many rounds as you can in the general direction and hope that you hit something. I don’t know about you, but most of this type of advertising goes directly into my spam box. I never even read it. So to know if the list actually brought me new business I would have to keep track of how people find out about me. I wonder if
anyone does that?
And having someone else track down leads and prime them for my grand presentation, that really gives me a queasy feeling. Would they be saying the right things about my business and its products? Would they be treating the potential customer the way that I would? How would I know? What if these new prospects think that this person works for us and they would never do business with us after meeting this person? Am I being paranoid?
Maybe I’m just a control freak – or a pessimist – but I don’t think it’s possible to just download success or leave it to those outside of the business. I think that acquiring customers is the job of my business. Otherwise why does my business even exist? Am I wrong?
Until tomorrow, GUNG Ho friends!