Do You Have a Lead Machine?

There are a lot of things you need to grow your business successfully, all of which are important and necessary. It would be hard to put them in any kind of order of importance since with any one missing you’ll find your growth slowed or completely stalled.

Most business owners I know, however, have many of them at least somewhat figured out. They know how to hire another employee, buy more equipment, lease a larger space, buy more inventory, etc.

They are also likely aware they have room for improvement in their brand building, value proposition, review gathering, efficiency improvement, employee training, and so on.

One area I see over and over again with nearly zero investment and effort and not even a clear picture of what they could or should be doing is nonetheless a very key piece of growth that many businesses simply fail to do at all – lead generation!

We work with a lot of clients who are working on buying a business and one of the most consistent things we hear about the current owner/seller is that they haven’t done any marketing.

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That is the story over and over again. They rely on word of mouth, repeat business from current customers, and being randomly found online in the few places they may show up.

Usually, the excuse is either “We had enough business already” or “The owner knew they were going to sell so didn’t want to invest the time” or “They tried this or that but it didn’t work and they never got around to trying anything else”.

But none of those excuses really work! I guarantee the same person who says they “had enough business” will also tell you all kinds of stories about demanding customers, cheap customers, problematic customers, etc.

If you had all the business you wanted and really weren’t taking any more the first thing you’d do is fire all the pain-in-the-butt clients since they could so easily be replaced by all those other ones you were turning down, right? Which didn’t happen, so probably means they may not have been looking to grow but they also weren’t beating away business at the door because they were sooo busy!

Not bringing in new business because you are going to sell also makes no sense. Giving up on marketing because you don’t know how to do it may be an honest answer, but not a good one!

The reality is you should always be growing your business even if you have to pause from time to time while you staff up, add equipment, expand territory, etc. There is never a good reason not to have a good flow of new potential clients calling every single month. It’s much, much better to have to say no once in a while or delay starting with someone new than it is to ever be wishing for new clients (or literally need new customers to stay open) and have no way to bring them in!

Why Every Business Needs to Build a Lead Machine

I confess I have been in the same situation. While I regularly spend time devising ways to generate new business I have not always given it the attention it deserves and I haven’t always had as many leads coming in as I would have liked.

It’s easy to get busy with other stuff that “needs to be done right now” and put off things that are more focused on the future and not quite as urgent.

The solution is to make lead generation something you do a little of all the time instead of something you do when things get slow or even desperate.

How you pull in leads (people who may be interested in doing business with you) depends on the business but you should have a way of regularly getting in front of a target number of them each month and tracking how many convert into customers. Then ideally you can do more of this when you have more room or are ready to grow and you can slow it down some (but not turn it off!) when you are close to capacity.

It could be one thing you do or there could be several different tactics you use. The important point is to be consistent with doing it every single month and to track the results so that if you notice conversions going down (the number of leads who become paying customers) you can adjust as needed.

How many you need to generate each month depends on that same conversion rate. If one out of every five leads becomes a customer, and you are targeting ten new customers a month then you need to ensure you have pulled in fifty leads for the month. Some businesses only need one new customer a month, some need five hundred. Whatever the customer goal is should dictate the lead goal.

I will dive more into types of leads and ways to generate leads and so in the next article but for now ask yourself:

• How many new customers do I want to get each month?
• How many leads does it take to get each customer?
• How do I get my leads now and how many am I getting?
• What do I need to do to ensure I am more than making up the difference each month?

If the answer to that last question is “I’m not sure” then you know at least you have some work to do to even figure out what your lead machine should look like and that you really need one to guarantee you never run out of customers or business.

One of the most comforting things in business is having the phone ring (or the inbox ping) with an inquiry from a potential new customer – it means you’re doing something right and you may soon have a new customer.

It therefore follows if you want your business to always feel comfortable and avoid the stress of it getting slow, bills piling up without the revenue to pay them, etc. then you need a constant steady stream of leads.

A lead machine, if you will! Next time – how to build your lead machine.