Hi {{first_name | there}},
Two quick stories.
A while back, the founder of a business called me and said they needed more leads. Honestly, this is something I hear a lot. So I looked. It took me about 20 minutes to see it. They had 847 leads sitting in their pipeline that had never had a second outreach. No second call. No second text. Just put on a newsletter list and left sitting there.
Another company was generating roughly 2,000 leads a week and converting 1.05% of them. That’s about 21 buyers a week, and nearly 1,980 people who didn’t buy. Their average close cycle was under two days. That tells you they were closing the people who were ready on day one, and basically nothing happened with everyone else.
Both of these companies had plenty of leads. What they didn’t have was a system to follow up the moment a lead didn’t make a decision right then and there.
And if you know people, how often do they know right now, with 100% certainty, that they want to buy what you’re selling?
More is not a number
The moral of the story: chances are, leads are not your biggest issue. I’m not saying never. I’m not saying nobody has a lead problem. I’ve 100% seen it. But the reality is, more often than not, your business isn’t producing the revenue you want because of a lack of effort, not a lack of leads.
I call it entrepreneurial lead syndrome. It always shows up as the same four words: we need more leads.
More is not a number. You have to reverse engineer exactly what you want from your business. That means knowing your conversion at every step: lead to appointment, appointment to show, show to close, or whatever your sales process looks like.
Say you want 50 new clients this month. Work it backward. If you close half the people you sit down with, you need 100 people to show up. If only half of the people who book actually show, you need to book 200. And if only 20% of your leads book an appointment, you need 1,000 leads.
That’s a number. It’s not more.
Where the real money is
Now spend time on just one of those conversions. Go from 20% to 30% of leads booking an appointment. Same 1,000 leads, and now 300 book, 150 show, and you close 75.
That’s 50% more clients without one more lead.
And even if you do want to generate more leads, better conversions mean every one of those leads produces more clients. No matter how you look at it, it’s always a worthwhile endeavor.
Your move this week
Go look at every lead you’ve generated in the past 90 days. Honestly, how many of them have you followed up with to the point where they truly told you, “Hey, I’m just not interested”?
If you’re in a situation where you need to generate money, is it okay not to do that well? If you needed something, would you be more persistent?
That’s the angle you need to be thinking about.
Steve