Lead gen that sputters is typically not the result of lack of effort, activity, or capability.
Sputtering prospecting is typically the prioritization of doing over thinking.
Sometimes it is the matter of a few hours, or a few weeks invested in thinking, that multiplies the odds of success of your prospecting efforts.
Before you try to outsmart your competition, resolve to be less stupid than your rivals.
Not kidding here, small investments of time upfront can drastically reduce the odds of failure. It’s the 80/20 rule in reverse, just a few missteps are disproportionately responsible for led gen failures or underperformance.
Most of them are rooted in doing before thinking.
Calling overly broad lists, lousy messaging, doomed to fail touch process and baking inefficiency into work methods are great ways to greatly increase the odds of prospecting failure. These are common root causes of lead gen failures and underperformance. Putting more focus on thinking before doing would nip it in the bud.
Any results achieved prioritizing doing over thinking will often be due to randomness, not the result of a sustainable, well organized strategic plan.
2 causes
Impulsiveness: Sometimes people can’t resist. There is an urgency to get more leads now and doing lots of stuff immediately takes precedence over doing the right things in the right way. Those that are impulsive don’t typically understand how drastically they are stacking the odds of success against themselves.
Not knowing: Sometimes people just don’t know what they don’t know about sales/marketing/lead gen. Here are some examples of not knowing what you don’t know. If someone thinks that you can manage outbound calling using spreadsheets, they are clueless. If someone believes it is OK to pick leads randomly off the internet, they are clueless. Both of these beliefs are prime predictors of failure.
If your past efforts have not led to something sustainable that you can build on, there are things you just don’t know you don’t know, or you are unwilling to admit. Seek assistance to get off this doomsday treadmill.
Sometimes the thinking that should come before the doing is just a matter of hours. For larger projects, a few weeks of thinking and going slow in the early stages to monitor and tweak and perfect, before you try to scale, can drastically increase your odds of success.
Whether it be hours or weeks, that thinking time is often a small fraction of time to be dedicated to a project.
You can work hard, be very smart, be very capable and yet self-sabotage yourself by jumping into doing before enough thinking has been done.
Working hard on the wrong things will not work out. Poor execution of a good plan will not work out.
Greatly increase your odds of success by doing more thinking before you start doing.
