Not every sale is automatic or instantaneous. There are times, especially in specific industries, where you are more likely to make three or four calls before you make that final sale. For those types of sales, lead generation is as important, if not more important than the actual sale. It might be safe to say that lead generation is more significant than the deal, especially in a one-time sale that does not usually include follow-up or repeat sales.

A woman goes to the beauty shop or the local drug store and buys a hair coloring because she is going gray or bored with the color nature has given her. Now, either that woman will love the color and want to keep it, or she will loathe it and want to get rid of it. Either way, it is a guaranteed second sale, at the very least.

But, that same woman is not going to buy a house every six weeks or so unless she is a real estate flipper. So the point is exact: with some, instant and smaller market purchases, SALES are the key. In other, larger budget items where the sale may take a few weeks, if not longer to complete, lead generation is the key.

In the world of business, there are two types of lead generation to be concerned with: those that will end in new clients or customers and increased sales, and those that will get you the best employees, those that are going to get you more of the first kind of leads and make the most actual sales. Finding your best sources of both is like a hunt- like a wolf going out for prey in the early morning. By instinct, you will know where you are most likely to find the best candidates of either kind and by instinct, you will learn how to approach them.

Where to Find New Clients

In the old days of doing business, the small base of clients in your area was your total addressable market. Once you sold everything that you could to them, you changed professions or pulled up stakes and moved along to a new town. As the world became more and more mobile, it was possible to sell to an ever-widening group of customers- in Hungary, in Poland, and Russia. You could sell things to customers in Australia, and they may very well be the first one to have that particular item. There is no limit to what you can sell to someone thousands of miles away from you, with only a few exceptions. But just because you know that they are out there, does not mean that you know where they are. By that reasoning, you could point at a forest and say, “the wolves are there.” But where are they exactly? They move around a lot. They change their direction for several reasons. Just because you think they would be in one place does not mean that they will be there when you need them.

Customers can be the same way. You do the research and think that you know where you are going to find these people, the very people that are most likely to be interested in your product or service. But for any list of reasons, they have changed their mind. They are boycotting a particular thing that might affect them, seeing your marketing campaign, or keep them from buying your item. Maybe you are going to be part of the collateral damage thanks to a smear campaign based on another company’s product or service. Perhaps everyone is finally mad at Mark Elliot Zuckerberg once and for all and has decided not to bother with Facebook, and that is where you based your hunting. There are millions of clients to be had, that much is true. But there are just as many forces out there that want to keep them hidden.

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