While most businesses understand the need for systems in areas like accounting or client fulfillment, having a client acquisition system is something that is often overlooked, even by my high-level seven-figure clients. However, client acquisition systems are essential for sustainable business growth.
Intentional lead generation is the piece that I see that is missing for so many businesses. A systemized approach to lead generation can solve most or all of the problems I mentioned above: not finding the right people, getting stuck in reaction mode, running out of time, and experiencing sales peaks and valleys.
Networking can be one of the key components of how you move people over the bridge from your marketing efforts into sales conversations. Having a strong network of people who will send you referrals, and people who will support you, is one of the things that turns that bridge into a shortcut.
Marketing consists of all of the things that you do to create awareness of your business. Sales is the mutually agreed upon conversation that you engage in when you discuss exchanging services for money.
That makes intentional lead generation the activities that move people from engaging with your marketing to having sales conversations about working with you. Without intentional lead generation, there is a gap in the client journey, and that gap unfortunately often results in a gap in a business’s cash flow.
For most of us, when we started our businesses, we were wearing all of the hats and doing all of the things. But as you grow and scale your business, the business owner is not supposed to know or do all of the processes. It’s not your job. The role of the business owner, and most entrepreneurs, is to create the strategy, the vision, and set the stage for the team. In order to grow, the business owner needs to lead the way.
In my corporate job we used to say, “the problem is never the problem” which means that the problem you feel is not the problem you actually have. If the only thing that you are measuring in your business is revenue, you’re going to have a hard time breaking through, because most of the time the problem you feel is not the problem you have.
Anything that happens in your business that is predictable and repeatable is a process. Whether you realize it or not, your business likely has processes in place already, even if you do not realize what they are. Whether it’s paying bills, posting your online content, preparing and sending a newsletter, invoicing clients, or doing the actual work that you do with clients, or any of the million other things you do in your business, you have a process for how that happens.
Waiting means not doing something and coming up with extremely logical reasons for doing so. It is sneaky because we have ourselves convinced we’re doing the right thing by not taking the new action, compared to procrastination which we know is going to cause us problems Waiting is harmful to us and our businesses because when we wait to solve problems, we are just prolonging our suffering.
I believe that you need two guiding lights, or sources of inspiration, in your business. First, you need a really clear goal of what you want to achieve. Second, you need to have a strategy that gets you to that goal. When you have a clear goal plus a strategy to achieve that goal, it services as a litmus test for all of the decisions that you have to make in your business.
Who do you need to be, or what do you need to believe, in order to make yourself successful at these efforts and not succumb to the feelings that lie to you? How do you avoid the imposter syndrome and the scarcity mindset? Where are you tied to your process instead of wanting to provide solutions? And finally, where are you holding onto something so tightly that you are not seeing the opportunities in front of you, so that you are being held back instead of propelled forward?
