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.
If you reach a plateau in your business or are not getting the results that you want, doing a review of where you are being delusional about your business, and/or where you might be lying to yourself, either consciously or subconsciously, can help you break through and achieve the success you are working toward.
There is no wrong answer when it comes to which market position you choose. You can choose to be a low cost leader, and you can choose to be an exclusive, high-end, luxury brand. Neither are wrong, as long as you do it on purpose.
One of the reasons people have problems knowing what to say is that they don’t “do” the work before “going” to work; they just go out into the world and do random acts of marketing. If you put thought into what you are going to talk about in advance, you will encounter fewer blocks and feel more confident in what you want to say to promote your business.
Many business owners end up in a cycle that looks like this: you market to get a new client. When you get the client, you stop marketing. When you are done helping that client, you market for the next client. These starts and stops in your marketing and client acquisition create gaps in your 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.
