“If I just had more leads, then everything would be…”

Every struggling business is running around saying, “If I just had more leads.” And the easiest thing for an underperforming sales rep to say is, “If I just had more leads…” And most aren’t wrong; they need more leads for sales to work on because they haven’t figured out a scalable, proactive marketing system that consistently delivers them.

We bring that system to them, and soon their message is being heard by hundreds of thousands of people a week. And even though we say the flywheel takes nine months to a year to come up to speed, there are always undecided consumers in the market for what you do every day who, upon hearing that message, reach out.

Ahhh, leads, leads, leads start flowing in. People who have already chosen to do business with you; all you have to say is, “Yes, we can help you.” The sales process gets easier as there is less convincing and more converting. If the offer is really attractive, the leads flow in even faster. And even though every business owner says they are ready, the first break can happen. Sales can get overloaded; conversion goes down, not up. And the business starts to break the brand promise.

Good business owners are sensitive to that brand promise and reluctantly reach out to us and ask us to throttle back the message so they can improve the sales department. Once this choke point has been repaired and the messaging throttled up, the second break point can appear.

Your operations and delivery team will always tell you they are ready. That’s their job: to be ready to handle and deliver on the growth. They had the excess capacity; that said, they needed more orders, more business, to become more efficient. Until the orders actually showed up, and you found out they couldn’t keep up.

That’s the second way the business breaks. The brand promise gets broken because you can’t deliver at the level that keeps customers happy and overjoyed. The customers start leaving one-star reviews, and they’re justified. So once again we are reluctantly asked to throttle back the messaging to give ops time to hire more and fix the rough spots.

Once these rough spots have been polished to a shine, we throttle back up again, and the cycle begins anew.

An expression that helped me get through these choke points when I ran my own business is, “Remember, these are the problems you wished you had. You wished you had more leads. You wished you had more sales. You wished you had more customers.” But when the problems show up, it’s always a challenge. Therefore, the only thing you can do as an entrepreneur is say, “Challenge accepted. I’m ready; bring it on. I wish I had more leads.”

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