Which one of these two high-school kids is going to pick up the most?
- The one who attends discos to maximize opportunities to meet with the girls?
- Or the one waiting for a friend to tell a girl about him to get them out together?
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A customer yesterday wrote me:
in order to get to important customers, the best way is still the word of mouth
That’s a bit like hoping to get engaged to the most beautiful girl in school by word of mouth…. I wish it had ever happened to me once before that one…
A couple of considerations from this interesting cue (for which I thank the customer).
The first is self-criticism:
obviously, we have not yet managed to convey the value of a service such as Lead Generation Farm™, which allows us to acquire important customers through a systematic lead generation methodology.
We will therefore improve our “value proposition”.
.The second, more general, consideration is on word of mouth to make lead generation.
I have nothing against this tool, which works very well when it occurs and produces qualified leads.
But in strategies to acquire new customers (large or small), especially in B2B markets, word of mouth can only be “additional”.
For two reasons:
- word-of-mouth is not predictable
You never know if and when a client will refer you to a friend/colleague.
You can’t say:
“By doing so, I will generate a word of mouth within T days”.
The lead from word of mouth could arrive tomorrow… or in N months… or never.
And if you can’t predict if and when a word-of-mouth lead will arrive, you can’t rely on it to pay wages and bills.
When the lead arrives, welcome, but you can’t build a development strategy around it.
- Word-of-mouth is not scalable
There is no method of multiplying word of mouth to make it systematic.
You can’t say:
“if I do X I get Y, so now I do 2X, so I get 2Y”.
And when you can’t implement this kind of programming, you don’t have control.
IN CONCLUSION:
Let’s keep the right word of mouth to put some icing on the cake. But let’s systematize lead generation strategies to get customers proactively.
That is, tonight all invited to our Lead Generation Farm™… excuse me:
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