Demand Generation Done Wrong

How to waste your time, money, and energy when trying to create interest for your consulting services:

• Don't nurture or sell to leads who are not sales-ready. Waiting for the right time or circumstance to approach prospects means you're missing up to 98% of opportunities. "Do good work and the phone will ring" is not a strategy, despite some consulting firms firmly believing in it.
• Focus only on new sales, and ignore growing relationships with existing clients. Apart from being more difficult and expensive, you will always need "fresh blood" in your sales pipeline - good luck trying to keep it full. Better to turn your clients into loyal advocates.
• Look at marketing and sales as two completely different things. This is the perfect recipe to invest in a hundred different marketing initiatives that leads to zero projects. Although it is a mistake to completely bundle marketing and sales together, they are part of the same growth-driving system.
• Adopt a "me-centric" approach. That's the best way to sabotage your practice. Offering the same diagnostic or presentation for every prospect is easier for you, but less valuable for them. To stand out and earn trust during your conversations you will need to learn how to sell yourself without a solution.
• No scarcity or exclusivity. We can still find consultancies who will work with everyone, doing everything, whenever they want - as long as they have the budget. Imagine how exciting it is for prospects to hire such a service.

Being busy is not a synonym for making progress. Working on the right things and avoiding what doesn't work will take you further than simply adding more hours to your workload.