In lead generation, you are either a nomad or a settler. What determines this is the way you treat your sources of business leads. This treatment will determine whether or not you are exercising good sales lead generation practices as well ensuring that the process keeps sales coming in.
How Lead Generation Can Be Like Either Nomads Or Settlers
Nomad – If your lead generation strategy is nomadic, it is characterized by a focus on primary sources. For example, if you provide merchant services, then you would currently preoccupy yourselves with whatever method or ‘territory’ that has been the most abundant in terms of yielding your merchant services leads. You continuously set appointments with new businesses as certain regions or industries experience a sudden surge of interest.
- Settler – In contrast, you might be more of a permanent settler if your lead generation strategy focuses on not just production but being able to survive while your resources ‘renew’ themselves. Your lead generation strategy does not just get new leads or appointments. You find ways to make them into repeat buyers as well as control your marketing strategies to not expend so much energy.
Either one has an even share of both good and bad examples. For nomads, the constant pursuit of new places for leads can lead to a sort of swarming behavior. It makes your lead generation strategy the equivalent of barbarian armies. Your merchant prospects actually fear you because you go around conquering them but then giving them lower priority once the sale has been made.
On the other hand, your lead generation process could also be a means for a tightfisted authoritarian dominion. You have claimed a certain area as your own. You will not leave but cannot bear the idea of customers considering the competition. You manipulate the market environment into but an artificial caricature of itself just to suit your own survival.
Neither worst-case example is something you would expect of merchant services lead generation. You neither want prospects to fear your arrival nor do you want to make them feel like slaves to your business. So what do you do to avoid them both?
- Avoid permanent damage – Both nomads and settlers have their own means of inflicting permanent damage via uncontrolled lead generation. Such is counter-intuitive if you want your lead generation strategy to live on. It lives on because you also allow the marketing environment to live on. You do not remain aggressive in your marketing and consider the long-term effects of meeting with prospects (whether there is a closed deal or not).
- Sustains both itself and others – It is one thing to go from one source to another only after milking it dry beyond recovering. Whether you are a nomad or a settler, your lead generation strategy should really seek to not just sustain your business but make sure it leaves enough for the marketing environment to replenish itself. That means toning down on the marketing and stop wasting people’s time when it’s not working.
So as you can see, this was not about whether your lead generation strategy should be a nomad or a settler. It is simply to ask you what kind it is so that you will know how to keep it at its best, not devolve into something worse. Avoid inflicting any damage that is too permanent and make sure your sales appointment setting campaigns do not make it hard for sources to recover.
