When do we need Lead Funnels?

In the previous lessons, we talked about Lead Generation funnels and I showed you an example of how I have built my lead generation funnel. 

We have also discussed that high-end B2B and enterprise products do not need a lead generation funnel and low-end simple B2C products do not need leads at all.

Lead generation is required when you are selling a product that is high-priced, is complex, and the buyer might have a lot of questions before buying your product or service.

 Please note that the requirement for lead generation and the requirement for lead generation funnels are not the same things.

 Lead generation is required when the product price is higher. But when the product price is very high and the target market is very small, a lead generation funnel is not required.

 A lead generation funnel is required when you have a balance between the two. Your products and services are not too cheap and simple, nor too costly and complex.

 A funnel is required when you have B2C products at a higher cost and B2B products at a lower cost.

Examples of products and services where a funnel is required:
High-end B2C Products like house, car, appliances.
Low-end B2B products like software
So how can we visualize this?

I have made this chart which explains it clearly. 

In the chart, you can see that there are two Y-axes.
The marketing effort goes down as the price of the product goes up.

The lead generation effort goes up when the price and complexity of the product increases.

When the price is too low, you don't need leads, so you don't need lead generation funnels.

When the price of the product is very high, every lead that you reach out to will be a very high quality targeted lead, and you do not need a funnel in that case.

For example, Infosys, a large enterprise IT company, would reach out to people who are the right fit for their services. They would already have a fair idea about their target customers. Pinpointing the lead is not a problem at all. They would do cold-emailing, meet, and connect with the right people in conferences and also reach out to them via referrals. The sale is more dependent on the sales effort than the marketing effort.

When do we need lead generation funnels?
We need lead generation funnels when we are somewhere in the middle of the chart that I have shown above.

In the previous lesson, I talked about how I generate leads, nurture them, and filter them to engage with the sales process. My business (the training one and not the agency) is a B2C business. But the products (my training programs) are not low priced. They are starting from 10,000 rupees ($150 approx). 

I cannot just market my products and brand and expect people to buy. That's why I create a funnel.
Let's take a look at one of the B2B products I have - OptinChat.com. It is a lead generation tool for website owners that collects names and email IDs of visitors. The cost of the tool is $49 a month. The price of the product is not too high that I would have a sales team that reaches out to people directly and sells them. The profit from each sale wouldn't be enough to pay the sales team.

So even though OptinChat.com is a B2B tool, I market it in such a way that I would sell a high-end B2C product. There are too many prospects out there for a manual sales outreach to effective.
I generate leads for OptinChat by giving the free version of OptinChat for free and I do webinars to sell the premium version.

In the next email, I will explain how the lead generation funnel for OptinChat (a low-end B2B tool) works. 

The funnel generates the leads, nurtures them to build trust with them, and converts the cold leads into warm leads even before the sales process begins.

Lead Generation for High End B2C Products

Hera today we learned that we do not need lead generation for basic B2C products that are low priced and simple.

For example, if you are selling candy or a pen, it is a simple low priced product and doesn't need lead generation.

The sales cycle is short and the decision-making process is easy. Many of these products and services are bought on impulse.

Even if the end consumer makes a wrong purchase, it is not something to worry about. If I spend 10 rupees on a pen and if it doesn't write properly, I will not lose sleep over it.

My time is more valuable than going back to the shop and asking for a refund. However, when it comes to high-end B2C products, we need to do lead generation.

Let's take two examples of high-end B2C products.

What are the biggest purchases that a consumer will make in his lifetime? It is easy to guess.

The biggest purchase would be a house.

People end up spending their entire life savings to buy a home. The next biggest purchase that they will make will be a car.

Let's first think about buying a home.

The Process of Buying a Home:

If someone is interested in buying a home, he/she will look at an ad and will call the number on that ad. Or they will look at an ad online, click on it, visit the landing page and fill out a form with their contact information.

This contact information becomes a lead for the seller. As we discussed in lesson 1, this is a lead because it leads to a sale.

This contact information is the connecting link between the buyer and the seller. Once the seller gets the contact information he will call the prospective buyer and schedule a site visit.

Without seeing the house in person, the buyer cannot make a buying decision. This is a complex product and once the purchase is done, it is difficult to reverse the transaction.

So the buyer will visit the house (or a model house if it is still under construction) and then will ask a lot of questions to the salesperson.

Does it have a good water supply?
Is this a good neighborhood?
What about the facilities in this apartment building?
What about the security and so on.
These are the questions and objections that the buyer has before he can go ahead with the purchase. The decision-making process can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months. The sales cycle is long in this case.

The seller needs to generate the leads, profile the leads, score the leads, and then close the sale with constant follow up. (All these strategies will be discussed in the future lessons).

Now let's take another example of a high-end purchase.

The purchase of a Car: After a house purchase, the next biggest purchase for an end consumer would be the purchase of a car. It is not a one time purchase but it can happen once in 3-5 years. Since it is a complex product, lead generation is required for this.

This is how the process would flow:

The buyer sees an ad online for a car.
He visits the landing page and downloads a brochure.
He gives his contact details to download the brochure.
Then he watches a welcome video.
Below the welcome video, there is a link to request for a test ride.

The form asks a lot of questions such as:

What car do you currently own?
When are you planning to purchase the new car?
Will you be buying it as an individual or as a company?
When do you want to request for a test ride?
Do you need financing for the car or will you pay the full amount upfront?
The questions that are being asked in the form is very important to score and profile the leads. The salesperson may not have time to call every lead and give the test ride of the car to them.

He has to filter out the highly qualified buyers from the unqualified ones. Many car enthusiasts who don't have the money to buy cars would still request for a test ride.

The information filled in the form will help the salesperson to prioritize the leads. That's why lead profiling and scoring becomes important. In future lessons, I will show you how lead-profiling and scoring works in real life with practical tools.

You can see that in both the cases mentioned above the sale cannot happen without lead generation.

No one will see an ad and swipe their credit card to buy a home or a car. Lead generation and sales are required in this case because the buyer has a lot of questions that need to be cleared before the sale can happen. And that can be cleared only by a salesperson. And for that, the salesperson needs the contact information of the buyer.

That's why lead generation becomes very important. The same method can be applied for any B2C product that is high-end.

If you are selling an interior-design service or an appliance that is high priced, you need lead generation.

In the first few weeks, we will be focusing on the theory and fundamentals of lead generation which is very important. Without understanding the principles and fundamentals, the strategy and tactics will not make any sense.

If you are looking for tactics and strategies that you can apply immediately, please have patience, they are coming to you in the future lessons. If you understand the principles properly, you will be able to come up with your own strategies and tactics.

That's it for today's lesson on lead generation for high-end B2C products and services. In tomorrow's lesson, we will talk about lead generation for low-end B2B products and services.

Why Your Business Needs a Business Growth Adviser

I think this was a very new word for me before 2 months, but when I met a person who introduce himself as "Business Growth Adviser",  then I was really very surprised that what is this profile, but the name is very impressive and impact-full, so I invested my 90 to 100 minutes with a long and deep discussion with him for various aspects and prospects of Business and its growth.

After a long discussion, I found that business is not only sales, but it is combination of Sale, Projects, Delivery, Human Resource handling, task assignment and completion with timelines.

Apart from this, this person keep a business owner active throughout the day, week and month, for every project, every client and even for every employee.

Now I have collected some points on which a Business Growth Adviser keep their very keen views and observation.


1. Keep you active and focused.
As a business owners so many times we think that everything is going well and never think that in the fast moving world it is really not a very time taking process to get pulled off track. Here A growth advisor keeps you active in your field, share you market trends/research and keen you focused on the more critical aspects that directly influence your business growth.

2. Provide external support and business structure.
When I was running my business in year 2016 than I was thinking that doing a business very easy and we can earn a lot of money, while within a year I realized that growing a business can be a lonely endeavor if you not have external support of market experts. Hence, a growth adviser or we can say mentor, worth their weight in salt, helps you employ growth metrics to measure your headway. The numbers never lie. They tell you whether you're growing or not growing. No guessing needed.

3. Offer you their expertise.
A business growth adviser spent a lot of time in the market trends, ups and downs, requirement, reason of boom and reason of slowdown or out of market, So a skilled growth advisers offer business expertise and knowledge about growth strategies and business development. This falls under the "two heads are better than one" scenario. Your ability to leverage additional business acumen lets you skillfully maneuver the curves and bends along the business growth road.

4. Propose insight.
Many times you're too close to your own situation to clearly see what's working or what's not. An extra pair of ears and eyes helps heightens awareness and keeps you hip to where to put your energy, focus, and effort.

5. Deliver guidance.
A good growth mentor or advisor provides guidance on growth strategies, key activities, and potential roadblocks. They make available analytical intelligence to make sure you're equipped to make smart, strategic decisions.

Finally, A business growth advisor is your well wisher who keep you updated abut the market trends, demand, you can call them mentor who can advice you time to time what to do and what not to do and support you in the digital marketing to bring best clients from all over the world.

Is Entrepreneurs fail or a great ideas fail ?.

It doesn’t matter how unique or exceptional or smart your idea is, but it isn’t enough because an idea doesn’t guarantee results, but how well you execute it does.

Because whether you succeed or fail depends more on how you are giving life to the idea and the idea itself.

A great idea can bite the dust when poorly executed, while a not-so-good idea can succeed when implemented correctly.

Because execution is everything and success usually comes after numerous starts, adjustments, pivots, collective efforts, and commitment to cross the finish line.

And that’s where many entrepreneurs fail even when they start with a fantastic, groundbreaking idea.

It’s hard to accept because we all believe we are good at executing our ideas.

Unfortunately, we aren’t.

It might sound bitter, but you need to accept if you are serious about succeeding an entrepreneur.

I’ve seen so many of entrepreneurs, both successful and otherwise, and I’ve seen it always comes down to executing the idea.

But execution is a broad term, and it means a lot. It will make sense if we can drill a bit deep down, right?

We are going to discuss the five areas where entrepreneurs go wrong with execution and eventually fail.

Let’s start.

#1: They don’t know what it takes to succeed

Don’t get me wrong. Most entrepreneurs know they need to put a lot of effort to succeed, but they don’t know what it really takes to succeed. For example, to succeed as a business, you need to come up with the right idea, validate the idea, build an MVP, get your first customers, launch the product, get your 1,000 customers, and scale your business.

But how much effort is required for that is what you don’t know. For example, It might take a week to validate specific ideas and might take a month or two to validate some other ideas. You can validate some ideas with an online survey, and might need to meet a lot of people and ask the right questions, comb through the answers, and read between the lines to validate some ideas.

But, first, you need to define what success is and how you will measure it, and that’s where many entrepreneurs lose. They don’t know what to measure, how to measure, and how much effort is required to get there.

#2: They don’t know how to balance things

People who fail usually stay on the extreme ends. They either work hard or slack. They do too many things or nothing at all, and they feel motivated one day and lose hope the other day.

It doesn’t work.

Entrepreneurship is like running a marathon. It’s a long one, and you cannot start fast, lose steam in the middle, and fail to reach the finish line. You need to run fast enough and also preserve the energy to reach the finish line. You have to celebrate each milestone, no matter how small it is, and yet remain glued to the ultimate goal.

You have to get up after a fall, quickly assess what caused it, and move forward. That’s where people lose it. They either get excited when they win small or depressed when they fail.

#3: They follow what’s popular, instead of what they’re good at

This is a no-brainer.

After Facebook, hundreds of people wanted to build a social media platform even if they didn’t have the experience or expertise to build one. After Flipkart, so many people started an e-commerce business even if they didn’t have a clue as to what e-commerce is. And the list goes on. Even you might have seen a few of them.

Do you know what happened to all of them?

They all failed.

It’s like you decide to start a restaurant in your locality because the neighborhood restaurant is doing great. You can’t because before starting a restaurant, you should know a thing or two about running a restaurant and making it profitable. Otherwise, you’ll bite the dust. As an entrepreneur, contrary to the famous advice, you shouldn’t ask, “What do people want?”

Rather you should be asking, “What is it I know better than others that my market is missing and people would be interested in paying for it?” Because that will take you close to success than following a trend that you have absolutely no idea about. But many entrepreneurs miss that one while starting, and it leads them to failure.

#4: They don’t know what they don’t know

As much as you know what you are good at, you also need to know what you don’t know. It’s critical to your success, and failure to recognize your dark spots will lead you to crash for sure. For example, you could be a great developer, but if you aren’t exactly good at UX, you’ll end up building a product with poor UX. It could cost you everything. You could be great at selling, but if you terrible at time management and prioritizing deals, you’ll fail.

You should know what you don’t know so that you can find someone suitable to do those jobs for you while you focus on your strengths. It’s not just critical; it’s the thin line between your success and failure.

And there is another side to this.

People get too comfortable with things they know. They get to the stage where they believe they got it all figured out because they have plenty of experience.

Don’t do it.

Because the moment you start believing you have got it all figured out, you’ll stop listening and learning, and start making decisions based on assumptions. You’ll stagnate, and it’ll lead you to downfall. Be grounded and humble, and keep your mind always open to learning. It’ll help you grow.

#5: They don’t stay in their lane

Being an entrepreneur and founder gives you a lot of freedom—freedom to stay on course or go off-course. And that’s where things go wrong. People start doing things even if those are beyond their expertise simply because they can.

For example, if you have no idea about designing things, you should avoid suggesting color choices to your designer. If you don’t know much about advertising or marketing, you should avoid picking your marketing channels or suggesting them. But people cannot resist getting their hands dirty and have an opinion.

Because they are the founders, they feel entitled and start putting their suggestions and recommendations on things they don’t know much about. Where do people go off-course? The moment they try to do what isn’t their primary skill set, merely because they can. And that takes them to a downward spiral.

Those are the top five areas where entrepreneurs go wrong when it comes to executing their ideas and fail even when they have a fantastic idea. Remember, entrepreneurship comes with lots of responsibilities, and one of the most significant responsibilities that comes with it is how you are executing your idea, choosing what to do and how to do an.d in this your online presence is matter a more, so for this you can hire a good Digital Marketing Company to handle these stuffs.

You can choose not to make these mistakes.

You can choose to succeed or fail.  Choose wisely.