If I asked you to imagine a salesman or woman engaged in lead generation, the very beginning of the sales process, you might picture something like this: a poor salesperson, tucked away in a dimly-lit, cramped cubical in the corner of an office floor, slaving away over a printed spreadsheet of numbers, cold-calling until her or her face fell off. Cold-calling certainly has its place– I’ve done it with varied success. However, the best sales I’ve ever gotten didn’t come from a call sheet or a list of referrals handed down to me, but from rather “unconventional” methods. Telemarketing has been around so long, many companies have systems upon systems in place to make it challenging for your call to ever be put through to any individual or group anywhere in the decision making process. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “we’ll let him know you called and he’ll call if its a good fit.” In my experience, that phrase is the harbinger of the end– where all good leads go to die. As frustrating as it is, I know I’ve done the very same thing. Working in Grove City College’s admissions office we get calls like this all the time. Last week I got a call from a woman that makes large illustrated campus maps for brocures. “Thanks for calling in, I’ll pass this up the food chain and my boss will get back to you if there is an interest,” I said. I wrote the details on a sticky note and put on my bosses desk and we never heard about it again. Getting in front of the right person is only getting harder. In order to beat this you need to be unafraid to get creative.
There are many ways to get in front of the right person. To generate leads and put them in the top level of your funnel, you need to find a different way to navigate an organization. One of the jobs I work is a consulting job for a young adult publisher. My job is to schedule book signings and speaker
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