Why the problem of “we’ve got no leads” isn’t as simple to solve as you may think

There’s no one single marketing playbook that you can apply to your business to bring in all the revenue and leads. Because if there was I wouldn't need to be writing this blog post. I'd be in my penthouse pool looking out over a luxury skyline wondering what my chef will be cooking up for lunch.

The reason I'm not is because even though issues with marketing may show up in the same way, every single business is different, each with different markets, challenges, opportunities, audiences, routes to market, and their people.

What does actually remain the same across the board is that you need to build and apply your marketing strategy fundamentals, such as your ideal customer, your messaging, your positioning and your overall plan.

But the exact who, why and what of it all will be unique to each business.

The same marketing symptoms but a very different diagnosis and cure

Let’s start by saying that if you’re a B2B SaaS business, then how you apply your strategy and plan is going to be wildly different from a Gen Z fashion brand. (I know you know this already, but it’s where I have to start to show the why of this all).

So then that brand will also be completely different from a company who sells mobility equipment, which will be different from an HR tech business. And those are all completely different to my marketing consulting business, which in turn will be different from other marketing consulting businesses.

And so on and so on until everything starts spinning and implodes upon itself.

I’ve worked with a number of B2B businesses over the past few years, both as a fractional and a FTE, and at a cursory glance they look fairly similar in size and scope. However, they’ve all had their own very unique challenges.

I’ve seen founders spread too thin, businesses without a proper identity, great products that needed repositioning, marketing activity that hasn’t grown with the business, conversion gaps, decision making paralysis, an ICP that was slightly off, and broken commercial processes.

All of them just “needed more leads” all required something completely different structurally to be fixed in order to create the roadmap to get back on track and start following a proper plan and system.

How the most visible symptoms show up in the work I do

As we’ve already established, every business is different, which is why similar issues don't show up in the same way, or can be solved with the same fix.

Let's take two examples of two clients I've had this year - both of which came to me with the same issue of needing to grow beyond a founder-led marketing approach. 

Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

But when I started digging further into the issues, they showed up very differently, and required completely different approaches to solve them.

Client A 

• This client came to me as they wanted to do more beyond founder-led marketing but didn’t know what that looked like or what works.

• It was clear that the founder had so much personality that they needed to be front and centre of everything, so we built out a strategic plan of what that looked like and away from a corporate identity which they had completely outgrown (and not why customers kept coming back).

• A year later there’s a proper content engine in place designed to build visibility and trust through a robust video strategy which generates 60% of inbound leads.

Client B 

• They got in touch wanting help to figure out how to get marketing actually working in the business and move it beyond founder-led.

• We started mapping out all of the foundations of how everything works and soon discovered there was a bit of a revenue hole within the product hierarchy.

• This led to a product and package overhaul, and discussions around restructuring the brand to start to capture the missing demand.

Same initial conversations, two wildly different outcomes that neither had any idea would be the solution. We've got no leads was the follow up issue in both.

This is exactly the same with “we’ve got no leads”

Here’s a whole host of things that have been the core issues of the no leads problem in my career:

• The product market fit hasn’t been established properly

• The competitor is being copied like for like

• There’s a mismatch between the audience and messaging (very common)

• There’s a revenue black hole in the pricing

• The product that has been purchased doesn’t fit into the business model

• There’s actually never been any marketing activity

• Or there’s just been random acts of marketing

• PR and marketing have been confused for each other

• The pitch delivered in person which converts is in none of the messaging you promote

• The website and assets are a jumbled word salad of buzzwords and needs stripping back

• No one know who the customer really is

Related reading: How to fix issues between strategy with no execution and execution with no strategy

Could be one, could be some, or there could be a whole host of these issues hiding. Some are also easier to fix than others.

And to solve them we have to go right back to the beginning, to discuss the business, the goals, the vision and the aspiration. Then we’ll start matching everything together, building a proper marketing strategy to bolster the business, and then build out the activity from there.

Lastly, rely on the experts, not on AI

You can ask AI to solve your problem (no one is stopping you) but it's going to give you the answer to the question you've asked and not look at anything around it. It's not going to dig deeper into the foundations and help solve the structural issues that show up elsewhere. 

When I’m asked to solve the problem, I ask a lot of questions that start with how or why, and challenge assumptions, so that we can actually get to the bottom of what’s going on.

I asked AI (so you don’t have to) about how to solve not having any leads and it went on about building a proper marketing system. I start further back than that, in the business foundations looking at all of the evidence. If I said just build a system I’d get blank stares back asking what on earth I meant.

A human helping you out with your marketing already knows that not having leads is not the problem they need to fix. 

Whether that be me or another marketing consultant. I don't mind, just as long as you're getting a human to pinpoint and fix your core issues.

Want to have a chat about how we can start to figure out what's causing your lead volume to dry up? Get in touch - let's have a chat over a coffee.