What is a "lead"?

I see, in our forum and others, many discussions exchanging ideas and suggestions for lead-generation for network marketing businesses.

My friend Robin van der Merwe makes the good point that where she sees most people dropping the ball is in their Marketing Plan (or lack of it!). They fly by the seat of their pants each day, starting the day with some question like “Well, what shall I do today?”. If you’re starting the day with this question, Robin rightly observes, you’ve already lost the race.

The other area where I see a lot of people dropping the ball is that they're putting time and/or effort and/or money into finding people who are not really leads for their businesses: they're just people whose email addresses and/or phone numbers they were able to get. I think this is yet another illustration of what a huge mistake it can be to go fishing in the wrong pond (as Robin also puts it).

Lead generation is a significant part of all of our businesses, whether we do it ourselves or delegate that function of our business to an outside source.

Just as it’s a mistake, when sponsoring distributors, to aim at the ones most easily sponsored (“jumpers”, people looking for “work-at-home”, people who have been in 5 other companies, regular internet forum-posters and so on, all of whose collective turnover as distributors is dramatically high), it can also be a big mistake, when trying to generate leads, to target those most easily generated, because in reality they may not be “leads” at all.

I think all such discussions really need to start from the perspective of a clear understanding of what a lead is. We will all (perhaps rightly and understandably) have our own definition of this concept, some of us more clearly defined than others. Some people think that the email address/phone number of someone who has requested free information about “xyz-problem” is a lead for the purposes of building a network marketing business. Those people really have their work cut out for them, in my opinion, and will have “fun” trying to duplicate it, too, because these are not business-building leads at all: they’re simply the email addresses and phone numbers of people who wanted free information about “xyz-problem”.

When you’re building a home-based business, a lead is someone who is already looking for a home-based business opportunity. There are such huge numbers of these people around at the moment that it makes little sense to accumulate a “list” of email addresses of other groups, hoping that bombarding them with enough autoresponder messages will eventually “convert” a small proportion of them into becoming interested in your business opportunity. It will, surely, but will they still be with you and building your business for you 2 years later, if they weren’t actually looking for a home-based business opportunity in the first place?