I have enjoyed the best part of 32 years in the sales and marketing industry and I’ve successfully sold all the things that it’s supposed to be difficult sell. Life Insurance, Encyclopedias, Home Improvements, Therapy beds, Advertising…

And yes there were tough times… like many people are finding it tough now… but tough times never last and they make us stronger unless we give up. I have been around long enough to have seen this a couple of times before. Each time I got better and this time has Been no different.

Do you know what I found out a long time ago? However tough it is, if you have enough qualified sales leads, enough people who have put their hand up to say that they are in at least interested in your offering… you will always make a good living in sales. You have just got to tell your story to enough people and even if the numbers are bigger than you would like, if you stick with it, eventually one will say yes.

And however big your presentation to sales ratio when you start if you keep on going it will come down. When I first joined the great Encyclopedia Britannica in 1989 they put me through the standard week long training with a bunch of other rookies and said if we did four presentations one of them would buy. Well I reckon I did about seventeen before one did actually buy and they canceled the next day. All my fellow trainees had gone by the time I actually got paid for an order. But I don’t give up easy and four months down the road it really was one in four and that meant if I saw eight people a week I was paying off my debts and scraping a living. And as long as I was able to keep telling my story I was getting better all the time. A year later my conversion rate was seven out of ten and it stayed that way for five more years.

The secret was leads, people to tell your story to, if you’ve got no leads, you have not got much of a business.

As I said, I am not one for giving up. An English prime Minister gave a famous speech one day, a whole auditorium full of graduates were waiting with bated breath…he walked to the podium, stared at them for few pregnant seconds and simply said “Never give up!” He waited a while as the audience became restless and repeated “Never give up!”. Again he waited and finally said it again, “Never Give up!” before taking his seat. It takes real confidence and a great leader to make a speech as simple and yet as powerful as that. The audience got the message and stood to their feet in rapturous applause. I think all of us living in the United Kingdom are glad that Sir Winston Churchill was not one for giving up.

But now and again in life… there comes a time when we know we have to move on. Not giving up, just changing direction. I had spent nearly 14 years, with a national company that saw itself as the best business bridge between buyers and sellers. Providing sales leads to the SME marketplace.

For all those years I had wholeheartedly agreed with their perspective and was perfectly happy telling their story. 
Until one day in late 2008 I went to see a lady who owned a beauty consultancy. She had spent two thousand one hundred pounds with us the previous year and my job was to renew and hopefully increase that spend.

She had not seen the lead flow she had been promised and in fact had experienced quite the opposite. She was struggling to make ends meet. She had been forced to lay some of her staff off and pretty much all the joy had gone out of owning a business.

Of course I was hearing that sort of thing almost every day and I had a job to do. I was trained to get past what we called early objections and before long I was doing my usual fact find asking questions like… what were your expectations? What kind of customers are you looking for in the next 12/18 months? How big is the gap between what you are getting now and what you need? What else are you doing to bridge that gap?

And she wasn’t doing anything else, she didn’t know what else to do.

So she stopped me and said, “Look, just tell me what to do.” She looked like a rabbit gazing into the headlights of an oncoming car. I agreed with her that things were tough, and some people are spending less on advertising but explained that the clever people were aiming for a bigger piece of a smaller pie.

Many are going out of business; this is your opportunity to take their market share and so on… 
I took her £2100 plus a bit more, plus the VAT. I re-jigged her program the best I could and I hoped it would work better for her. But that night I found myself asking some very searching questions. The conflict of interest hit me like a train. Did I really help that woman in her desperate situation? she had asked me to make a decision as if I were the advertising manager in her business, as if we were partners…

but here was the conflict of interest. I had targets to hit, a manager to please, an obligation to the firm that paid my wages and they have to report figures to the city every financial quarter. And above all that… let’s be honest… I had a living to make and a pretty decent lifestyle to maintain.

Well it was one of those tangible moments in life… by the next morning I had decided I didn’t want to work with that conflict of interest any more, it was too great, for me. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe the job that sales people do is the key to our economy, unless someone makes a sale a lot of other people are looking down the barrel. But for me at that time I felt I couldn’t continue.

So after 14 years of good success with that company I went to my boss the same day…the same day and asked if I would be allowed to take early retirement. I think my wife was shocked…I don’t think she understood at the time.
But I had just had what was probably the biggest shock in my entire business career. People trusted me to give them good advice; and they depended on my solution to get them good sales leads. Maybe your thinking I was burned out? I don’t think so. My sales figures in 2009 have been great!

So I retired, I went to Spain, soaked up the Andalusian sunshine for a while, recharged my batteries and then - decided retirement wasn’t for me after all. Not yet anyway. It’s not about the money but we just have to have something useful to do.

I was still thinking of that lady in the beauty shop. And the thousands of other small business owners like her. I began to look for ways to help people like her get control of their own marketing and rescue them from an endless round of directory, newspaper and radio sales people, and all the other weird and wonderful advertising ideas that people come up with? How could she create enough sales leads to start enjoying her business again. Could I help her to start making a profit again without breaking the bank. Believed me I looked long and hard and I found a solution that appealed to me.

I knew it wouldn’t be for everyone. I know that some people just want their lead generation all done for them and are willing to pay whatever it costs. I am sorry to say some of those people don’t know how to capture the leads when the phone rings. In fact you’d be surprised how many don’t even answer the phone. But my beautician wasn’t one of those.

If she would she be willing to learn in her own office, and she could go at her own pace, we could teach her how to generate and capture all the leads she needs using the fastest growing medium in human history, the Internet. 
It works for and kind of business and it doesn’t matter how low the budget is, because it’s like a college course in online marketing and it thoroughly covers ways to generate leads from low or even no cost areas as well as teaching how to get the best return from paid for advertising.

She could go over one step at a time until she masters that step, and then move on to the next step. She could be marketing within days. But you might think, she’s a beautician not a marketer, and I’m a solicitor or an ice cream manufacturer or a car mechanic. And that’s the beauty of it, no one knows your business like you do and with each lesson it will become clearer that you are the one who should be in charge of your marketing. It can’t be that easy I can hear you say. I didn’t say it was easy and I promise you there is a steep learning curve, I am on one myself, but I have never been a computer person, I have learned from scratch at 53 years old and I am producing leads for my business using the same tools that you would be using.

Like I said I was never great with technology, I cant even work the DVD recorder, I get the kids to do it, so if reckon if I can learn most people can. It costs nothing to evaluate the idea Go to www. abundant sales leads.com and do the research yourself but keep an open mind…

Has my lifestyle got better? Well I spend a lot more time at home and with 8 children that’s a big bonus, and my income hasn’t suffered at all, quite the opposite really because not only does this create sales leads for my own primary business but it is a pretty good business in its own right. I am not pushing that side of it at all but a lot of people just decide to run with it. Whatever your goals and aspirations I just hope we can help you achieve the lifestyle you’re looking for.