Summary: Happy New Year! Welcome to the first podcast of 2018. I hope you enjoyed the holiday season and are ready to get your year rolling and off to a great start. The holidays are over and it's time to start selling!<br> <br> <br> <br> It's trade show season! This podcast is being posted on January 2nd and I am scheduled to present four training sessions today at the ASI Show in Orlando. I'm talking about Maximizing Revenue from Your Customer Base, Making Prospecting Simple with your own Lead Generation Machine, Simplifying for Success and Total Market Domination: How to Become a Recognized Force in Your Marketplace. If you're in Orlando today, I hope you'll attend ALL of those sessions, if not, here are a couple of takeaway points from my session on the Lead Generation Machine.<br> <br> Consider this: Every machine has inputs and outputs. With a vending machine, you put in money and you get a snack or drink or candy in return. With an ATM or automated teller, you put in your card and password and you get money out. And with a lead generation machine, you put unqualified people in and you get qualified prospects, who become customers, out.<br> <br> If you don't have a fully functional lead generation machine operating in your business right now, today, I can assure you with great confidence that you are losing, if not outright hemorrhaging money!<br> <br> Think of your lead generation machine as the black box on an airplane. There is a process taking place inside the box that is shielded. Something is happening in there. Do you know what that something is?<br> <br> Crazy as it sounds, many people in our industry do not know what's going on inside their own lead generation machine!<br> If you don't have a tested, proven system for converting unqualified people into qualified leads -- and qualified leads into paying clients -- you will never earn all you're capable of earning.<br> When you DO have such a system in place -- when you have a lead generation machine that works consistently to convert unqualified leads into qualified leads into paying clients -- what do you spend your time doing?<br> <br> Feeding the machine, right? That's all you do, you just keep feeding the machine.<br> <br> If you had a process that worked, you wouldn't waste your time with non-essentials. You'd spend every waking moment feeding the machine. And that's exactly what you should be doing. Unless you don't have such a machine in place. Which is exactly the situation in which many distributors find themselves.<br> <br> People talk about networking and cold calling and referrals and prospecting and content and social media as if any of these things are actually a means of converting strangers into clients. And they just aren't. At best, they are components of a lead generation machine.<br> <br> You can use networking and cold calling and referrals and prospecting and content and social media to feed the machine, but it's what happens inside the machine, after you've brought the prospects in, that really counts.<br> <br> The goal is not to do a social media post, the goal is to post something that gets someone to raise their hand and express interest. The goal is not to do a podcast. The goal is to have a podcast listener contact you to request more information. The goal is not to crank out reams of content consistently like a broken copier machine. The goal is to put out the right content, to the right prospect with the right message, strategically, to create a specific result.<br> <br> So many people focus on a spaghetti-on-the-wall approach -- throwing it all up there to see what will stick -- and then expressing frustration when nothing sticks.<br> <br> Consistent content is worthless if it's garbage.<br> <br> If you want a lead generation machine in your business that works, you need to create a strategic process for moving human beings through that process.
