This afternoon I spoke to another Search Marketing CEO I’ll leave nameless.
I asked him how was business “Great. Exceeding expectations.” I asked him where leads come from. He said “Virtually all our leads come from referrals.” I then asked what he was doing in demand generation. The answer: Nothing.
Welcome to a young and red-hot market — where the number of prospective customers greatly exceed the number of vendors — at the moment. Unfortunately, it is not going to last. Easy money attracts competitors like ants at a picnic.
When revenue is easy, people don’t have to be great at marketing — they simply have to show up. Unfortunately, not every company is in this comfortable situation.
Even when they are very comfortable in one place — like the UK, they find a completely different environment in another place, like the United States. This is why so many struggle to expand around the globe. They simply cannot deal with these differences.
Yours truly came from the school of hard knocks — where one had to work for leads. In most tech companies, leads happen when you go out and make it happen — they don’t fall in your lap as they do in the search marketing busienss today.
Someday soon the search marketing business will slow dramatically and CEO’s will have to get religion — fast! Most won’t and will get swallowed up by companies like Getupdated.
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Jeff Ogden