B2B Demand Generation | Starting a business is hard work

Those two opposite ideas sum up how I feel about my my b2b lead generation business, Find New Customers.

The challenge of running a company that helps businesses implement lead generation programs is the hardest thing I have ever done. Demand generation is very important and most companies suck at it, but how do they find you?

But when very happy clients like OneSource, Marketo, Aprimo and the others mail us checks, enabling me to take my family out to a nice dinner, I’m immensely proud of my b2b lead generation company.

If you’ve never founded and run a start-up, you probably have no idea how much work goes into it. You need a website, a blog and a strong social media presence. You build it. But you don’t just throw something up to have the kind of quality you’ll find in the website designed to fix the problems companies have with sales leads, Find New Customers. It took countless hours of work. And creating 9 or more blog articles a week, plus writing cheat sheets, white papers and being the featured speaking on a webinar sponsored by Act-On Software is serious work.

But you don’t get a score of 99 out of 100 in Hubspot’s websitegrader.com or 100 out of 100 in TwitterGrader.com without a LOT of very hard work.

But you have to do the mundane stuff too. Pay bills. Deposit checks. Buy supplies. Pay taxes. Fill out forms. It’s dull and boring too.

But the other thing that makes it all worthwhile is the incredible support and complements we get all the time. We have unbelievable supporters and fans.  People rave about the great content they find on this blog and at Find New Customers, so it is all worthwhile.

So my labor of love continues. Thank you to the 61,000 plus who have read this blog. (That number just boggles my mind.) Thanks to the countless visitors to Find New Customers.

And especially thank you to customers like Aprimo/Teradata, OneSource, Marketo and the others, as well as partners like Avitage, Silverpop, Eloqua, and others. And lastly to supporters like Jim Burns, Kenny Madden, Arthur Germain, Paul Dunay, Trish Bertuzzi, Joe Pulizzi, Mike Volpe and so very many others. I also have to give a special thank-you to Marketo. Not only did they get us started by backing an unknown, but they are the fastest payers on Earth, which I really appreciate.

Together we’ll make 2011 the best year ever!

What have you done that is really hard but richly rewarding?

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.