Arguably, three states in our country are famous for gold: Alaska, California, and New York. California had a gold rush in 1849. Although it was not a state yet, Alaska had a gold rush in 1896. New York is famous in more modern times because of Wall Street and the financial trading in Gold and Gold Futures. COMEX, the Commodity Exchange, is in Manhattan, New York City.

Oh, one other city is famous for gold: Fort Knox. Located in northern Kentucky, this is where the US Treasury's gold reserves are kept. Fort Knox holds approximately 147.3 million troy ounces of gold, about 4,583 metric tons. This represents a little over half of the total gold reserves held by the United States government.

What may surprise you is that Nevada, home to Carlin Trend, one of the world’s richest gold belts, produces nearly 80% of U.S. gold.

So, as you know, gold is valuable. There are only two ways to get it: Mine it (work on your own to find and process it) or buy it (physically possessing it, or betting on it in the form of futures).

Mining Gold

Back in the gold rush, there was a lot of money to be made. It may surprise you that the gold was not in the streams or mines but in the general stores. More money was made selling would-be self-service miners' shovels and pans than from finding gold in streams.

Don't get me wrong—some self-serve miners did strike it rich, but if you add up all the items being sold to miners who came from all over the country to try, the total far exceeded the riches found.

Also, gold miners often sold their mining locations—known as mining claims—to companies. This practice became especially common as gold rushes matured and mining required more capital and advanced technology than individual miners could typically provide. While a single miner could sift through a river bed, a company could build and move in machines to do it en masse.

Finally, multinational corporations will buy the rights or own the land to mine gold below ground. This was (and is) very expensive, and requires teams, management, and tons of capital.

Mining for leads in business is a lot like those three levels: individual, business, and corporate. And make no mistake: just like panning for specs of gold in sediment, finding high-quality leads will require sifting through a lot of “dirt”!

Mining for Leads: Individual

Small businesses often confuse advertising with finding leads. Just because someone comes to your website, that does not make them a lead. I use WP-Forms, which I feel is the best webform plug-in available for WordPress.

I have a small website with little but targeted traffic. I get around five leads a week. Almost all of them sound legit, but WP-Forms can tell me where the contact was generated. Most of them come from India, Pakistan, or Indonesia.

Small businesses buy tools like Monday, Pipedrive, Nimble, and Salesforce. Although they are all good CRMs, I would not connect my lead gen form to my CRM. That would produce more false positives than real contacts, and you would spend more time cleaning up the junk than working with real leads.

Many of these smaller, more affordable systems constantly add features and capabilities. Some start as CRMs and then become social posting and emailing platforms. Many charge for those add-ons, but I can tell you they fall short when it comes to a one-stop shop lead-generating machine.

I use Active Campaign for email marketing, Planable for social media marketing, Nimble for CRM, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for finding quality leads. It all adds up, but each is exquisite at doing what I need and expect them to do.

Nimble has a lead capture form, but it cannot tell you where the lead is from. Many of these CRMs are great, but I would never consider them an all-in-one solution.

Mining for Leads: Business

Bigger and mid-sized businesses will try to find that elusive and perfect all-in-one solution. They look to tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, and more.

The cost of any of these systems can exceed what some small businesses make in a year, yet the same problem arises. They are really good at some things but lack in other areas. They can try to be an e-commerce, CRM, accounting, social media, and email system, but ultimately fail at being excellent at all of them.

Salesforce started out as a CRM for business but added more features. HubSpot started out as a marketing platform but added other features. Microsoft Dynamics is Office 365 on steroids, with many add-on modules that are functional, but lack what even some smaller platforms can do better.

It still makes sense to me to keep the main thing the main thing. If you have a sales team, your CRM can become your most profitable tool. If you need eCommerce, you may also get a great accounting package, but it's not gonna be QuickBooks.

Now, these companies are offering AI assistants that will help you write and distribute content. AI can only write based on past and other people's ideas and work. We are years away from creative writing based on buyer personas and their interests today and tomorrow.

Expecting these systems to help you generate leads will lead to many false positives as well.

Mining for Leads: Corporate

There are some big companies that say they can get you qualified leads. Just like the corporations that mine for gold, they are combining or aggregating data from multiple contractors or suppliers and packaging it up as the gold mine.

They pile on bigger and better AI systems that can integrate your customer list and tell you when a customer has come to your website rather than a lead. They can use Google and other data and analytics to help you qualify leads, and they can tell you who searched for what (meaning something that you may sell).

The one thing they can't distinguish is whether the person searching is ready to buy or just helping their kid with homework.

As I have said in the past, even the best quality lead starts out as a cold-call prospect. If you don't have the internal system and the people who will proactively and consistently execute it, you have a lead… not a sale.

Sales are the gold, but the big guys are selling you access to the gold mine, not the end product. Whether you hit paydirt is up to how you create and execute your systems.

Closing Thought

Since my company works with smaller to mid-sized businesses, we understand that sales are the gold. Tools are agnostic to us. It can be as simple as a pick ax and a shovel, or as complex as big-ticket machinery that will process what would take 10-20 people to do.

It's the system that matters. You have to create attraction content, knowledge (thought leadership) content, and sales content. All have to work as a system. That system needs to capture and process data and facilitate conversations between humans.

I have yet to hear of an AI tool that can pinpoint where a gold mine is, direct machines to find the vein in the ground with precision, and then extract, clean, and sell the gold to Wall Street.

At some point, someone will need to use a prospecting pan, a pick ax, and a shovel to move people from prospect to purchase.

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Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about business-to-business sales and marketing today! Do you have a sales or marketing communications strategy that works for you? What tips or techniques can you share that work for you and your business?

To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at The Bacon Podcast.

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