Every business owner I talk to wants the same thing from their marketing. More sales opportunities, and fast.
I get it. Nobody likes investing in these initiatives that won't pay off until next year.
If I'm being honest, most of the conversations I have about marketing sound a little like this:
No judgment. I've had my Veruca moments too. But here's the honest version of what I'd tell you if we were sitting across the table.
Take a look at the market you compete in right now. Who are the two or three companies buyers already trust most… the ones they're already buying from, the ones AI names when someone asks "who do you recommend for this?"
If that's you, great. Keep going.
If it's not, you have work to do.
Because being more recommended by AI and chosen by buyers starts with being more trusted than the companies you compete with, and you can't skip that and “just want more sales”.
Here's what I'd bet on. Take the companies in your market that you might be losing sales to, or simply doing more revenue or have more customers than you. Do a deep dive on them. I'd put money on this: they're doing the things we preach at IMPACT, and they're doing them at a much higher level than you are.
Things like:
Every item on that list takes time.
And depending on where your company is starting from and how competitive your market is, it could take over a year. Of course, that’s the part nobody wants to hear.
So people look for shortcuts. We've seen a lot of them.
The most common one is investing heavily in paid ads, hoping leads ramp up the day after the campaign turns on. Ask anyone who has tried this and they'll tell you the same thing. Nope. That's not how it works.
To be clear, I'm very pro paid ads. But only once you've proven you have a digital presence buyers already trust and feel confident buying from. Then you pour traffic on it. Before that, you're paying to send more people through the same website and sales experience that's already failing to produce qualified leads, and you'll get a lot more of the same. You'll be disappointed by how few of those visitors fill out a form, and when you look at the real cost per lead, you'll be appalled. We see $1,000 a lead or more all the time with this strategy. And the leads that do come through still don't really know who you are or what you do, so they sit in the sales process. Time kills all deals. That's not the fix.
The other one is buying leads. Lead aggregators, list sellers, anyone promising a spreadsheet of "leads." What you're really buying is contacts. Maybe some are in the market. But put yourself in their shoes for a second. Have you ever ended up on some aggregator list, got a cold outreach from a business you've never heard of, and said "sure, I'll buy"? Of course not. Neither do they. A name is not a qualified lead.
Here's the thing all of this comes back to. People only do business with companies they know, like, and trust. Trust has to be earned, and earning it takes time. The brands that invest in it dramatically outperform the ones that don't, especially over the long term.
But it's not a light switch. You don't flip it on. You build it, one trustworthy thing at a time, in public, where buyers and AI can both see it.
I'll tell you something I've noticed over the years. We've never taught the Endless Customers principles to a business owner who said "that doesn't make sense." Not once. The ones who didn't move forward weren't disagreeing with it. They just weren't ready. And a lot of them are still out there hoping to find something that works faster. As I've just laid out, those things don't exist.
Which brings me to the uncomfortable math. If it takes a year to become one of the most trusted companies in your market, and you start today, you're there in a year. If you start next quarter, you're there in a year and three months. Every month you spend looking for a shortcut is a month added to the back end of actually fixing your customer acquisition problem. The timeline doesn't shrink because you waited. It just moves.
And the companies you're losing to right now? They're not waiting. They’ve been making deposits and they’re making more this week.
So if you've been putting this off, here's the only honest advice I have. Start. There's no version of this where waiting gets you leads sooner.
Pick one question your buyers are asking that nobody in your industry has answered on their website. Write an article and answer it, this week. That's deposit number one.