Beyond Leads: Rediscovering the Heart of Marketing

In today’s digital age, marketers have become entranced by the allure of lead generation. Metrics, data, and conversion rates dominate the landscape, pushing us to see customers as mere numbers in a funnel. But marketing’s true essence lies far beyond this narrow focus. It’s time to rethink our dependence on leads and reconnect with the core principle that people buy what they are aware of and what they like.

The straw that broke the camel’s back is RB2B. If you have not seen this yet, you must at least see where this thirst for leads has led marketers. Read the comments from current users who, by the way, call themselves marketers.

Basically they allow you to place code on your website that will send personal information about a visitor to Slack so you can spam, pitch-slap and harass your “prospect”. All without offering any transparency, choice or clarity to your potential customer. And their fearless leader Adam Robinson sees nothing wrong with this! “It’s how the internet works” he states, making the internet responsible for his lack of empathy, conscience or ethics. Seems he interprets the Golden Rule as do whatever it takes to make more money.

Back to the Basics

The true purpose of marketing is about creating awareness, building trust, and fostering positive relationships. When we reduce our efforts to purely chasing leads, we lose sight of the customer as a person. We forget that a customer’s loyalty and advocacy are built on genuine connections, not just transactional interactions. Unfortunately we have turned all digital marketing including social media, into transactional interactions – us telling them what we think they want to know. Most feedback from the potential consumer is being mis-interpreted by the “marketer”, as they are addicted to leads – no matter the quality. I doubt any respectable marketer could not interpret visiting a website as interest in purchase. Surely there have to be a few other data points added before we could call it intent to buy.

Respecting our customers means…

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