Three years into this newsletter, I get a lot of comments and questions from readers - and I meet up with them too.
I try to reply to everyone, but I'm writing the answer to the most common question I get so that I can send it to people:
How can I get more leads for my business?
You are far from the only person finding it hard right now, so let me give you my view.
The baseline has moved
AI is disrupting markets, but only the low-quality end. I believe we are about to witness the friction paradox with AI. That is when the technology promises to remove friction, but actually causes more.
Social media is a great example, here. People are now more connected than ever yet cannot go on a date without an app. A good chat-up line in a pub was far more productive with fewer data centres in the way.
Thanks to AI, savvy buyers have realised, very quickly they can get simple work done cheaper and more easily than ever.
As I’ve written before, the big consulting firms are showing a lack of their own strategy around this.
Content, basic research, first draft consultancy thinking and routine analysis have all been commoditised by AI. That has been the fate of some sectors already and it is coming for others.
There are a lot of people - consultants in particular - wrestling with this shift, but excellent work is a different story.
Excellence is scarcer because it depends on the things machines are worst at. Expertise, judgement, insight and relationships.
So the baseline for what counts as worth paying for has shifted significantly higher. Anyone serving the market with an average mindset will struggle to compete, while people with real creativity and a drive to satisfy the customer have more room than before.
I know these sound like obvious things to say, but hear me out.
Demand hides from dashboards
I have always believed you should start with the customer problem. Those problems have not gone away. How many CRM dashboards do you see that start with the customer problem?
The hard part is that finding new demand means stepping well outside your comfort zone. You have to go and listen to the market directly so qualitative research is your friend here.
Demand is everywhere. Your job is to find it, focus it and get it talking about the problems you can solve. Point it to the answers (and be there to catch the requests).
Community is the frontier
The real frontier now is nurturing interest and building trust. Lead generation as a standalone activity matters far less than it did, which might sound bananas, but digital funnels and SaaS style thinking are so transactional they omit the important bit. Relationships, judgement, trust and the ability to listen - and yes, that's in both B2B and B2C.
For example, Gymshark grew from a garage in Birmingham into a global brand by building a community of fitness fans and creators long before that was standard practice. The products followed the community rather than the other way round.
Monzo asked its user community which features it would like in a modern banking app.
My friend Robin Block runs CreatorVC, which makes fan-funded documentaries such as Aliens Expanded, featuring the original cast and director James Cameron. It is one of - if not the most - successful crowdfunded documentary makers in the world.
Robin and I went camping this weekend (the tents are another story). His one rule is always to validate any new idea with the crowd before launching the big campaign. The crowd tells you what it wants before you build it, which is the whole leads problem solved in reverse. That rule has helped him immeasurably.
Then there is the City CIO Club, which is the community I’m building. It’s the fourth one I’ve built in my career.
I wrote for technology leaders for years. I’d always felt the media market was serving chief information officers badly, expecting them to turn up to transactional events and sit through a PowerPoint on some vendor agenda.
My hypothesis was that they were bored, hungry for better conversation and their own opportunities, and tired of being bombarded with vendor emails all day.
So we built the opposite. People are looked after, walked around the room, introduced and made to feel special. We give them what they want - access to excellent people, connections to NED roles and introductions to opportunity. That comes by meeting and talking to people through an experience they want.
Serving this community as chair allows me to meet some incredible people. We have the outgoing CIO of the MoD coming to speak at a dinner in October. One of the leading quantum computing CEOs is speaking in September and a CEO of one of the major FTSE banks will speak in November.
You get the point. Own the community and opportunity follows. Sit in the middle of your market and connect people to things they want.
The next question is, “How do I get people in my community?”
You have to advertise. I know agencies making both B2B and B2C campaigns perform brilliantly, with returns that are much easier to measure than anything above.
But they're just the start of the journey.
The mistake is treating ads and community as rivals. Ads generate reach. Community converts that attention into trust and eventually sales. Many of the best communities use advertising precisely to bring people in.
Now of course, it depends on what type of business you run, but I like the above approach as it becomes valuable to people.
Google Ads and Meta will tell you quickly what people click on and care about, but long term, build your community. Use videos and stuff that people either find interesting or fun.
It is painful and slow at first, a lonely cold walk until the benefits arrive. Give people things that help them, listen to their problems and introduce them to each other.
By the time you put a proper campaign in front of your audience, they already trust you, and warm trust converts in a way no funnel ever will.
Now you may hear wise people say: "stick to one thing", but I would argue the people saying that are either in full-time jobs or have never had to sell to put food on the table.
I would say in an uncertain market, you want to test a few ideas to see what people gravitate towards.
If you want somewhere to start this week, pick ten people who sit close to the problem you solve and invite them for dinner.
Ask what is frustrating them and listen properly. Then do it again. You'll soon see where demand is and what to do about it.
Hit reply and tell me what you are wrestling with and if I can help, I'll come back to you. And if you're in the City, the coffee is on me - providing you aren't a coach party.
Dan x
