Alright, let’s do it. Let’s talk about leadgen. 

Leadgen is the gorilla in marketing, the thing that everyone thinks every other thing is about. 

“Where are the leads!” they cry. I’ve cried it, too. You’ve cried it. We’ve all cried.

The old-school (meaning 2009) version of this is marketing leveraged to garner buyer attention, usually to entice said buyer to give up their contact info. Leads get qualified based on their activities (MQLs) to be passed on to the sales department. 

“Trade us your sacred inbox for the precious gift of our WHITE PAPER!” 

What will we sell to get that contact info? What will they sell to us? Encyclopedias have been written. 

We’re not here to perfect Leadgen today. We’re also not here to decry its fallacies. 

Like any good trade, we’re here to attend to what it costs. Not the hard costs—advertising, copywriting, design, distribution—the downstream costs of leadgen gone wrong. 

As Nick Richtsmeier said on LinkedIn this week, the greatest hindrance to good marketing is marketers. So, we need to police ourselves. And many a marketer, in the pursuit of the glorious LEADS has put their company and their brand through the wringer, all chasing those precious leads. 

Today’s buyer, B2B or B2C, smells those trades coming. They can feel the craven hunger driving brands and their marketers. They know the second they release that contact info, their inbox will be flooded, and their phone will start to ring. They’re working out ways to avoid it like the plague. 

Brands need revenue. (Hello, Captain Obvious.) And we’ve been lulled into believing that the transaction of leadgen is the way. But it doesn’t have to be. Today we look at a cautionary list of 10 ways leadgen can ruin a brand’s reputation, so you know where the pitfalls are, and—hopefully—how to avoid them. 

10 Ways Leadgen Can Ruin Your Brand’s Reputation  

1.     The Content Sucks: Trades are all about value. If the thing they’re giving up their contact info for doesn’t actually make their life and work better… the unsubscribes start flying. 

2.     The Wrong Boss: In a strong revenue operation the boss is the customer. They get what they need to be happy, loyal, and sources of referrals. Leadgen often steps in as a replacement for that. “What if instead of serving customers before they buy… we just lured them in and chased them around the internet?” When the KPIs are the boss, you get what you get. 

3.     Bad Outcomes: An email address is not a lead. When you treat it like one, you tend to treat the person on the other side of it pretty poorly. Subscribers to your content need to show buying intent before we pepper them with sales. You can have the biggest email list in the world and no buying intent. 

4.     Sibling Rivalry: Marketing and sales devolve into a vicious cycle of quality vs quantity of leads. Customers pay the price. Without internal alignment on how you’re going to serve your One Beloved Customer Profile, everybody is just trying to posture to meet their specific KPI.

5.     Cultivating Distrust: Customers are humans. So, when you treat them accordingly—as people with needs and opinions before, during, and after the buying cycle—they tend to feel valued. When you only love them enough to get them to buy, they get the message must faster than you think. 

6.     The Cost of Loss: Customer acquisition is expensive. Why would you build a revenue operation that loses them as fast as you keep them? Because Leadgen is obsessed with the acquisition and not the full buyer’s journey, the back door gets wide, and with it, your failing reputation. 

7.     Failing Digital Spies: We’ve covered this at length in other content but chasing people around the internet with cookies and tracking just ain’t what it used to be. And maybe… just saying… it wasn’t that great of an idea to begin with. Transactional Leadgen tactics like the one’s we’ve described above a are primary driver of CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs) and they’re going up all the time. 

8.     Chasing Credit: Digital attribution is in the midst of dying a painful death. Your software saying “organic search” or “webinar” or “SDR-generated” is making massive assumptions, producing red herrings, causing you to spend money you don’t have. We spend so much time trying to figure out which marketing spend to attribute the ROI to, we’re driving down ROI with every passing day.

9.     Trained to Ignore: Most Leadgen tactics tend to center the company – “Look at us we did a thing!” Instead of centering the customer, they train even those interested in buying to ignore you. Marketing should be training your future customers to LOVE you. And you do that by focusing on them, not on how you can hook them into a sales funnel.

Reason 10: The One Upside of Leadgen (Surprise, It’s Actually a Downside) 

In our estimation, as you can already tell, traditional leadgen techniques are leading many businesses astray. There is one significant upside that we’ve heard pointed out that we want to address quickly: 

Leadgen is the easiest revenue strategy to scale. 

That’s still true. And without investigating why, leadgen sounds like it could be a really attractive option. (I mean, after the list above maybe not THAT attractive…)

But do a little digging and you’ll find the reason leadgen is easy to scale is because it relies on a heavy persuasion-toned, sales-first engagement. All that hard selling can protect a brand from having a fully beneficial product or service… thus the infamous “vaporware” you hear about in SAAS all the time. 

This strategy to sell fast and build later has HUGE consequences for reputation, the one thing you can’t afford to lose. Digital leadgen tools have been notorious culprits of getting people revved up for a product or a service or a training that’s just one more sales pitch for one more sales pitch for one more eventual product that isn’t even ready for primetime. 

You can build an email list fast that way. And then what? 

Leadgen done wrong sells customers to death with content till they buy or leave. It forces a result, rather than facilitating a relationship.

That worked 10 years ago, when digital marketing was still relatively new, and customers were desperate to be sold-to online. But not anymore. Today’s online customers are seeking honest, and genuine interactions with brands they feel care for them and know them. 

For that, brands must lead with value.

We’re having a blast building out revenue strategies for brands that want to center value, build trust, expand reputation, and serve customers. Is that you too?
Let us know when you’re ready to see what it takes.