Get People To The Starting Line

I heard the other day, that for religious evangelists, it takes just over 4-years to get someone to convert religions. This was from 'This American Life' the episode entitled Bait & Switch - Act 2 Raw Sex (how's that for SEO). I've been thinking about it ever since. As a sales guy, I spend a ton of time evangelizing my products & services.  If you spend your time cold calling people, you need to convince people that what they are doing is inefficient or basically backasswards.  When selling technology, this doesn't happen in a 10-minute phone call. This happens over months of relationship building and calls and site visits and more calls and more relationship building.  You're preaching your version of religion and trying to make converts. It doesn't come easy and it is easy to focus on how many people finish the race, but we lose track of how we got people to show up at the race in the first place. We spend a lot of time talking about metrics. How many deals closed, how many leads from one point to another. How many suspects to prospects; prospects to opportunities.  All of those metrics are great for potential customers who are already in the race. But let me ask, how are you getting people to show up at your race?
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Tagged Cold calling Evangelism Marketing & Management Religion and Spirituality Search engine optimization Technology This American Life religion sales
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