There are really only four ways to grow a business – Get more leads, close more deals, increase your average transaction or add products and services to your offerings. Of the lot, trying to generate increasing numbers of leads is the most expensive.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you drop your lead generation efforts, I’m simply advising you to give more real focus and effort to the other three first.

In other words – fix your message, fix your follow through, and fix your Marketing Hourgalss^sm. Do that and you might actually find that you can grow your business while decreasing the number of leads you need to in order do so. Too often a lone fixation on lead generation for growth can attract the wrong kind of prospect and run your resources dry while you chase your tail looking for the next live one.

In most cases, the easiest thing to impact in a small business is lead conversion. By creating a truly systematic way to present, follow-up, transact and thrill your customers and prospects you can almost certainly expect to do substantially more business with the amount of leads you currently generate

With a message that communicates how remarkably unique your business is, targeted at a narrowly defined ideal prospect, price pressure goes out the window. Find you message, raise your prices and grow through increased average dollar per sale.

I use an hourglass image to illustrate the idea that every customer that comes into your funnel and squeezes through that small part to become a customer needs to immediately go into another expanded set of offerings (the bottom widening part of the hourglass) that includes complimentary products or services, introductions to strategic alliances and an acute focus on referral generation – that’s how you build real growth momentum.

So, fix your message, fix your follow through, and fix your hourglass first, figure out how to get bigger this way, and then turn the lead generation tap and prepare to witness a flood of growth.