They say that offering a quality product or service is the most important key to marketing your business. When customers realize that you have such and such good product, they can’t help but spread the words around, generating referrals and word of mouth. Soon you have all the customers and clients you can handle.

Now your problem is more about scalability…

Wait, does it really work that way? Not quite, I’m afraid.

The Failure of Amiga

Amiga’s graphic and sound capabilities were revolutionary for its time, but it flopped. They built strong fan base though. Even years after the last Amiga was sold, the scene continued for many years.

Nowadays you can find Amiga emulators for PC platform. Old school gamers still have hours of fun playing the games.

How could such product fail? If a quality product is all that is needed to succeed, PC will not be the desktop computing and gaming platform of choice nowadays.

Why Small Businesses Fail According to SBA

According to U.S. Small Business Administration, 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years.

The reasons behind the failure, in the top ten list, include poor inventory management, over-investment in fixed assets, competition and low sales.

If you look closely, those reasons lead to just one core issue: the inability to reach the minimum critical mass of customers to make the first profitable sale. Small business in its infancy needs to make a system to create customers profitably. The rest is in the back-end where business could actually grow.

There are always exceptions though, but this is how it works typically.

The other factors such as lack of experience (the first reason) is utmost important. That’s why as a small business owner or service professional, you need to invest on yourself and continuing education. That’s another blog post though.

Lead Conversion: The Proof is in the Pudding

Simply put, without marketing, people can’t possibly know about your product. When they don’t know about it, it doesn’t matter at all if it is really the best of its kind in terms of quality and perhaps price.

No matter how brilliant your marketing is, it can’t beat the checks in the mail. The only question a marketer needs to focus on is “Does it sell?”

Next time you heard website owners boast about the level of traffic they get, ask about the conversion rate of the traffic. Is it millions of useless hits or qualified prospects who really want to buy their product or service?

Lead conversion is the entire plan and process you have in place that you want the visitors and prospects to experience. It’s how you position your product in their mind, what you want them to understand and do.

With a properly created lead conversion system, you will move the leads from one step to the next, closer to the sale. While traffic and others are important, often what makes a break even or lost depends on lead conversion.

Until a marketing system can prove that it converts, it will be more of a cost rather than investment.