A few years back, one of the leading software companies in India wanted to generate leads for its software services business. Their target market unlike any company in India was the US Market where dollars glitter.
This was the time when I was looking out for a Job change and through one of the Job Portal’s I got connect with this gentleman. I joined them in their sales team without studying their bank balance. The very first day I got to see their balance sheet just to realize that they were running under huge loss for the last couple of years. Even their website was a junk. Every prospect that I talked to complained about the website and never came back.
I escalated this to the management and after a couple of discussions they came back and told me to implement a lead generation process. From a long term perspective I suggested an In-House team to generate leads, and one of my colleagues who had an upper hand suggested to outsource the lead generation process to a third party organization who charged about $1200 per month per person. We identified two different organizations where they decided to execute two separate lead generation campaigns on different verticals.
That makes it $ 2400 per month per person. Both the organizations promised 6 qualified leads a month. Having been in the industry for some time it actually sounded crap to me. I still sticked on to my suggestion of hiring In-house team for lead generation, because having been in the Industry the definition of a qualified lead could vary depending on organization to organization. Having defining the qualified leads for these vendors, they failed to deliver a quality lead which was expected. 3 months Pilot project and that was the end of the story. The website of the organization was still not revamped from where it all started.
The CEO really failed to see the bigger picture. At times of the Internet where in SEO/SEM play a big role in lead generation, this organization did not even consider a suggestion from an employee to revamp the website for good. Call it ego or lack of intelligence I am not sure. Soon I left the organization because I knew things where not working. Later they fired about 100 people. The 200 plus team reduced to about 100.
Today that organization has been sold off to a different company at much lower price than what it’s worth off.
Being a CEO:
Running an organization with 200 employees just does not mean running an organization. It also means running 200 different families who are depended on this organization. It also means touching the hearts of 200 different families.
Being a CEO is just not easy. It’s not all about being the CEO. It’s also about making a difference to the society.