The typical technician-turned-business-owner: that’s the best way to describe my sales technique. I have always been confident talking to prospects about the subjects I know well, and I’ve been fortunate to win a few relatively sizeable contracts in my time. However, I have never held a pure sales or business development role for any organisation. I am responsible for business development within my company, but it’s just one of the many hats I have to wear. Let’s just say I was not born to be in sales.

I am not obsessed by targets or closing deals. I hate overpromising. I hate interrupting people. I hate making people feel like a number, and I hate pressurising them. Why? Because every single time someone else does those things to me, I hate it. And every time it happens – which is a lot when you are running a business – I lose a little more faith in the traditional ways of contacting a cold prospect.

Still, I am a businessman, and being successful in any business requires the ability to attract customers. Which is why I believe that when you have created something of genuine value which can help other businesses to succeed, you are performing a service by bringing it to the attention of the people who can benefit. Continually going above and beyond for customers is the best way to build a business; but sometimes, situations and circumstances dictate proceedings. Sometimes, necessity demands you to be proactive in business development, instead of merely sitting back and waiting for the right people to hunt you down.

How is it possible to accomplish this without resorting to all the things that I – like so many other business professionals – hate about outbound sales?

For more than ten years running my own business, I found myself struggling with this puzzle – and not just any business, a marketing agency no less. Not only was I routinely experiencing personal business development headaches, but I had daily exposure to the attempts of clients who were trying to wrestle with their own.

Over the years I tried everything my time and budget would allow: cold calling, email marketing, networking, direct mail, exhibitions, advertising and public relations all played various roles in my ever-evolving business development playbook. All ended up costing me a lot in both time and money, with little reward to show for it. Social media offered me a glimmer of hope, but it’s so saturated with ill-conceived, generic sales tactics that it was proving increasingly difficult to cut through the noise.

In truth, the reason this book exists is primarily through desperation. I was desperate for a way to actively generate quality B2B leads for my business. Desperate to fight against the generic, one-size-fits-all spam that plagues my inbox and in-tray daily. Desperate to avoid wasting time and money, neither of which I could afford to lose. Desperate to measure effectiveness, instead of repeatedly flinging mud against a wall in the hope that some of it would stick.

Above all, I was desperate to leave the people I approached with a lasting, positive impression of me and my business – reputations are built over years, yet can be destroyed in minutes. Even the highest echelons of the business world acknowledge they deserve our protection.

In this book I’m going to share with you the framework that finally gave me the breakthrough I had been searching for all those years. A method that enabled me to achieve a reach rate of 55 per cent, a response rate of 44 per cent and a lead-generation rate of nearly 11 per cent. The results proved to be almost 20 times more effective than cold calling.

Best of all, the whole process allowed me to keep my integrity firmly intact.

I hope that Wonder Leads gives you the skills and confidence to go out there and build positive connections with the people that matter to your business.

If the whole world could do that, who knows what incredible things we might all accomplish.