Author: Aldwin

I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I’ll give you an example of what a B2B tech company I helped was facing.

When I audited their marketing operations I saw a number of areas where there was a big disconnect between the marketing investment and the marketing outcome.

If you think of their marketing operations as a machine that you pour money into, then turn a crank, and business benefits come out the other side, the first part was definitely working.

They were making investments in all the right places.

The trouble is they weren’t turning the crank.

They weren’t putting in the work to figure out what was working, what wasn’t, and what should be done about it.

A lot of this came down to them trusting their agencies to connect the dots from investment to return. And the agencies were letting them down.

One area where there was no clear indication of what was and wasn’t working was in lead generation.

They had spent a lot of money and generated a lot of leads.

And that’s as far as the agencies had managed to connect the dots.

You wanted leads, you got leads, our job is done… Not quite.

I looked in their CRM and we found over 1000 high quality senior leads who fit their ideal customer profile (ICP).

These 1000 ICP leads had been in the database for about a year, and all of them had completely disengaged from my client for at least 6 months.

How’s this possible? How can 1000 real, qualified, targeted leads suddenly disengage from a company that they had previously been engaged with? I go into it in more detail at this link, but the summary is: leads binge, then disengage. It’s normal.

But what are you supposed to do about it?

Find a channel that they’re still tuned into and show up there.

What these channels have in common is that they are all very focused on the customer’s jobs, and they tend to have as little as possible to do with vendors.

For example, you’ve probably seen the “State of the Industry” reports that some vendors publish where they aggregate, anonymize, and summarize the data that they gather through their platform.

Those state of the industry reports do amazing business. They get staged rollouts so investors and industry analysts see them first, then the customers, then high quality leads, and then finally the general lead generation programs use them to bring in more leads.

Why do they work? Because they’re about what the customer cares about: themselves and their peers. They are useful.

What they don’t have is a sales pitch. So customers lower their guard and tune in. They’re unaggressive.

They’re useful and unaggressive.

What’s a useful and unaggressive offering you can give your leads to re-engage them?

For my client, the answer was a series of Executive Roundtables where their dis-engaged leads could speak with their peers about a problem that they had in common and that my client solved. They didn’t talk about my client. And my client didn’t say anything about their solution. That would have violated the unaggressive requirement.

The leads talked to each other about the approaches they’d tried to solve the problem.

One or more of them happened to be my client’s customers. I made sure to invite them first. We didn’t coach them in any way. They talked about how my client’s solution helped them solve the problem.

Typically, between 20% and 50% of the attendees enter further conversations with my client after an event like this. That’s exactly what happened here.

Maybe it can work for you.

Let me know if you want to chat:

Connect with me on Linkedin

Cold leads are one thing. They don’t know you. You can’t take it personally when they don’t return your calls.

But what about the cold leads who used to be engaged, but have since gone cold?

That hurts.

They know you. They read your posts, they downloaded your pdfs, they attended your webinars, they opted into your newsletter!

Any now they just ignore you?

Well, it’s sad to say, but you know what?

It isn’t them. It’s you.

The way we consume vendor information has changed. We binge and ignore.

Think of how you act when you’re the buyer.

When we’re in binge mode, we download everything and scan it.

Once we get the feeling that we have a decent understanding of what the vendor can do for us, we disengage and ignore.

Why?

Vendors have trained us to behave this way

There’s just too much information. It costs too much in the way of time and mental energy to consume vendor information as it comes in.

DING! Here’s an email from a CRM vendor that might have some features that can help us.

DING! Here’s a call from a vendor who promises to lower our costs.

DING! Here’s an webinar invitation from vendor we don’t care about…but their guest speaker is Chris Voss!!!

DING! DING!

It’s all day every day like this.

The only cure is to ignore it all until you need to figure out a vendor.

Then you binge everything they have. And as soon as you think you’ve got them figured out, you ignore them again.

So it doesn’t really matter what your marketing team is saying, or what your call script is, or anything like that. Once you’re in the ignore pile, you tend to stay in the ignore pile.

The best you can hope for is:

1. Stay somewhere in the periphery of their consciousness so they remember you when a need arises.
2. Get your message into one of the channels that they’re not currently ignoring.

Once you get yourself back onto their attention span, then you can find ways to help them realize that they really do need your stuff right now.

But how do you get back in front of them when they’ve put you on their mental ignore list?

You show up where they’re paying attention.

One area that most of us keep paying attention to is our peers.

If I told you that I had a report showing what your 5 top competitors are doing, would you want to see it?

You probably would.

Let’s go one step further. What if I said I had a report showing what the top 3 sales people at your top 5 competitors were doing.

That’s a little more interesting, right?

Now let’s take it the whole way.

What if I invited you to have a friendly, moderated chat with those 15 top sales people who are as good as you are at what you do? A roundtable of your peers. Would you be interested in trading stories with them?

Maybe I lost you there. Sales people tend to be competitive. Maybe you’re concerned about sharing your secrets. But not everyone is as competitive and guarded as you might be.

How do you do it?

You put 15 CFOs or CEOs or CISOs that fit your target buyer profile around a table.

Then you get the conversation started in just the right way and you’ll see how quickly they open up to one another and start sharing their experiences.

Figure out a way to steer the topic to problems your company solves, and you’re most of the way there.

Let me know if you need help doing this for your used-to-be-engaged-but-now-they’ve-gone-cold leads.

Sign up for the newsletter (it’s very occasional, but always good).

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

See also: The Art of Cultivating Connections

Your nurturing doesn’t work because you’re doing it right.

Just like everyone else.

You are tailoring content based on your leads’ goals and pains. So is everyone else.

You are targeting your ideal customer profile throughout their buying journey. So is everyone else.

You are following up in a timely and consistent way. So is everyone else.

And there are a lot of “everyone elses” out there.

You and everyone else are providing high value, highly targeted, timely and consistent outreach and frankly, it’s a bit too much.

Your leads have gotten used to it.

They know that the good information you provide is there when they need it.

Once in a while they dip in, binge on it, then go away.

But why do they go away? Because consuming information is hard work, and we all avoid hard work if it’s not necessary.

Unless solving the problem you help with is necessary, your lead will stop engaging with your content the moment they feel that they have a good handle on what you do and how you do it.

They’ll file it away in the back of their mind in case they need it some day.

You’re left waiting for them to remember you when they finally need to take action.

And that’s uncomfortable. Just waiting. That’s not what you’re paid to do. That’s not who you are. You’re a person of action. You take charge.

You keep sending them more messages that are meant to convince them to do something (just like everyone else).

But they’ve already checked out. They’re not tuned into you anymore. So although you have some success in catching their attention and getting them to finally do something, it doesn’t work as often as you’d like it to.

Here’s a trick that might work for you:

Find out what they are still tuned into

Maybe it’s an industry publication.

Maybe it’s a semi-celebrity expert in their field.

Maybe it’s their peers.

Find out who they’re still tuned into and figure out how to get your message to your leads, through the people they still seek out and listen to.

Sign up for the newsletter (it’s very occasional, but always good).

Connect with me on LinkedIn

See also: Increase lead response rates

You might forgive marketing people for forgetting this, but as a sales person you know that nothing happens until the lead starts talking to you.

No amount of brand awareness or nurture or thought leadership means anything unless it gets a lead to say yes to a conversation with you.

There are two problems with this, and only the first one is normally talked about. We’re going to talk about both problems.

The first problem is about relevance and reach.

Does your marketing team have messaging that the leads find relevant?

And can they find ways to have that message reach the lead?

All the things we normally hear about personalization of content, creating urgency, storytelling, branding, advertising, all of it is really about relevance and reach.

Can we reach the right people with a relevant message?

But there’s a second type of problem that is not talked about:

What happens when your message is relevant, and it reaches and even engages the lead, but then the lead disengages?

What do you do then?

The disengaged lead already knows about you. They already find your message relevant, or else they wouldn’t have engaged with you in the first place. Obviously you found a way to reach them too.

But now they’re no longer responding to anything you do.

They’re not reading your emails, downloading your pdfs, registering for your webinars…

What’s going on?

Let’s turn the table. Have you ever disengaged from a vendor even though you like what they do? Why?

Here’s an overlooked reason: It’s work.

It takes work to read a vendor’s emails, to download their pdfs, to attend their webinars, to think about their message, to remember their brand. It all takes work.

And we’re all so busy now that we don’t want extra work.

We’ll do the work if we think it will remove other work.

If it’s taking us an extra 10 hours a week to get a job done, and we think that could be done in 2 hours, then we will do the work of engage with the vendors who say they can make that happen. Even though we really don’t want to.

Chances are pretty good that a lot of your newly disengaged leads are in this boat.

To get them to re-engage, you have to make the work worthwhile.

But here’s where we run into a circular problem.

They’re already checked out. And sending them more of the same messaging that engaged them in the first place isn’t going to get them to re-engage. They’ve already been there, done that.

If you can’t change the message, change the medium.

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Your customers are overwhelmed by content.

Your leads are overwhelmed by content.

There’s so much content out there every day, on LinkedIn, on blogs like this, on newsletters and podcasts and everywhere else, that it’s a chore just figuring out who to listen to.

People have gotten so good at writing clickbait titles that you can’t figure out if an article is any good until you’ve read, or at least skimmed, half of it.

Who’s got that kind of time?

Which means that more and more, your leads default to disengaged.

Disengaged is the default.

To re-engage them, it’s not enough to say relevant, helpful things.

Because by default, they won’t even hear you.

Their internal self-defense-against-information-overload filters won’t even register most of what you’re saying.

It doesn’t matter how “personalized” your content is. It doesn’t matter how tailored it is for your target audience, it doesn’t matter if you’re “where they are” on social media.

What matters is who says it.

No matter how relevant and valuable your message, it will reach fewer people if you say it. Because you’re a vendor and there are too many vendors saying too many things.

But if the same words come from one of their peers, they pay attention.

It’s not the message, it’s the medium. (Someone said that before, right?)

So how do you get their peers, people with the same title, from the same industry, going through the same problems, to deliver the message?

You do this by getting them into a conversation with one another.

And because the word “vendor” causes a Pavlovian dis-engagement response, what you need to do is distance yourself from that conversation. Sit quietly in the corner, listening intently, saying nothing.

There’s an art to this.

And getting it right makes the difference between a good year and a great year.

See also: Here’s what one of the attendees at an Executive Roundtable told me

Want to chat about this? Fill out the form here and I’ll get in touch, or call me at 647-479-5856.

Sign up for the newsletter (it’s very occasional, but always good).

Connect with me on LinkedIn

I don’t do a lot of SEO work anymore. I refer the work to a competent agency my clients have said they’re happy with. (Ask me if you want an intro).

But I do look at websites through an SEO lens because it’s an undeniable part of the digital marketing mix.

And it’s obvious that SEO has broken the internet when a reputable website uses phrases like this one:

“If you’re looking for kitchen stores near me, then let us show you great kitchen accessories and equipment at our kitchen store in the Toronto area.”

The people at the site aren’t trying to be weird, but they probably feel like they have no choice.

They probably feel that they either stuff their copy with this kind of SEO-focused nonsense or see their competitors pull ahead of them.

And that’s a shame.

Because although it probably makes it easy for people to find their site, it makes it very hard for people to read their site.

Over the years I’ve always stuck with the principle that you should write for people, and let the search engine algorithms catch up with you.

It seems like they still have some catching up to do.

Anyway, if you want a referral to a good group of SEO people who can help you rank without this kind of thing let me know.

Or should I say if you’re looking for “SEO agency in my area” that provides the “Best SEO agency” service with “reasonably priced SEO services”, let me know. 😉

I’ve hosted Executive Roundtables for years, and they consistently produce results.

The companies I work with are B2B tech companies that want to engage their senior executive prospects more deeply.

The problem is, their prospects have stopped responding to the automated emails, pdfs, surveys, and phone calls they receive from them.

To get past this problem, I organize a Roundtable and let prospects discuss a tough problem they’re trying to solve with each other.

I tell my client to say as little as possible.

While my client simply listens, I moderate the conversation so that the attendees can have open conversations.

Following the session, the attendees tell me they have a much better understanding of the problem and their peers’ solutions.

Almost always, my clients get sales meetings with the leads to discuss problems that the leads identified on their own.

There is no pressure, only value.

More problems are solved, more customers are signed. It’s amazing.

Call me if you want to try it out: 647-479-5856.

There’s no way 100% of the qualified leads in your CRM are going to buy from you.

But what if you invited 20 of the most qualified but heartbreakingly disengaged leads to an Executive Roundtable, and 4 or 5 of them became customers?

Is that far fetched?

Those kinds of conversion numbers are very realistic if you run your Executive Roundtable the right way.

The secret, really, is to remove yourself from the conversation as much as possible.

If you want to get my guidebook that goes into this in all the detail you need, look no further:

“The problem is difficult to solve, and there’s no end to the amount of money and energy you can spend on it. I come to these meetings to get a sense of how other companies are making this decision.”

I’m paraphrasing to leave out private information. But I think you can see the kind of unique value an Executive Roundtable provides your senior leads.

Getting to ask someone from another company what they’re doing, why they’re doing it that way, what else they’ve tried. That’s valuable.

And that’s why your senior leads will keep coming back to your Executive Roundtables even when they say no to your webinars, surveys, and report downloads.

Try it out.

See also: Essential Silence

Connect with me on LinkedIn

“78% of salespeople have anywhere from 1 – 40 prospects moving through the sales process at a given time.”*

How does this line up with your experience?

I’m specially interested in stats from B2B tech selling offerings that require a PO to get generated and the CFO to get involved.

How many prospects are you working at a given time before they go back into marketing’s nurture track?

*This is from the Hubspot “2023 Sales Trends Report” if you want to see the full stats.