More Ideas - Turn your Disengaged Leads into Your Next Customers

June 3, 2023June 6, 2023

When SEO Breaks the Internet

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. 😉

May 25, 2023May 22, 2023

There is no pressure, only value.

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.

May 23, 2023May 22, 2023

Get the guide

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:

May 22, 2023May 30, 2023

One of the attendees at an Executive Roundtable told me

“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: https://aldwinneekon.com/2023/05/18/essential-silence/

May 22, 2023May 22, 2023

How many prospects can you juggle?

“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.

May 21, 2023May 22, 2023

What are your top sales goals this year?

I went looking for stats about this and here’s what I found:

The number one goal is to exceed targets and quotas.

Not an earth shattering revelation.

(This is from Hubspot’s “2023 Sales Trends Report” if you want to see the whole thing.)

Then they asked how they were going to pursue this goal, and found:

50% of sales people wanted to better understand “the key business challenges prospects face.”

How do you do this when the prospects have disengaged from you?

When they’re not answering your calls, or emails?

When they’re not even downloading or opening any of marketing’s nurture track messages?

The report doesn’t go into this.

How are you re-engaging disengaged leads?

May 20, 2023May 30, 2023

Do you have a million dollar CRM?

You probably have millions of dollars worth of leads sitting in your CRM doing nothing.

😴 I help you wake them up and sell to them.

Message me and let’s talk about it.

P.S. It’s not about your nurture track. Your nurture track should have nurtured them into calling you already. It’s about giving them something nobody else can. It’s about letting your leads sell to one another. And it works every time.

See also: https://aldwinneekon.com/2023/05/18/essential-silence/

May 18, 2023May 22, 2023

The sweet sound of silence

Here are a couple of reasons why you should be silent during the peer conversations you set up for your stuck leads and customers:

1. When you say nothing and listen, you learn more. You’re hearing them speak to their peers. This stuff is gold.

2. Because they value the peer-conversation experience you’re providing them in this peer conversation, they start to value you and your company more than before. Trust you even. But when you speak, they’re not having a peer conversation anymore. Get out of the way.

You get a room full of people, all of whom have the same problem, which is a problem you can solve for them, and you get to listen to them share all kinds of valuable details about their experience in trying to solve that problem, and also they now know and like you more than they did before.

You can make that work for you, right?

But there’s one more thing to consider and this puts the whole thing on a rocketship to the moon.

I’ll talk about that one simple change in my next post.

If you’re impatient, leave a comment below or DM me and I’ll tell you before I publish that post.

If you want to try one of these events and see how it accelerates your sales team’s success, contact me.

I’ll help you get your first one done in about a month and you’ll see the results for yourself.

May 17, 2023May 30, 2023

Can Doing This Increase Your MQL to SQL Conversion Rates?

One of my old colleagues was running the marketing function at a big company and asked me if I had any ideas how to increase how many sales leads get generated from the leads his marketing team generates.

Your team might know this as MQL to SQL conversion rate. MQL being marketing qualified lead, and SQL (or sometimes QSL) being sales qualified leads.

If you’re just trying to increase the rate of conversion, one easy way is to make the denominator smaller. If you have fewer MQLs by being more picky about which leads you certify as being “marketing qualified” then a higher percentage of them will turn into sales qualified leads.

The problem is your team probably has a monthly MQL target, so you can’t just generate fewer MQLs by pre-disqualifying lower probability leads before sending them to sales.

Besides, how would you even know with any kind of certainty which leads are more or less likely to turn into sales?

A lot of the techniques your team uses could be just fancy guesswork. I’ve seen companies base their marketing qualification scores purely on website activity. If the company has 10 pdfs to download, and a lead signs up to download 9 of them, they get scored as a 9 out of 10, that sort of thing.

Here’s a better way. Get your leads on a call with one another. Say you have 10 new leads each week. Once a month invite all 40 of them to a virtual peer-to-peer conversation about a problem you solve.

Your role in the conversation is to say as little as possible. “Welcome!” might be enough. Let them talk to each other about the problem. Encourage them to share stories with one another about the problem, what they’ve tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t.

You’ll learn a few things:
1. You’ll learn what they really care about and how they talk to each other

2. Once any of them become SQLs or customers, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of what characteristics make a lead likely to become a customer

3. Your sales team will immediately have excellent reasons and topics to call the leads about.

That last point just by itself is likely to increase your MQL to SQL conversion ratio.

If your sales team is looking at a dubious lead and can’t figure out what to talk to them about other than the 9 pdfs they downloaded, they’re likely to disqualify the lead. Or to call them and have a bad conversation.

But once they’ve heard the lead talk about what matters to them in their own words, the followup sales call conversation becomes so much more natural and relevant. This increases the sales team’s confidence, and can skyrocket your conversion rates.

See also: https://aldwinneekon.com/2023/05/25/there-is-no-pressure-only-value/

May 11, 2023May 22, 2023

Peer Power

When you’re setting up an Executive Roundtable or any peer conversation, why does the peer relationship matter to making the conversations great?

When attendees see other people at about the same seniority level as themselves, from their own work area, they can assume a kind of level playing field when it comes to discussing the problem at hand. People can get down to discussing the problem right away.

This kind of environment makes people feel more relaxed, more trusting that they’ll be understood and that they will in turn understand.

In this kind of environment I’ve seen people who have never met exchange ideas and vulnerabilities that you’d never hear inside each person’s company, no matter how many team-building off-sites they go to.