Turn your Disengaged Leads into Your Next Customers
Hi, I'm Aldwin Neekon and I help B2B tech companies re-engage with and sell to their cold leads.
What do you do when your leads go silent? They used to be engaged but now they don’t respond to your pdfs, email, webinar invitations, phone calls.
I’ve been hosting virtual meetings where I invite them to talk to each other about a problem my B2B clients solve, and it’s really helped.
What are you trying?
I know, I’m asking some uncomfortable questions here. 😱
If you look at all the silent leads, the sleepy leads, the leads that don’t talk to you anymore…how much have you paid to generate those leads?
How much have you paid for the search campaigns, the ads, the events, the collateral, the staff time to get those leads to sign up for your emails?
Only to have them go silent.
Don’t give up on them.
Get them re-engaged.
Every sales person I talk to tells me it’s a tough time to sell.
I’m in B2B tech, so maybe your market is different, but what I’m hearing is that it’s tough everywhere.
And yet….the other day I ran a 1 hour Executive Roundtable for a client, and they were delighted at the attendee’s actually asking them for follow-up sales calls.
That’s right, a previously disengaged lead asks you for a discovery call after a 1 hour meeting where you say almost nothing.
It wont solve every problem that your sales team faces.
It’s still tough out there.
But if you think it might help you like it helps my clients, let’s chat.
Should anyone from your company attend your Executive Roundtable peer conversation?
Remember you’re setting up this conversation to allow your stuck leads and customers to have a conversation with their peers about a problem they all have, which you can solve.
They’re not here to listen to you or your colleagues.
Invite your colleagues but remind them to be silent. If you’re doing this in a virtual meeting (and you should because you’ll learn a lot faster when you can do more of these at a lower cost and more frequently) tell your team to keep their cameras off and to stay muted.
It doesn’t hurt to have them remove their titles from their profiles either. It’s not important that they’re the CEO or VP Sales or whatever. It’s a distraction.
Invite someone from sales so they can learn what each lead is really struggling with. The reason for their next phone call to that lead will become obvious.
Invite someone from marketing to learn what people in this peer group care about and the words they use to describe the problems they have and the solutions they want. Invite someone from the product team.
At the same time, don’t overwhelm the meeting with a ton of non-participants.
The peer group can feel like they’re being mobbed. You don’t want that.
Here’s a heuristic for you to consider: Keep the number of people from your company to fewer than a quarter of attendees.
If your attendees consent to it, record the conversation and show it to your team later instead of inviting them.
I tend not to record these meetings because I find people are more forthcoming when they don’t have to worry about being recorded if they mistakenly let something slip.
Take it easy on them. Make them comfortable. Definitely don’t record by default or without their knowledge. Don’t do that thing where you ambush record them. I’m talking about when they show up for the meeting and there’s a warning that says “This meeting is being recorded”.
Have someone take notes during the meeting and share those with the rest of your team.
Use the insights IMMEDIATELY in sales calls and marketing messages.
Try hosting a peer conversation this month. They’re really effective at accelerating sales.
If you get stuck or don’t have the team to do it yourself give me a call.
You’ve spent a lot of money generating, nurturing, and having meetings with leads, just to have them suddenly go silent.
Now you have a problem with your pipeline. Your team’s still optimistic, but you know they’re at risk of missing their numbers.
No problem, you can just generate more leads.
Think twice.
If you’re in B2B you don’t have billions of potential customers. It’s more like thousands. For one of my clients, it was just a few hundred companies globally that they could sell to.
Maybe your target market isn’t that small. But if your marketing team has been at it for a while, they’ve already generated the easy leads.
Each additional lead is harder and more expensive to get.
So if over-relying on lead generation is a mistake, what’s the solution?
Go back to the silent leads in your CRM.
But instead of another follow-up call or another nurture email, offer them something that:
1. They really value
2. They’re not offered by anyone else
What checks both of these?
Anything that you have exclusive access to that tells them about themselves and their peers.
Not about you.
About them and their peers.
What does your company have that can tell your leads more about themselves and their peers?
“If you want to learn about your customers, stop talking and listen.”
🏆Here’s some great advice:
“If you want to learn about your customers, stop talking and listen to them speak to each other.”
What they tell you and what they tell each other can be two very different things.
Leads not replying to your calls and emails anymore?
Webinar fatigue and way-too-much-content syndrome driving your open rates toward zero?
Can you blame them? When was the last time you engaged with any of the vendors who are trying to sell you something you don’t desperately need? Why would you go to yet another webinar, or download yet another pdf from them?
It’s just more work.
But would you attend an Executive Roundtable meeting where you can have a nice conversation about some of the challenges you have in common with other people like you?
A lot of people say yes to this when they say no to yet another vendor “thought leadership” piece.
Be that vendor. Build community. Earn trust. Let your leads talk to one another. Put a couple of your customers into that conversation. You’ll be pleased with how this unblocks the most stubbornly stuck leads.
Half the attendees at an Executive Roundtable I ran recently opted into a sales conversation within one day of the event.
This was a highly focused event with a very small number of handpicked attendees….and….
…the key thing you need to know is that prior to the event, they had known of the client for months but had not engaged with them.
In other words, they were old or cold leads.
What would that mean to you?
What if we could invite a group of your old and cold leads to an event where 50%, or even 25% or even 10% of them immediately engaged with your sales team?
It’s a very simple process that you can run to do this.
When was the last time you did an outreach campaign where nearly 50% of the leads turned into a sales opportunity?
Just did this for a client with an Executive Roundtable. How?
Here’s 3 steps to do this yourself:
1. Identify high quality leads who’ve gone cold and stopped engaging with you
2. Invite them to a roundtable conversation with one another about problems that are important to them and that you solve
3. Say nothing other than “Welcome”, “Thank you”, and “Please tell us more”
They signed up for the webinar.
They even had a call with sales.
But your lead’s gone silent, and frankly, you’re a little worried about them.
Let’s talk about it.
I’m doing a thing I’m calling WIP Wednesday (because of alliteration).
If you want to chat about your work in progress, specially about waking up silent leads, book some time for a free chat
I do lots of work in this area, so chances are good we’ll have an interesting chat.