More Ideas - Turn your Disengaged Leads into Your Next Customers

March 2, 2023May 22, 2023

When the nurture campaign doesn’t work

Before: “My team spent a ton of money on lead generation, most of which turn into nothing”

After: “We had to increase our revenue forecasts because old cold Leads are suddenly asking to have sales conversations.”

If you’re the CEO of a mid-sized B2B company you’ve probably seen sales and marketing spend a ton of money on lead generation.

While it seems normal that only a small % of those leads become customers while the rest get put on “nurture” campaigns, it’s got to bother you that so much of your money is parked in your CRM in the form of cold, silent, unresponsive leads.

What would help is a system to get those unresponsive leads to re-engage with you, with one another, and with the urgent problem you can solve for them.

I’ve got good news. I stumbled on a system that does exactly this a few years ago, and it has worked every time, for every client.

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense why it works so well.

Give your leads what your competitors won’t: a conversation with their peers.

February 18, 2023May 22, 2023

Do your leads roll their eyes at your sales messages?

Think back to when you were a teenager.
And your parents gave you advice.
Which you ignored. 🙄Until…

You heard the exact same advice from one of your friends.
And you followed that advice.

You might have even mentioned how great the advice was to your parents, as if it was something completely new. 😐

Your customers do the same thing. And you can’t blame them.

When you send them yet another pdf, or webinar invitation, or follow-up email, what do they hear? Often, nothing. They have their own reasons for tuning out sellers.

But you know who they listen to? Their peers.

So why not create opportunities for them to have conversations with their peers? Conversations that centre around problems that they all have and that you can solve.

This really works. If you don’t know how, let me know and I’ll go into as much detail as you like.

Tell me who your peers are and I’ll even create a peer conversation where you can talk to one another about how to do this. 😀

February 12, 2023May 22, 2023

When prospects stop opening your emails

My clients have been hosting Executive Roundtables for years, and they constantly deliver results.

My clients are B2B tech companies who want to engage their senior executive prospects more deeply.

But their prospects have stopped responding to yet another automated email, pdf, survey, and phone call.

So I organize an Executive Roundtable where prospects get to talk to other prospects about a tough problem they’re trying to solve.

Of course they don’t think of themselves as prospects.

They’re tech executives talking to other tech executives about a problem that’s important to them. I moderate the conversation.

Ideally, my client, who is the vendor, says nothing at all.

The executives who attend love it and come back again and again.

An amazingly high number of them become customers.

If you have some leads stuck mid-funnel, not responding to your emails and calls, and you want to help them really get engaged about a problem you can solve, let me know.

I’ll tell you how to do it.

February 4, 2023May 22, 2023

Buying shortcuts

What are your customers’ buying shortcuts?

When buying the kinds of things you sell is a lot of work, what are the strategies your customers use to reduce that work?

Do they rely on personal recommendations from people they know?

Do they narrow the list to just those offerings that have their prices listed?

Do they start with a list of industry leaders published by analysts?

They’re busy. Buying from you is not their life’s ambition. They’re going to look for shortcuts.

What can you do to find those shortcuts?

January 26, 2023May 22, 2023

Remove yourself from the conversation

Want to hear about your teenager’s day?

Ask them.

But if they don’t say much, do this:

Remove yourself from the conversation.

Put them in a situation where they can chat with their friends. Maybe by giving them and their friends a lift somewhere.

Stay quiet.

Listen.

If you’ve been a teenager, or been a parent to a teenager, you know this works.

Here’s the secret, this is really a post about your silent, unresponsive sales leads. Use your creativity to replace the drive in the car with something more appropriate, like say an Executive Roundtable event.

Remove yourself from the conversation.

January 17, 2023May 22, 2023

Your silent leads might just be bored

How many leads do you have languishing in your CRM?

These are people who were once interested enough in your offerings to raise their hand for more information.

But over time they stopped responding.

I imagine you yourself are in that position in the CRMs of a bunch of vendors.

Is that because you fully understood their offerings and have decided you don’t need what they have?

Or did you get tired of reading basically the same old thing from them, dressed up in different formats?

Now it’s an email, now it’s a pdf, now it’s an infographic.

One of my clients had hundreds of qualified leads who had gone completely silent.

We tried an experiment to see if the leads were really disengaged or just bored.

We invited a small group to a virtual roundtable conversation with one another.

Turns out, they’d just been bored because these same leads who had gone silent for months suddenly signed up for the roundtable.

They attended the roundtable and spoke at length about the same kinds of problems that my client solves.

They instantly went into community-building mode and started suggesting helpful solutions and resources to one another.

All on a 1 hour virtual roundtable call.

And nearly 20% of them signed up for follow-up calls with my client’s sales and tech teams.

How many good quality leads have you invested time and energy into only to have them go silent?