By Aldwin Neekon
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, and how a focus on lead re-engagement helped them.
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 on lead re-engagement
They weren’t putting in the work to figure out what was working, what wasn’t, and what should be done about it. As far as marketing strategies or sales strategies go, you can tell this wasn’t going to work that well.
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 and lead re-engagement.
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. These assets are lead re-engagement gold.
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 and lead re-engagement 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. lead engagement is the goal.
Not selling. Lead re-engagement.
Of course once leads are re-engaged with the problem and with your solution, it paves the way for your sales team.
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 Buyer 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. This is what a lead re-engagement win looks like.
Maybe it can work for you.
Let me know if you want to chat:
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