By Aldwin Neekon
Disengaged leads are a sales graveyard. You invest time, money, and effort into nurturing them, only to have them go radio silent. But what if you could turn those cold leads red hot? What if you could reignite interest and turn lost sales into won deals?
The answer lies in lead engagement. It’s the art of creating meaningful connections with potential customers, keeping them interested in your product or service, and ultimately guiding them down the sales funnel. It’s about understanding their needs, providing valuable content, and fostering a relationship built on trust and mutual respect.
In a content-saturated world, simply generating leads isn’t enough. Engagement is the key to unlocking their true potential. By implementing a strategic lead engagement plan, you can transform those passive prospects into active buyers.
This article by Aldwin Neekon dives deep into effective lead engagement strategies, providing actionable tips to win back lost sales. Keep reading to discover how to re-engage dormant leads and turn them into loyal customers!
Quick Overview:
What is Lead Engagement?
Lead engagement refers to the ongoing process of building relationships with potential customers throughout the buyer’s journey. It involves providing them with valuable content, interacting with them on various platforms, and nurturing their interest in your products or services.
Why is Lead Engagement Important?
Effective lead engagement is crucial for several reasons:
- Increases Lead Conversion Rates: By nurturing leads and building relationships, you can significantly increase the chances of converting them into paying customers.
- Improves Customer Lifetime Value: Engaged leads are more likely to become loyal customers who purchase repeatedly and recommend your business to others.
- Shortens Sales Cycle: By consistently engaging with leads, you can address their concerns and move them through the sales funnel faster.
- Boosts ROI: Investing in lead engagement strategies can yield a significant return on investment by maximizing the potential of your leads.
Common Challenges of Lead Engagement:
- Keeping Leads Engaged: In today’s information overload, capturing and maintaining lead attention requires consistent effort and valuable content.
- Identifying Disengaged Leads: It’s crucial to recognize when leads lose interest to tailor your approach and re-engage them effectively.
- Personalizing Lead Engagement: Delivering personalized experiences across different touchpoints fosters stronger connections and demonstrates your understanding of their needs.
- Measuring Lead Engagement ROI: Tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your engagement efforts is essential to identify what works and optimize your strategy.
Lead Engagement Strategies:
- Content Marketing: Create informative and engaging blog posts, articles, ebooks, and webinars that address your target audience’s pain points and interests.
- Email Marketing: Develop personalized email sequences that nurture leads, provide valuable content, and move them closer to conversion.
- Social Media Engagement: Actively participate on social media platforms where your target audience is present, answer their questions, and share relevant content.
- Lead Webinars and Events: Host informative webinars or events to educate leads about your industry, showcase your expertise, and answer their questions in real-time.
- Gated Content: Offer valuable resources like white papers, case studies, or exclusive reports in exchange for contact information, allowing you to capture leads and nurture them further.
- Lead Scoring: Implement a lead scoring system to qualify leads based on their engagement level and assign them to sales reps accordingly, prioritizing the most promising ones.
- Marketing Automation: Leverage marketing automation tools to automate repetitive tasks, personalize communications, and streamline your lead engagement efforts.
Disengaged is the default
What’s your lead engagement strategy for leads and customers who are overwhelmed by content?
There’s so much content noise out there every day, on LinkedIn, on marketing and sales blogs like this, on lead generation newsletters and strategy 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 (and your customers) 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.
To re-engage with would-be customers who have gone silent, it’s not enough to say relevant, helpful things. It’s not enough to create insightful content about strategy, or tools, or anything.
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 your content is for your target audience, it doesn’t matter if you’re “where they are” on social media or their favourite website.
Lead engagement remains out of reach. And so do potential customers.
At best your leads, prospects, and “almost” customers will stop scrolling long enough to get a vague sense of your headline, then keep scrolling.
More likely they’ll delete your marketing emails and ignore your calls and maybe even go all the way and block you on LinkedIn if you’re coming on even a tiny bit too strong.
Where did it all go wrong?
The worst part of this is that these people are often the same leads who were very engaged a few months ago. They’re the exact right leads for your business. They were qualified by marketing and sales teams.
They wanted your product, needed your service. They raised their hand and asked for help.
They didn’t just engage with your content, they binged on your content. They opened every email and attended all your marketing webinars. They even sat through a discovery call.
They represent an enormous amount of time and money and energy spent by you and your team.
Being able to keep those leads engaged represents not only a lot of potential revenue, but a lot more crucial information about what your target customer really needs. As long as they’re silent they’re not buying, and you’re not learning.
Who says it matters
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.
You might have solid B2B customer research. You might have solid sales strategies. You might have figured out their B2B buying process down to the tiniest nuance.
But if the same words, the same messages, come from one of their peers, they pay attention.
(They’re a bit like teenagers that way.)
Let them chat with their friends. Maybe give them and their friends a lift somewhere. (I’m talking about teenagers here, not your customers).
Stay quiet.
Listen.
If you’ve been a teenager, or been a parent to a teenager, you know this works, right?
So how do you get their peers to naturally deliver your message?
You do this by getting them into a conversation not with you, but with one another.
And because the word “vendor” causes a Pavlovian dis-engagement response, what you need is to stay quiet.
When I run a Lead Engagement Roundtable for my clients, I help the client spend the first minute welcoming everyone, and the last minute thanking everyone. In between, they don’t say anything. I don’t say anything either. I just ask the right questions to help the attendees to forget we’re there and enter a deep discussion with one another.
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 understand their product and have decided you don’t need it?
Or did you get tired of reading the same old marketing content, dressed up in different formats?
Now it’s an email, now it’s a pdf, now it’s an infographic.
Here’s an example of lead engagement
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 of them 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. We also invited an existing customer, but didn’t coach them at all.
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.
There’s an art to lead engagement
And getting it right makes the difference between a good year and a great year.
One of the attendees at a Lead Engagement 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 a peer conversation like this provides your senior leads. And it never hurts to have a customer in attendance to share a product success story either.
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 Lead Engagement Roundtables even when they say no to your webinars, surveys, and product demos.
No pressure, only value
I’ve hosted Lead Engagement 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 peer conversation 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. They trade stories and share helpful links and resources. They ask questions of each other. In giving each other support and help the engage with the problem again.
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.
I’m always happy to hear from you about how you can add peer conversations like these to your customer growth and lead engagement strategy.
What is lead engagement?
What is the difference between lead engagement and lead generation?
For example, when a lead fills out a form to register for your webinar, and they are added to your CRM for the first time, that’s lead generation.
When they attend the webinar and send you a question afterward, that’s lead engagement.
How do you engage new leads?
For example, tactics like email nurture campaigns that automatically send a sequence of emails to newly generated leads will only engage leads if they provide valuable information or tools or processes that the lead craves at that moment.
Why do you need a lead engagement strategy for lost leads?
This can happen if the flow of value from you to the leads stops or if their engagement with you is interrupted by a more urgent or important event.
It can be much more difficult to engage lost leads than to engage new leads, but the principle of providing value remains the same.
Why would leads attend a lead engagement roundtable?
How do you run a lead engagement roundtable?
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”
If you’d like to know more, contact me.
Should I record the lead engagement roundtable?
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”. That’s never the preferred way to treat future customers.
Have someone take notes during the meeting and share those with the rest of your sales, marketing, and product teams.
Use the insights immediately in sales calls and marketing messages.
Who needs to attend a lead engagement roundtable from my company?
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 Marketing Director 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 right reason for sales to call that lead and continue the conversation 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 customers or non-participants. The peer group can feel like they’re being mobbed. You don’t want that.
Here’s a heuristic to help you find the right way to do it:
Keep the number of people from your company to fewer than a quarter of attendees.
Want to chat about lead engagement strategy? Fill out the form here and I’ll get in touch, or call me at 647-479-5856.
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