What’s your lead engagement approach for leads and customers who are overwhelmed by content?
There’s so much content noise out there every day, on LinkedIn, on blogs like this, on newsletters and 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 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.
Disengaged is the default
To re-engage them, it’s not enough to say relevant, helpful things.
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 it is for your target audience, it doesn’t matter if you’re “where they are” on social media.
Lead engagement remains out of reach..
At best they’ll stop scrolling long enough to get a vague sense of your headline, then keep scrolling.
More likely they’ll delete your emails and ignore your calls and maybe even block you on LinkedIn if you’re coming on even a little too strong.
The worst part of this is that these are often the same leads who were very engaged a few months ago. They’re the same leads who were qualified by marketing, who binged on your content. They attended your 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 get those leads engaged with you again represents not only a lot of potential revenue, but a lot more in-depth understanding of what your target market really needs. As long as they’re silent they’re not buying, and you’re not learning.
In lead engagement, it’s who says it that 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.
Their default is set to ignore.
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.)
It’s not the message, it’s the medium. (Someone said that before, right?)
So how do you get their peers, people with the same title, from the same industry, going through the same problems, to deliver the message?
You do this by getting them into a conversation with one another.
And because the word “vendor” causes a Pavlovian dis-engagement response, what you need to do is distance yourself from that conversation. Sit quietly in the corner, listening intently, saying nothing.
When I run an Buyer Roundtable for my clients, I get the client to 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 get the attendees to forget we’re there and enter a deep discussion with one another.
There’s an art to lead engagement
And getting it right makes the difference between a good year and a great year.
See also: Here’s what one of the attendees at an Buyer Roundtable told me
Want to chat about lead engagement through buyer roundtables? Fill out the form here and I’ll get in touch, or call me at 647-479-5856.