Your customers are overwhelmed by content.
Your leads are overwhelmed by content.
There’s so much content 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.
What matters is who says it.
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.
But if the same words come from one of their peers, they pay attention.
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.
There’s an art to this.
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 Executive Roundtable told me
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