B2Bs: Fix This. Save Yourselves.
I’m gonna keep this quick. Stop. Just stop. Your cadences aren’t working. Your conversion rates are truly abysmal and your hopes and dreams for what your conversion rates could be – well we’re not thinking big enough.
Think for a minute about the trash filling your inbox from other orgs, ineffective ads targeting you, the times you register for <anything> and then don’t read the thing or turn up to the event, etc. Is your outreach any better?
Your foundational content is probably pretty good by now. But all the interstitial content? The nonsense masquerading as “personalization,” the drudgery scripts we assign our salespeople? Yuck, it’s all yuck. Of course our conversion rates are low.
Your Task, If You Choose to Accept It: Cross-Functional Emergency CRO Session
I’d recommend you book a team meeting, with Sales and Marketing, in 2 weeks. Below is your required reading. And then get those smart heads together to determine how you’ll break the legacy binds in order to start delivering fabulous solutions to terrific prospects and customers who desperately need your expertise.
Drop the Legacy Thinking; Materially Improve Conversion from Top of Funnel through to Closed
Everything Wrong With Prospecting, Anthony Iannarino, Keynoter, President
My good friend, Anthony, never pulls any punches:
“We are increasingly choosing prospecting approaches that harm our professional relationships.
The automation that claims to solve the problem of getting meetings causes the exact opposite outcome.”
Don’t miss this ^.
The Tyranny of More, Hank Barnes, Gartner Chief of Research
Hank has been 🔥 for yearsssss and when he publishes, I pretty much drop everything. If you can get enough folks in a room advocating for Hank’s suggestions, you’ll be on to something BIG. I mean:
“The more we more, the more we:
Sacrifice quality for quantity, and get seduced by the bigger numbers of targets
Make decisions without enough research and rigor (leading to more bad decisions–which drives the need for more new decisions to course correct
Tolerate mediocrity and poor conversion rates”
What If They Aren’t Looking? Dave Brock, CEO Partners in Excellence
Prolific, brilliant Dave Brock – cannot recall a time I didn’t admire the heck out of him. One of his recent pieces came out of a discussion we were having about the value of latent pain and the prospects who aren’t searching.
Could not agree more. Here’s just a hint of one of the many ways we get content/messaging wrong:
“‘We do this already, we get references, we get testimonials, we sponsor speakers and influencers to talk about us and how great we are…..’
But we are asking them to talk about the wrong thing!
Instead of talking about us, they need to be talking about the industry, the markets, risks they see, things that are changing, things they are doing and things they are concerned with. They may talk about their strategies, their points of view, actions they are taking to respond to change.”
Finally, I’d recommend these two roadmaps to help you take a step back, audit, and start focusing outreach on the mindset of brilliant prospects who aren’t searching. I’ve taken the liberty of laying out a model audit for your team to conduct on your own orgs.
Why Prioritizing *Not* Searching Over Searching Is Critical to CRO
Ahead of your cross-functional session to break the legacy binds of structures and cadences that aren’t delivering, to get past the escalating Tyranny of More, your team is capable of designing a new path.
Your time commitment upfront is less than 10 hours to start to turn this around. The bigger hurdle will be helping your organizations understand the need for change and the challenges therein.
BONUS: Your competitors also suck at this. Prioritize this work and you leapfrog the market.
You can do this! Lead! And then share your story with the rest of us 😉
