The negative touchpoint
Yes, these exist and they may be impacting you more than you realize
What you see from B2B companies:
"Hi Sam - Me again 🙃 Apologies for the professional persistence. Here's a link to my calendar to grab time for us to talk."
”Let’s send emails out to our market daily!”
“I double tap (call back to back if no answer) prospects regularly”
How your prospects/customers feel about these tactics:
Here’s the deal
For too long, B2B companies have operated under the impression that touches are either “impactful” or “not impactful,” or more simply put, “positive” or “neutral.” Because this is often viewed from a “new customer acquisition” lens, it’s viewed as a binary yes or no response to “Did [activity] lead to better business results?” and not "Did [activity] result in the prospect thinking more positively or negatively of us?"
A CRM will never show “negative” pipeline created, and that’s precisely why this has been so often overlooked.
Until now.
Put yourself in their shoes
Take a step back from your marketing/sales/etc. role and be your prospect for a minute.
You’ve just received 2 calls from a number you don’t recognize back to back after intentionally screening the first call
A few minutes later, you receive an email that starts with “Me again 🙂 I apologize for my professional persistence, but you could really benefit from [our product/service]. Here’s a link to my calendar to grab time for a demo.”
A handful of hours later, you receive another generic email from their marketing drip sequence inviting you to a webinar…but the persona/segment is the wrong one
This is just in one day. And while the above is a fictitious scenario, I can attest firsthand to having the above experience happen to me multiple times over the years from various companies trying to get me to buy from them.
What would you do if you were in their shoes? Remember:
You aren’t looking to buy anything right now (+ you don’t want to deal with the internal change management anyway…)
You’ve never been to this company’s website, so you aren’t even sure what they really do
You didn’t ask for them to reach out to you
You’re already strapped for time trying to do the things you need to complete in your day-to-day
You flat out don’t trust them or know how credible they are
So how would you respond in this scenario? Would you ignore them? Would you cave and take the call? Would you get furious after receiving the Nth call + email from them?
This last group is one that isn’t accounted for.
Most companies today play the volume game
Execs after learning about the predictable revenue model:
"If our SDRs make 100 calls/emails per day, we know we'll get 10 meetings booked and 1 opportunity, so let's get them on the phone cranking them out!"
The problem with this is that while you may get 10 meetings booked and 1 opportunity, you're not taking into account what happens with the other 90 calls/emails that have been hitting your market over the head 10+ times in the past week.
Of those 90 prospects, here's what's likely going to happen:
- 55 are simply going to ignore you
- 20 will finally reply and say they're not interested
- 10 hit the unsubscribe
- 5 are completely turned off and you've burned the bridge for them to ever become a customer
Let that sink in for a moment.
Of the 100 emails/calls you're making, you're making a trade-off.
10 meetings booked for 5 burned bridges.
1 opportunity today for 5 opportunities that will never come about in the future.
This is the epitome of having a short-term focus only and not thinking about how to grow your company in a sustainable way.
Trading 1 opportunity NOW for 5 opportunities that will NEVER be. But the trouble with these 5 burned bridges is that the company simply sees these attempted outreaches as "did not connect" or “unengaged.”
They don't think about how these messages are perceived by the receiver.
So your CRM spits out campaign results of "10% success in booking meetings, 1% SQO rate," leading you to believe the other 90% is still fully intact.
The reality of it is that the campaign results look more like "10% success in booking meetings, 1% SQO rate, 5% removed from all potential future opportunities."
Leading companies today play the quality game
The best BDRs I know don't make 100 dials per day, they make 15 and do their due diligence before reaching out to the prospect. The result is much higher conversion rates with those targeted accounts over the next 1-2 quarters.
The best emails I receive from companies are weekly or monthly sends that add value to ME in my role. Instead of wondering how they can increase their open rates from 15% to 18%, they have open rates of over 40% and an audience that looks forward to receiving these.
The best ad campaigns have multiple ad variations and are constantly being iterated upon on a regular basis to stay fresh + relevant. The message and content behind them are timely + relevant to the audience who sees them.
Buyers have the power now
Use common sense with your prospecting + outreach campaigns.
Are you truly creating a relationship with your prospect?
Are you adding value to them before making any type of ask?
Did you even check to make sure your "personalized" template has the right name?
And my personal favorite question that I ask myself before we take anything to the market:
Would you respond to you?
One LinkedIn post I bookmarked this week
Ahh the podcast. The question every company has asked themselves at some point in the past few years - should we start our own?
Dave shared some great points in this post around how they use their podcast to help grow their company. And I couldn’t help but chime in with my experience while here at Loxo as we started our own since I’m coming from a common position of “What if I’m not an expert/thought leader in the space we sell to?”
One podcast episode I enjoyed this week
Really enjoyed listening to Uri’s experience across multiple startups + how he approaches business strategy. Some really good topics in here as well that he hits on that anyone can learn a thing or two from, notably:
His famous tagline (and book title) “Fall in love with the problem, not the solution” that has helped guide his organizations to building products/services that the market embraces
How and why firing is more important than hiring
That we’re all severely underutilizing the first and last slides in our presentations
And for anyone interested, here’s the playlist I add to each week with some of my favorite podcast episodes:
See you next Saturday,
Sam