Followers of this blog will have observed some of my most common rants, that of the futility of “digital marketing”. Of course, I don’t mean all digital marketing, but rather the fruitlessness of using the internet to reach out to new B2B prospects, with the hope of getting a reply.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Every one of you, and I mean each and every one of you, has been targeted by some type of digital proposition, most of us endlessly. It can be an email from a current supplier, an up-date from and industry organization, or countless other marketers, all vying for your attention. We have voice mail, instant messaging, RSS feeds, forums, and groups. We have webinars and video seminars. We also have direct mail, voicemail, webmail, Windows mail, Twitter and….. (me inhalinggggggggggg) and every other aggravating and annoying front from which the salvos fly in like so many scud missiles.
It seems a week doesn’t go by that I don’t marvel at the “new” and “exciting” tactics (read- tomfoolery) being invented by the Googles, Face Books, Data.coms and all the others in cyberspace with the claim of a better and more effective communication tactic for connecting with new B2B clients.
It’s all balderdash. I know it. You know it.
Far too many businesses judge “success” based on who has agreed to engage instead of those who have not. Eventually, you run out of target prospects. In my business, I hear sales people lamenting the challenge of finding new prospects, that they want marketing or someone else to source these leads, and then they will make contact. Or will they?
To be clear, we’re not talking about mass marketing in the B2C world, we’re talking about communicating with organizations in vertical spaces where there is a targeted person that we mustsuccessfully connect with in order to thrive. Moreover, most of us live within account territories that limit the number of possible new prospects, therefore we don’t have the luxury of reaching out to one hundred new potential prospects yet only succeeding five or ten times. What about the other ninety?
The key to getting someone’s attention doesn’t lay in the death by a thousand attempts method. It lays in effective out reach. Let me repeat that, effective communication, and that means achieving two waycommunication.
Two way means you say hello, and they reply. It means you reach out, and someone engages. It means that there are at least two parties involved in the communication dynamic.
Sending an email, leaving a voicemail, sending an invite to a web conference or sending “industry up-dates” are all good examples of largely ineffective prospecting techniques because they’re only ever managed in terms of who responded (minority) vs. who didn’t respond (overwhelming majority)
If you want to succeed in getting someone new to engage, then you must communicate effectively.
Recently, I became fed-up with my companies telco supplier and made arrangements to switch to a competitor. A few weeks later and, voilà, I receive a mysterious greeting card envelope with actual stamps on it. Yes stamps! You know, the kind you have to lick and stick.
Did it get my attention? Did it seem some how odd and out of place amongst the stack of other machine generated mail, direct mail, invoices, and all the other predictable crap on my desk, monitor, voicemail, and smartphone? You bet it did. Once opened, it became clear that this cleaver little tactic (one that I have been using and encouraging others to use for years) was from the fired telco, wondering if they could talk about getting my business back.
Oh the irony! Actually, I think the quote was “Oh the humanity”, but whatever.
Here was a major national telco, the very ones who champion the “digital solution”, the very people who spend billions on trying to convince us to abandon traditional communication methods with the promise of lower effort, lower costs, and better efficacy through cyberspace, social media, industry discussion forums, and on and on.
I find it interesting and frankly, somewhat of a prevarication that the very same people who promote the promise of the new world, have resorted to snail mail with a stamp.
What happened to their robo calls, the email, or direct mail blasts to ask for our business back? Why didn’t they reach out to me with a voicemail, or stuff a message into our final invoice?
I’ll tell you why, because they know it is largely ineffective, that we are all so deluged with constant noise of marketers attacking us on the web, in the streets, and on the air that the jaundice is irreversible.
If you want to engage with someone new, then you have to break out from the commotion and clutter of the common marketers. You have to be different.
How? Well, the telco knew. They new that a letter sent through the mail with a real stamp (not a postage machine) and no return address would be different.
What about placing a small add in the newspaper? “Mr. Jones, I was wondering if you would agree to meet with me?”
What about couriering something interesting to a prospect’s office?
There are numerous ways to stand out from the crowd, to differentiate yourself from all your competitors, who are drowning and annoying these prospects with virtual junk, further distancing their chances of ever accomplishing two way engagements.
If the world largest telco’s are resorting to snail mail, or legacy methods of communication, what does that tell you about their confidence in their digital solution? Makes you think, doesn’t it?
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