Let Buyers Move at Their Own Pace
Don’t Scare the “Bejeezus” Out of Them with Aggressive Sales Tactics
It’s true: buyers want your marketing information. What they don’t want is your sales pitch.
They don’t want cold calls, or your Sales team bothering them just because they downloaded a white paper. It’s a sure turnoff in the sales process and could easily lead them to drop your company from their research.
Ardath Albee’s blog post “The Payoff for B2B Content Marketing is Movement”
sums this up well.
As she says:
“Pestering a prospect to move faster makes them dig in their heels and stay stuck, or even reverses their intention to change (think delete, unsubscribe, and voicemail jail).
Why? You’ve just scared the bejeezus out of them.
The goal of marketing should be to produce incremental movement.”
We rarely think of marketing’s goal being incremental movement based on the buyer’s preferences. Instead, we dangle promotions in front of our buyers, hoping they’ll respond.
Our Sales team has numbers to hit by the end of the quarter so we send out another email blast. Or leads have dropped off lately so we schedule a product overview webinar – all reactive marketing moves designed to “shock” our buyers into taking action.
But does it really work?
What is our real goal with content marketing? Building relationships with our buyers by giving them content that satisfies their information needs throughout the sales cycle. To do that well means you need a long-term view that eliminates blatant sales messages and gives buyers helpful, high-value information.
This may mean telling your Sales team “No” the next time they ask for a last minute email blast to bring in more leads. It means educating your peers on why content marketing has a valuable pay-off, and the importance of letting prospects move at their pace. It means setting expectations with your Executive Team so they understand how content marketing will achieve your revenue goals, but they have to let the system work.
Remember, incremental movement is the goal. Scaring the bejeezus out of your buyer is not.
Next Steps
Want to use content marketing to generate leads? Join my upcoming webcast “5 Keys to Using Content for Effective Lead Generation” on Sept 22 at 11 am PT. Get the details and register here.
Comments
Does your organization support letting the buyer move at their own pace?