And The Insanity Continues……

We seem to be in a continued death spiral with our customer engagement strategies. I recently read a post, Why Buyer Engagement Is Harder Than Ever And 4 Ways To Improve It. While I’m a great fan of Gartner and the research, I had mixed feeling about this post.

I guess the best ways to characterize my reactions are:

Well Duuugggghhhh……..

And…….. Oh Shit!!!

We’ve known, for ages, that Buyers Don’t Want To Talk To Sellers! It’s now up to 72% that prefer a rep-free experience, and I anticipate this to increase in the coming year.

We’ve known the number of people involved in the buying process is increasing. Eleven years ago, with the initial publication of Challenger it was a little more than 6. Years later with the release of Challenger Customer, it increased to more than 11, and now it is 11-20.

And, the most terrifying data point is, apparently, the number of touches required to get 1 qualified meeting is 66! I can just imagine marketing and sales managers adjusting their outreach strategies—dial up the email sequences to 66 or more, buy more power diallers to ramp up the daily dials, sextuple the meaningless social outreaches.

Afterall, “It’s just math…….., we can run the numbers!”

We know we have to target multiple stakeholders. We know we have to understand our customers. We know we have to develop value driven insights. And we know we have to execute these at scale!!!

With due respect to all my friends at Gartner, the only thing that is new–and terrifying— is that “scale” now has skyrocketed from the traditional numbers of 15-20 outreaches to 66 and more!

When are we going to recognize our outreach strategies are broken! Profoundly so!

We don’t solve these by doing more, we must dramatically rethink everything we do to reach and engage prospects! What we are doing isn’t working and doing more of the same is not going to solve the problem, it will simply aggravate it. It will drive more prospects to Rep-Free buying experiences!

What do we do?

First, we have to respond to the interest and demand for digital engagement. Where our strategies were sales led, digitally supported, we now have to think of them as digitally led and sales supported.

How do we rethink our digital engagement strategies? How to we help customers learn, to think differently, but doing this digitally? How do we show up when customers search? How do we incite customers to search? How do we leverage our current customers and their stories/experiences?

How do we effectively show up where and how our customers want us to show up? And how do we do this with relevant tools throughout their buying process?

Right now, so many of the digital buying experiences are hidden behind a “wall,” and to gain entrance we supply our email, phone number, and number of employees/revenue–so that the company can generate………….

Drum roll please……

A prospecting call, “Thank you for your interest in our product, can we arrange a time for a demonstration….”

We, collectively seem to be committed to this continued insanity! When are we going to recognize that doing more of what hasn’t been working isn’t an answer to what our customers and prospects are telling us?

But there are some few organizations that seem to be breaking the code, doing better by doing different.

Some things we see them doing include:

• Abandoning an ever widening outreach. Instead becoming more sharply focused on fewer! They are viciously focused on their ICP, both enterprises and individuals in those enterprises. They know, precisely who their ideal customers are, they know the behavioral styles (organizationally and individually) of the customers that are highly likely to be interested. They leverage data and other tools to more effectively sharpen their focus.
• They understand those customers deeply. They know their strategies, their challenges, their goals. They know the likelihood they have an interest in addressing those issues.
• They provide meaningful, highly tailored content, based on who the customer (individually), the information that customer has consumed, what they are seeing from their peers in the organization. Again, they leverage tools that enable them to analyze the customer actual digital engagement, and what might be most meaningful/impactful to them at the moment.
• They design seller interventions based on the customer digital engagement. These interventions are unique to their role, their company, and their digital consumption to date. The sellers are able to offer insights based on where the buyer is, what they have experienced, to date, and what might be most important to help them move forward.
• Prospecting is important to these sellers. But these prospecting efforts are very narrow, very focused. The outreaches are based on deep understanding of the individual they are contacting and the organization they work for. The outreaches are tailored not just for these, but adjusted for behavioral styles of the individual/organization they are contacting. And their “sequences” are unique to that individual/organization.
• Since this prospecting is so unique to the individual and company, the hit rates are very high, some we see with opens/responses exceeding 50%. As a result, the number of outreaches to get a response tends to be very low. Having said this, standing out in all the noise is difficult. However good their outreach strategy is, sometimes it’s just lost in inboxes filled with crap. So these companies are innovating in their outreach. Some through meaningful discussions in social channels, some through high impact web/podcasts–though it’s hard to cut through the increasing noise in those channels. We’ve seen some creative uses of direct mail–since those mailboxes tend to be emptier. One of the most interesting prospecting outreach strategies we’ve seen as a form of “door to door.”
• Since these prospecting outreaches are more effective, the number of customers needed to be “prospected,” to generate an interaction is significantly lower than those with a volume, blind outreach strategy. But we do see these organizations eventually standing out, by persisting with highly personalized, highly relevant, highly researched outreaches.
• Increasingly, we see true, “thought leadership,” through the use of real expertise in social channels.
• We are seeing these organizations leverage current customer relationships, referrals, and other introductions very effectively.
• And, we are seeing these organizations discovering “less is more.” Because their outreaches are so impactful, to generate new opportunities, they don’t have to focus on volume. Instead they focus on deep quality, meaningful outreach. And they can afford to to this because they don’t have to “touch” their prospects 66 times.

I don’t want to suggest these organizations have discovered the “magic solution.” It’s common sense, it’s what we’ve always known to increase engagement. They are just doing it and doing it effectively.

I, also, don’t want to suggest it is easy for these organizations. The well has been so badly poisoned by everyone else, it’s difficult to stand out in the noise. But they don’t succumb, they perist, knowing that prospects will see and respond to something different–something more relevant, more personalized, more focused on them and what they need than on what the vendor is trying to push.

I’m not sure I know all the answers, I think we, collectively, are discovering them. But we need to recognize that our current outreach strategies are badly broken. Doing more will simply result in driving more customers away, making it even more difficult to engage prospects.

We have to completely rethink and reinvent our customer engagement strategies. We have to build them from a digital engagement first, with engineered sales interventions.