Twenty-odd years ago I was playing golf with a friend, both of us low handicappers, on a course neither of us had seen before. He hit a good drive, then put his approach two feet from the pin. I told him it was a great shot.
We walked up and found it was a double green: one green serving two holes, with two pins. He was two feet from the wrong one. He took four putts to get down and made double bogey. And he hit the green.
That is most of the B2B marketing I see. The message is fine. The channel is fine. The execution is fine. The target is wrong, and when the target is wrong, nothing else you do matters.
Better copy won't fix the wrong audience
When a campaign underperforms, the usual move is to rewrite the copy, change the offer, or try another channel. Sometimes that's right. But if two out of every three people seeing the message were never going to buy, no rewrite will save it, and the rewrite makes it look as though the copy was the problem.
Put the same message in front of the right people and the same copy suddenly works.
First, build your segments
Two words get used as if they mean the same thing, and they don't. Segmenting decides who could buy from you: the kinds of company you win with, and the roles inside them that make the decision. Targeting decides who is ready to buy now. You need both, in that order.
Most companies sell to three or four kinds of customer, and most market to all of them with one message.
A company that makes commercial water systems sold to hotels, apartment buildings, senior living and car washes, with one campaign. Those are four different buyers. A car wash thinks about water as one of its biggest costs. A hotel thinks about showers, kitchens and grounds. A senior living facility with 120 residents has a fixed amount it uses. Each has a different person making the decision. Blended into one cost-per-lead, all four looked bad.
Blending hides what's working. Say one segment costs $100 to win a customer and the other two cost $500 and $700. The average says $350. Your real cost is $100, in the one segment you're winning, and the other two are hiding it.
So the work starts with segments built from your best customers, each with its own buying unit: who champions it, who signs, who evaluates, who uses it. Every signal after that runs through those segments.
Then, target who's moving now
Once the segments tell you who fits, targeting asks who is ready this week. The segment gives you the context; the behaviour gives you the timing. Two signals matter:
- Researching your category. People at companies that fit, reading about the problem you solve, anywhere on the web.
- On your site. Named visitors from companies that fit, and the pages they read.
Either one on its own is noise. Run through your segments, they become a short list worth working.
One detail matters more than it sounds. The gate is the company, not the title. The CFO signs, but it's often someone else on your pricing page at 11 p.m. A filter on job title throws that signal away. Keep it, and note where that person sits in the buying unit.
What a sales-ready lead looks like
For an employee-benefits broker, the lead we build looks like this:
- a company in a state he's licensed in
- 50 to 500 employees
- the owner, CFO or head of HR
- researching benefits this week
- with a policy renewing in the next six months
Five boxes ticked before anyone picks up the phone. Most companies have never had a lead with five boxes ticked. That person deserves a call, a follow-up email, and a follow-up after that.
The order matters too
A retail-sector client started with a market of about three million people. The segments narrowed that to a few hundred companies, and then to the people inside them with the right titles. Last week, six hundred of those people, each researching or on the site and each scored from one to ten, went to the sales lead.
He made seventy calls, and he called the twos and threes.
The segmenting was right. The targeting was right. The calls went to the wrong end of the list. Somebody still has to work it, in score order.
When targeting is right, small things work
Another client: find the right person at a company that fits while they're researching, visit their site, wait a day, then send a LinkedIn connection request with no message at all. Seventy-five percent accepted, and these were VPs of Sales and account executives, not founders being polite. Nobody gets that rate from a cold list. That isn't a clever message. It's targeting.
It should get sharper every week
The last piece is the one most tools leave out. Replies, meetings, wins and losses should flow back into the scoring, so the system learns who actually buys from you and the segments sharpen every month. A tool that does the same thing on day 300 as on day one is automation. A system that improves from your own results is what you want.
Three ways to work with us
Everything is built for the company in front of us:
- Run it yourself. We deliver the targeting, scored and in your CRM. Your team runs the campaigns.
- We run it for you. Targeting, email, LinkedIn and calls, run by us for a fixed fee.
- Paid on results. For the right company, we run it and are paid on the revenue it produces.
Which one fits is what a 20-minute call is for.
If this sounds like you, or a client of yours
If you're a B2B company with a CRM your team actually uses, and you suspect you're spending money reaching the wrong people, book 20 minutes below. I'll tell you straight whether it's a fit.
If you're an advisor with a client in mind, put their name in the referral field. You stay in the room, and the referral is handled per deal.
— John Gallagher