Identify The Problem

Getting top-of-the-funnel prospective customers off the sidelines and into your sales process is challenging.

Often, these are prospective customers who either:

  1. Have a problem and don’t know it OR
  2. Are aware of the problem and avoiding it.

In both cases, inertia is working against us because their current practice/activity of doing nothing (in the domain related to our product or serive) is much less work than confronting the problem and acting on it.

In order to get these prospects off the sidelines, we want to do two things:

  1. Make them aware of the problem
  2. And make avoiding the problem less desireable than doing nothing

We need to wake the bear, then poke him.

Paint A Vision

There are several ways to do this, but I tend to think that the two most powerful ways are:

  1. Painting a vision of a future that’s so exciting it’s irresistable OR
  2. Painting a vision of a future so bleak that it’s unpleasantness is frightening

In both cases, we’re seeking to create a vision so compelling that it can overcome intertia. These should be visions so strong that someone is willing to get off the couch and do something to move towards that vision.

This is really challenging but, once you nail it, it’s gold.

Help Them Realize It

Then, once we’ve done that, we want to make sure we make ourselves available through our sales and lead nurturing processes to help them navigate the process required to help our prospect achieve that vision – even if that means that sometimes they choose a competitor to help them achieve it.

After all, it really is all about making sure the prospect’s needs are met.

So, if you have a prospect (or type of prospect) who isn’t as engaged as you’d like, can the campaigns extoling the virtues of your product (after all, remember, we don’t really sell products) and, instead, focus on the logical consequences that will follow if the prospect elects not to focus on addressing the core problem that you help them to solve.