Pull, Don't Push
I was participating in the “Geospatial Connections” discussion over on LinkedIn and the topic got around to marketing outreach, especially for smaller organizations. As the recipient of volumes of such outreach, I had observations.
I've been working in executive positions with authority for technology selection for well over a decade. As much as I've been tempted to hide my job titles on LinkedIn, I haven't done so and, as a result, my email inbox has typically filled with unsolicited outreach for a wide range of technologies. ERP, CRM, project management, field workforce automation, offshore development services, mapping and GIS tools, various related support services - the list is endless.
Unsolicited outreach can be charitably referred to as “cold calling.” I generally call it “spam.” In all of the years I have had responsibility for selecting and purchasing technology, services, and solutions, I have never once purchased anything based on any form of inbound unsolicited outreach. I don’t know anyone who has been in similar peer positions who has done so, either.
I know this because we talk to each other. When I perceive a need for a tool or service to fill an operational gap, I reach out to people I know and ask them how they dealt with the problem in their organization. I repeat this until I have a list of possible solutions and then I do my own research to see how each may fit with some of my particular needs - integrations with existing systems, licensing models, availability of customer success and support, and so on. After that, I start my own outbound unsolicited outreach.
I. call. them.
By the time I’m talking to a rep, I’ve already talked to a few of their customers and feel pretty good about the solution. It’s a variation on the adage that “I don’t ask you any question I don’t already know the answer to.”
This isn’t to say that cold outreach never works. It must because so many people still do it. Of course, marketing automation makes it cheap and easy to do, so failure has little cost. Marketing automation has also ruined email as a form of communication, search engines as a form of discovery, and social media as a form of information sharing - but that’s a different post.
But most people I know who are really good at their jobs pay absolutely no attention to cold outreach and make sure they never see it in the first place. Those people - and they are the customers you want - will reach out to you. So good content marketing - blog posts with detail, reachable via search, and not locked behind marketing automation forms and other roadblocks is the way you give them the information they need to decide to reach out to you.
Nothing succeeds like success - so talk about your user stories, your successful real-world use cases, and the value your product brought to those use cases. I am never purchasing based on features. I am purchasing based on value and making your value as apparent as possible is a help. I don’t want to be saved from doing my own research by your constant push into my inbox. The research is my process.
There’s a lot of pressure in the market to land and expand customers and it’s tempting to do that with a firehose. In the end, the basics are still what works. Make a good product, articulate its value, and back that up with real success stories. Doing that may generate enough warmth that I decide to reach out to you, and that’s what you want anyway.
Thank you for reading.