Why Your Lead Gen Will Nosedive In 2022. You Need To Act Now.
Let me start with this statement:
"2022 may turn out to be the year that your SDRs become obsolete and your lead generation nosedives. Worldwide."
You may think this is a bold prediction.
But there are three good reasons to suspect it may be right.
Why?
Because 2022 is the year when three lead gen killers will be converging.
Here they are:
Lead Gen Killer 1: Apple and Google have been busy killing off your 3 favorite sales lead and demand gen methods.
Following the latest updates by Apple and Google, cold calling, email campaigns, and browser tracking are all endangered species now.
In IOS version 15 there is a new feature, called "Silence Unknown Callers". It is a new feature in IOS V.15. You get to it by navigating Settings -> Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers
It does exactly what it says.
It mutes any calls from phone numbers that are not listed in your Contacts directory and then sends them to voicemail. There is no ring tone and no vibration. Unless you happen to be looking at the screen at the very time someone unknown calls, you won't even know they called.
Bam! Your cold calls now go unanswered.
As for emails, Apple has released something called Mail Privacy Protection (MPP).
It stops senders from collecting information about the recipient. According to Apple, the new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and it masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activities, or used to determine the recipient's location.
Sellers will now not know whether a bot or a person opened their emails. You will end up with vastly exaggerated Email Open rates.
The consequence for sellers is that the tried and trusted metric of Email Open Rates has just become hugely unreliable.
The future for Click-Through Rates (CTRs) is also not looking rosy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these metrics are also becoming enormously exaggerated.
The hot leads you thought you had, may now not be hot at all.
Browser tracking is also becoming an endangered species now. Apple says its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is hiding the user’s IP address from trackers. This means they can’t use the user’s IP address as a unique identifier to follow their activities across websites, preventing them to build a personal profile about them.
What will be the consequence?
Your lead quality will nosedive.
So, there you have it.
Cold calling, email blasts and browser tracking have all become either completely defunct, or hugely unreliable.
So much for the promises of data-driven sales and marketing.
Lead Gen Killer 2: Modern Buyers still love to buy. But they now really hate being sold to.
In reality, buyers have never liked being sold to. One reason this sentiment is now really coming to the fore is that the pandemic has further heightened buyers' sensitivities. They are no longer putting up with unsolicited and often poorly focused sales pitches.
Buyers have been responding with their "delete", "disconnect" and "unfollow" buttons in droves. Which means reaching them and ENGAGING them in a meaningful way has just become a lot more difficult. No wonder tons of reps are struggling to make their quota, staff turnover is high and sales tenure is low.
Your mar-tech stack has made it super-easy to reach out to just about anyone, and in huge volumes.
That's now ruining the game for all sellers.
How?
The relentless outreach has turned buyers off, making it now super-difficult to ENGAGE them into a meaningful business conversation.
Take yourself as an example:
Do you enjoy being spammed with irrelevant emails?
Bombarded with random cold calls?
Do you like being lured into accepting someone's LinkedIn invitation, only to be pitch slapped?
Right. Neither do your prospects.
So, what do buyers want these days?
Lead Gen Killer 3: The "traditional" selling model is getting old. In fact, it is now more than 120 years old.
Did you know that the selling model you are probably using right now is older than the Internet?
The sales model you are probably using right now was originally invented in 1898.
Yes, in 1898.
That is way before the Internet, and a full ten years before Henry Ford released his famous Model T.
A lot has happened in 120 years. And a lot has changed in the last two years.
Buyers have changed, but many sellers have not. They are still using the old sales funnel, the one that is inward-looking and focused on what sellers want to sell and on how they want to sell it.
The one that pressures reps to hit their quota every month, every quarter and every year. The one that makes sellers pass this pressure to perform right on to their prospects. The one that creates adversarial seller-vs-buyer relationships, and the one that requires sellers to be trained in objection handling because it is a natural expectation that buyers will resist.
Buyers don't want to be sold to any longer. Frankly, they have not been enjoying a 120 year old selling model being forced on them, where sellers - figuratively speaking - jump out of the bushes and ambush potential buyers with unsolicited sales pitches, hoping that someone will just happen to be interested.
This old sales model has never been sustainable, but buyers had simply grown used to it and they didn't put up much of a fuss.
The pandemic changed all that.
Sensitivities heightened. Buyers became preoccupied with too many personal, medical, health, financial and relationship challenges to still put up with salespeople bothering them.
They have finally had enough, and they are now resisting the old ways.
The Solution: What Your Can Do About It.
So, let's explore what buyers really want these days:
Modern buyers want sellers to understand their business opportunities, risks and challenges. They expect to be educated, guided and helped to make informed buying decisions.
You simply can not achieve this at scale with the same old spammy outreaches from yesteryear. That's a numbers game that has been played for too long and is increasingly being lost.
Isn't it time to change the game and give buyers what they want?
Astute sellers are adjusting their sales engagement approach to align with these new buyer demands.
After all, it seems to me there is a proven and logical sequence to winning new buyers and closing more deals now:
Understand WHO your ideal prospects and buyers are.
Know WHERE you can find them.
Know how to reach out and - crucially - ENGAGE with your buyers.
Draw them into a meaningful business conversation.
Know how to fend off your competitors.
Understand how to give yourself an unfair advantage to win the deal.
Know how to turn your one-off customers into repeat customers.
And, finally, turn your repeat customers into advocates for your business who refer new business to you.
This is a structured, modern, buyer-focused sales funnel approach that enables your reps to hit the ground running from Day 1 and - at the same time - gives your customers a 5-star buying experience that keeps bringing them back for more.
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The Buyer-Focused Sales Funnel
What works now is a new, modern, effective, scalable and proven selling model.
One that switches your focus from what you SELL and how you want to SELL it, to your BUYERS, and how they want to BUY from you.
It's like upgrading from a 1898 model car to a Tesla.
But where do you start?
Start by assessing your current selling model to understand your immediate opportunities for improvement, and where you can get help.
Click on the image below to start...
The Conclusion
Sellers can't just keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.
It's time to change your game.
The Conclusion
Sellers can't just keep doing the same thing and expect a different result.
It's time to change your game.
About
Peter Strohkorb is the Founder and Principal of Peter Strohkorb Advisory, the international Sales Acceleration Advisory firm with a growing list of clients in the b2b services and tech space in the USA, in Australia and in the UK.
Our motto is "More Sales, Faster", and that is exactly what we deliver to you, our clients.
Contact
Phone AUS: +61 (0)411 865 301 | pstrohkorb@peterstrohkorb.com
Phone USA: +1 (628) 246-1242 | peterstrohkorb.com