Notice how many marketing links now require your “corporate email” address? Ever take a look at lead lists and wonder why up to 60% of any list has people’s Gmail and Hotmail accounts?
Customers do not want to give out their email addresses because they will get sucked into DiscoverOrg lists and get hounded by vendors. They will be deluged by those expensive Hubspot or Marketo machines that spam until they buy or die.
Many marketing departments, particularly in well funded startups and large software firms, do the easy stuff well. Anyone can get lists, send out marketing whitepapers which do not increase knowledge, gather names at webinars and events and turn on the spam engines.
If someone downloads a whitepaper, it becomes a “lead” and the army of recent college grads in their first “marketing” job call to see if you need more info.
Companies like Hubspot and Marketo were born to automate mediocrity in marketing. Expensive mediocrity. And as a B2B tech startup, you cannot afford the dilution it takes to pay for this nor can you waste the time from the mostly useless leads that come in.
Execs and decision makers either avoid these events/webinars/downloads or they give out only Hotmail and Gmail accounts. Even low level non-buyers avoid giving out any email whenever possible.
The result is prospects—real buyers—have retreated behind any wall they can find to avoid the unwanted vendor calls and constant emails. They do more engagement before ever letting a sales person see them. They hide.
So what are the smart marketers doing?
They are delivering ONLY educational, value add type of events. They may even spoof their messaging with “this is a sales free zone” which in a recent event got rave reviews from prospects. After the event, almost every prospect remembered that one line!
When everyone is using the same tools, doing the same thing, they will get the same results.
The real winner does what everyone is NOT doing—-the innovative and perhaps HARD stuff—like getting trusted advisors to bring your solution into a deal while your competitor is spamming the person with whom you are meeting.