Don’t get immediately de-qualified by corporate customers – the importance of “how not to lose” for B2B startups

I recently worked with a client who did everything perfectly by the book in their outreach:

Pro Tips for a successful Cold Email Outreach Campaign

1.) Their messaging was timely, it addressed a pressing problem their target customer had.

2.) They addressed the pain straight on and talked about it in a way their audience related to.

The results:

• Over 60% click-through rate on their emails

• Targets clicking on all their channel links in the emails, not just for one email, but for consecutive emails

• They had a reply rate of 8%

These are the metrics of a very good cold outreach campaign, showing that what they were talking about really mattered to their audience.

But instead of booking meetings, all the answers were a polite “no”. In the tone of “We are good, we don’t need help, but thank you for reaching out. You really nailed the problem.”

Now unless your target audience are bored night-time security guards with nothing better to do, you don’t get your target audience to engage so strongly with your messages if your problems don’t address a problem they need help with.

Don’t forget, we are not talking about high opening rates, which are often totally misleading, but click-throughs. People actually clicking on their links and spending time on their website, their YouTube channel, their LinkedIn – and often multiple times.

So what was going wrong?

During their customers' visits to their website and other channels the client got “dequalified”.

Meaning the target felt, that yes they needed help. And yes, the client was giving a great impression in their messages, that they would be qualified to solve that problem based on their apparent understanding of the problem.

But they didn’t pass the most basic background check every company that does outreach faces - their website did not address the most obvious fears and objections their target customers had.

They didn’t know “how not to lose”.

They did everything they were taught on “how to win”. They really understood their customer’s pain and perfectly addressed those pain both in their messaging and their product.

But they did not put the same effort into understanding their customer’s, and equally important their stakeholders’, fears and objections and addressing them in their passive messaging.

And with passive messaging I mean the content / messaging you are not actively sending to your targets. But the content you put out there in your different channels for the customer to find and consume at their own time without your active involvement.

And that content needs to address their fears and objections – that’s “how not to lose”.

This is where too many startups fail and get dequalified in the initial stages of their customer journey, without even getting a chance to run discovery and go deeper into their customer understanding.

In the case of my client, a China based manufacturer of high quality, customizable kitchen equipment, the most prohibitive fear was, that most customers had made the experience of buying equipment from China based on lower prices just to be frustrated by low quality, which effectively harmed the customer’s operations.

The message to get fully customizable kitchen equipment to improve kitchen operations the way McDonalds is famous for was powerful.

But when the target customers reached their website, all they found were messages about low price offers.

Nothing about the decades of experience the client had. Or the fact that the client was producing to the highest standards in the industry set by McDonalds.

They knew what the customer needed to address their pains and they knew they could deliver it. So they knew “how to win”.

But they didn’t know what the customer feared and what would prevent them from even starting a sales process - they didn’t know “how not to lose”.

Are you prepared "not to lose"?

Have you made the effort:

1. To understand not only who your perfect customer persona is, but also who the stakeholders in the decision process are?

2. To understand what the fears and objections of your persona and of those stakeholders are?

3. To address the most prohibitive fears and objections at the earliest stage in your customer journey?

If you feel like you might struggle to ensure you don’t lose, please feel free to reach out and see whether I can help you “not to lose” but to win.