Here’s a sorry fact:
most of your prospective customers won’t end up buying your
software-as-a-
Lots of folks who should
buy it, won’t buy it. They have a problem you can solve. But instead of fixing it, they’ll stick with
the poor system they already have.
Others won’t buy your solution because they’ve never heard
of you. Or they’ve found another option
that fits their needs, and they feel there’s no need to look any further.
There are even some prospects that do know you and they do see that your solution would help them… but
they just won’t get around to buying.
These people have visited your website, opened your emails,
read your white papers, sat through a demo, even talked with your sales people
about pricing. They’ve been in your
pipeline for 90 days, 180 days, maybe a full year, but they’ve still not
converted into paying customers.
You might figure that these prospects have gone missing. Despite all you’ve been through with them, no
way, no how will they ever buy.
But you may be wrong about that. Perhaps they’re not truly gone; they’re just
hibernating.
Reviving the
hibernating prospects
Which is to say that with a bit of effort, some of them can
be revived.
For some of these hibernating prospects, other priorities
interrupted them. While they may have
been eagerly evaluating your solution six months ago, more important issues got
in the way. (See “Your
prospect has a day job.”)
At some point, whatever it is that prompted them to look at
your solution in the first place may make its way to the top of their to-do
list once again.
Your job as marketers is to be sure that you and your
solution are still in front of that prospect when that time comes. When they get around to focusing again on the
problem, and they start to think about a solution, you want to be
top-of-mind.
Even better, you can do your part to push your solution
higher up on the priorities list. Make
it clear to the prospect that the problem they’re living with deserves urgent
attention and there’s a cost to ignoring it or pushing it to the back-burner.
Every
day they put off solving it is costly to their organization: wasted money, lost
time, added risk, lost opportunities, and other bad outcomes. (See “Your
toughest competitor…inertia.”)
Be smart about the
cost
Of course, you want to be careful about the costs of these
efforts to revive hibernating prospects.
Using sales professionals to stay in touch can be expensive.
But offering them educational papers, inviting them to
webinars, or showing them customer success stories can keep you on the prospect’s
radar screen. And the cost of keeping
them on an email list is very low.
These communications should provide an easy way for the
prospects to tell you they’re ready to re-engage. And of course, you should also offer them an
easy way to unsubscribe if they’re truly done with you.
Bottom line: Don’t
assume that prospects that you’ve not heard from in weeks, even months have
gone completely cold. They may just need
a bit of attention and some heat to warm them up.
