More Isn’t More
B2B marketing is broken. Too many marketers are on a persistent hunt for more, more, more. Too many buyers are hounded, emailed to death, increasingly chased by agents, in a quest to identify needs and follow them around while they express so-called ‘intent.’ What if less is more?
Two must-reads caught my eye this past week and demonstrate the power of less is more in B2B marketing. This from a fellow CEO — a personal friend, and one-time head of Outsell sales, and longtime sales leader from the likes of IDC and Dataquest.
Sending you a brief blog (below) that might be of interest…about the idea of sharpening outreach to real prospects, more rifle than shotgun! Actually, I was with a client recently who told me she reduced their CRM by 60% and increased focus on the remaining 40% for better traction. I asked her how did it.
She said — it was a brutal process but was long overdue. She and 3 of her management team- CMO, Head of Sales, a senior BD player went in a room and spent 2 full days — sorting/filtering the CRM — stripping out all companies that had not bought for 5 years/were deemed that they were unlikely to ever buy.
Of course it is not an exact science but by being ruthless — they “purged the CRM”. I am mindful, of our dear friend, the late Skip Miller. Skip always told me the best sales guys always had less opportunities in their pipe! (quality vs. quantity.)
I know it does not cost a lot in $ or time — to email loads of prospects, but my client told me it was a “therapeutic process” to get rid of the dead wood. I believe it, and will be doing it at my company too!
Sending warm wishes!
And the email post he sent:
Dear John,
My social reach is down 47% and on the surface, that would make anyone feel like something has gone horribly wrong.
But it hasn’t.
I look at my content performance regularly and over the last 30 days something interesting showed up.
Because whilst my reach might have gone down, my enquiries have increased. And not only just that…qualified leads have increased by 7x on average.
On the surface that looks like a contradiction. It isn’t.
A few months ago I made a deliberate shift in how I talk about who I’m speaking to.
I stopped hedging.
I stopped writing content that could apply to a founder at any stage and started being very specific about the fact that I’m talking to founders doing over £1M in revenue.
The content got more precise. The problems I described got more expensive. The language I used started to assume a certain level of business — because that’s actually who I’m talking to, and pretending otherwise was making everything blurrier than it needed to be.
Some of the audience peeled off. Which is fine. It’s expected.
But the founders I actually want to be in conversation with started reaching out. More enquiries. Better DMs. People who already understood the value before they’d even said hello.
Metrics will lie to you if you let them. We’ve all looked at our analytics and equated success with how much engagement or likes we received on a post.
Or how many followers we added this month.
But if none of it is converting into actual revenue, actual enquiries, actual humans wanting to work with you — the numbers are pointless.
Content that reaches a million people who’d never buy from you is, commercially speaking, worth less than content that reaches a hundred who would.
The vanity metric trap is subtle because reach feels like proof it’s working. The number goes up, you post more of the same thing, the number keeps going up and meanwhile the person who could actually benefit from working with you scrolled past because nothing in your content signaled you were talking to them specifically.
Reach and relevance are not the same thing, and optimising for one often comes at the direct expense of the other.
When you write for everyone, you write for no one. The content gets smooth enough to appeal broadly and specific enough to compel nobody. It gets liked, shared, forgotten.
Positioning is a filter. That’s its entire job. Good positioning attracts the right people and actively repels the wrong ones and most people treat the repelling part like a failure rather than the mechanism working exactly as it should.
So before you celebrate the views or catastrophise the dip in your engagement, make sure you ask yourself honestly whether your content is actually clear about who it’s for and what working with you gets them. Because that is what converts.
Positioning is what turns an audience into a pipeline and if your content could apply to anyone, it’s probably compelling nobody.
A 47% drop in reach with a 7x rise in leads isn’t a bad month. It’s proof that my positioning working.
So the next time you look at your metrics, make sure you stop measuring how many views you’re getting and start measuring who is actually viewing it.
In my opinion,
Amelia
linkedin.com/in/ameliasordell
Thank you, Amelia, for calling it like it is! Less is more, especially when it has more intelligence around it. And by the way, Outsell’s Rob Keenan, expert in B2B is seeing the same thing with websites. Yes, traffic is down. But conversions are up. The reason:
1. The junk traffic is gone.
2. We’re finally focusing on real people with real needs and not the “so called” audience that we got from Google that didn’t truly interact with a brand anyway.
In today’s run-amok B2B marketing world less with more intelligence around it really is more.