The garbage chute

Today's GTM playbook generates garbage leads

Hi all -

I’ve been thinking about the “B2B go-to-market playbook” and am… sad.

Sad because every B2B SaaS business knows what it wants (new, happy customers). And yet, we do a bunch of activities that are dumb and wasteful.

How do you get a happy customer? You basically need these ingredients:

• They’re the right fit: right person, right company

• They’re in a buying situation: changing is a priority

• They understand enough: to choose you & become successful with you

And yet.

Our activities stuff our funnels with unqualified opportunities. Wrong person, wrong company, no need to change, no clue about your business, no chance of success. And we try to jam these poor souls into our sales process, get them to buy.

For each of the following “best practices”, ask yourself… which of these is actually likely to create a successful buyer more often than not?

• Free ebook download

• Top-of-funnel Google Ad

• Generic webinar

• Any ad that directs the recipient to “get a demo”

At best, they give your salespeople a lot of work. It’s hard to sell to bad-fit non-buyers. Builds those sales skills, I guess.

Overall, these traditional lead-gen tactics turn your sales funnel into a garbage chute.

What’s the alternative?

I am increasingly convinced that content for buyer enablement is THE sustainable marketing motion.

You build a content engine that speaks to your buyer - focused on what they care about as it intersects with what you do. And instead of hiring a just-out-of-college writer, you get a subject matter expert to create content on a regular basis. Maybe it’s just a newsletter; probably it’s a podcast / video, which is then cut up and distributed on social and wherever else your buyers are.

It doesn’t take much budget to execute this - far less than your social ads budget. It compounds as you build your content library. It creates successful customers, rather than unqualified leads. And it builds an expertise / brand moat that can set you apart from customers.

What do you think? Why aren’t you doing this?