by David A. Saltzman
By 8:12 on Monday morning, Evan Mercer had refreshed the sales dashboard eleven times.
The numbers remained stubbornly unimpressed.
Six months earlier, Evan had been recruited as the chief marketing officer of a fast-growing software company. His mandate had sounded straightforward: launch the company’s new product, fill the pipeline, and prove that last year’s disappointing sales were a marketing problem—not a product problem.
There was also an unspoken fourth item: Do it quickly enough to keep his job.
Evan had done everything a competent marketing executive was supposed to do. He hired a respected agency. Conducted customer research. Refined the brand. Approved a handsome new website. Produced videos with sweeping music, attractive people, and enough drone footage to suggest the software might also be capable of defending a small country.
The campaign generated traffic. Lots of it.
People watched the videos, clicked the ads, visited the website, and downloaded the company’s new 14-page guide, The Future of Enterprise Workflow Optimization.
Then they disappeared.
The sales team blamed the leads. The agency blamed the sales team. The product people blamed the market. The CEO blamed Evan, though he phrased it as, ‘Help me understand what we’re learning.’
Evan knew exactly what they were learning.
They were learning that he might soon have more time to update his LinkedIn profile.
So he called an emergency meeting. For two days, the marketing team revised headlines, changed calls to action, rewrote email subject lines, and adjusted the campaign’s targeting. They simplified the lead form. They shortened the guide. They even removed the stock photograph of five executives pointing enthusiastically at an empty glass wall.
And it worked. Conversions increased by 31 percent.
Evan walked into Friday’s executive meeting carrying the new numbers like Moses returning from the mountain. The CEO smiled. The sales vice president nodded. The tension in Evan’s shoulders finally began to release.
Then the sales vice president cleared her throat. ‘We’re getting more leads,’ she said. ‘But prospects still don’t understand what the product does. When they book a demo, they expect something completely different. Half of them aren’t qualified, and most of the qualified ones never show up.’
The room went quiet.
The campaign had not failed because the ads were poorly targeted. It had failed because the company had made it unnecessarily difficult for customers to understand what they were buying, why it mattered, and what they should do next.
Worse, those problems weren’t confined to the campaign.
The website spoke almost entirely about the company. The demo request required eleven fields. The confirmation email arrived from ‘noreply.’ Pricing was treated like a state secret. The scheduling link offered appointments three weeks away. And the sales deck opened with seven slides about the company’s history before mentioning a single customer problem.
Individually, none of those mistakes looked fatal. Together, they created a remarkably efficient system for turning interested prospects into former prospects.
Evan had been hired to generate demand. But the real threat to his job wasn’t a lack of demand. It was everything his company did to discourage that demand after it appeared.
For the first time in weeks, Evan thought he had fixed the problem.
He hadn’t.
He had simply persuaded more people to enter a sales process that was remarkably well designed to make them leave. The real question was no longer whether Evan could create more effective marketing. It was whether he could find—and eliminate—all the ways his own company was sabotaging it.
And unfortunately, Evan’s company was more the norm than the exception.
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
I haven’t written one of those assignments since the Eisenhower administration, and I am sure it was just as bland as my classmates’. But this summer was different. It was a summer of “God Winks,” coincidences that feel less like chance and more like directional signs from a higher power.
In the first year of the “You’re On Mute” column, we discussed ways to help companies, entrepreneurs, and salespeople tell their story so they could reach and convert the prospects they wanted. We delved into the neuroscience behind those challenges and provided examples of how to identify and repair ineffective messaging.
The challenge was finding the best way to keep providing value without plowing the same ground. That’s where the winks came in. An old friend and colleague invited me to a Zoom call to review his soon-to-be-published website and offer suggestions. As he scrolled down the homepage, I did what I always do; I suggested different language and offered advice on the placement of some text and the removal of other information. I reminded him that the “hero section” had to make it clear that the prospect was the hero, and so forth.
When he finished the initial scroll, a long pause in the conversation made me wonder if I had annoyed the crap out of him. When he finally spoke, it was just one incredulous question: “How do you do that?” “How do I do WHAT?” I asked, still fearing I had lost a friend. He said, “Everything you just told me to do is absolutely spot on, and you did it without spending hours.” He continued, “You see things others don’t notice, and they make a critical difference. Thanks!”
Relieved, I thanked him for the opportunity to be helpful and ended the Zoom call before I could get myself into trouble.
A bit later in the summer, I attended a national industry trade show. During “lunch with the exhibitors,” I shared a table with an old friend, one of the most accomplished and creative people I have ever met. I asked whether he had noticed that out of 60 or 70 exhibit booths, only three or four showed any evidence that they understood a problem someone in the business might have and could help solve it.
My friend said, “Only you would notice that – others would just walk by. They wouldn’t consciously know why they didn’t stop to learn more; they would just keep walking.” I agreed, but opined that some of those exhibitors were humongous companies with really great marketing teams, and wondered out loud how THEY could make such a miss.
Then it happened. My buddy said, “You’ve always been able to do that.” Being my usual thick-headed self, I asked, “Do what?” My friend replied, “You’ve always been able to almost instantly analyze all kinds of communications and find fixes for them. You should lead with THAT,” he said.
And so we begin our second year of “You’re On Mute. Why Your Clients Can’t Hear You” by examining how companies and their teams create self-inflicted sales losses.
Still wondering if your message is costing you sales?
Download the “Hidden Sales Loss ScorecardTM.” In less than 10 minutes, you will discover whether confusing communication is quietly driving away prospects and where to fix it. https://www.thesaltzmangroup.com
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