You’ve tightened the targeting, tested new creative, rewritten the landing page, and found people with the job titles everybody agreed you should pursue.

Yet here you are again, explaining why all that activity hasn’t produced enough conversations with people who might actually buy something.

So, before you authorize another round of adjustments, take a look at whether or not you're talking about a problem that they buyer will respond to. 

Your buyer has enough work without deciphering your advertisement

Imagine a CMO scrolling LinkedIn between meetings. She’s already dealing with a sales leader who doesn’t like the leads, a budget she may have to defend, and a team wondering which project will become this afternoon’s emergency.

Your ad offers her an “AI-powered platform” that will “transform workflows” and “accelerate growth.”

Do you think she's going to stop and investigate what the thing actually does or which of her problems it might solve? 

Of course not. 

Compare that with an ad describing the argument she had that morning: Marketing keeps hitting its lead targets while Sales keeps missing its pipeline targets, and nobody can agree where the trouble starts.

That gives her something familiar to grab onto. If you can explain why it happens and offer a useful way to investigate it, you might earn the next few seconds of her attention.

The practical test is whether your buyer can recognize a situation they care about before you start explaining your software. If they need a demonstration just to understand why they should care, your advertising has some unfinished work.

Give them a reason to question what they’re doing now

Most buyers can live with more aggravation than a software vendor would like to believe.

A revenue leader knows the forecast could be better. A CMO knows acquisition costs are uncomfortable. Both may be perfectly willing to complain about those things without volunteering to replace a system, retrain a team, or explain another purchase to Finance.

Your job is to understand what would make the trouble worth addressing.

What keeps happening? What does it cost them? What have they already tried? Why might the familiar fixes keep producing the same disappointing result?

Those questions help you build an argument around something the buyer has experienced. You can show them why a problem persists, what they may be overlooking, and how continuing with the current approach could affect an outcome they’re responsible for.

That’s the beginning of problem agreement.

When a buyer recognizes the difficulty and agrees it deserves attention, Sales has somewhere useful to begin. Without that agreement, your salesperson can spend an entire discovery call trying to persuade someone that there’s anything worth discovering.

Make the next step worth the interruption

Suppose your ad does its job and stops the scroll and the buyer recognizes the situation, suspects you understand something useful, and clicks.

Then the landing page asks them to book a demo.

You’ve moved from helping them understand a business problem to asking them to sit through your product presentation. Depending on what the ad promised, that can feel like a fairly abrupt change of subject.

This happened to me this morning. Got an email offering a useful piece of information so I said send it. Then I immediately got an email saying they need 45 minutes to apply it to my situation. 

No bueno. 

So if you offer a diagnostic, deliver a diagnosis. If you promise a review, give the buyer specific observations they can use. Dressing up a standard sales pitch as “free advice” is not "adding value."

The offer should make the next conversation easier to accept and more useful to attend.

Give Buyers a Reason to Keep Talking

Before you spend more money getting people to click, follow the experience you’re asking them to have. Does the ad describe a problem they recognize? Does the offer help them do something about it? And when they respond, do they get what you promised?

A buyer who accepts your help has given you an opening. If you use it to spring a sales meeting on them, you’ve given them a reason to regret responding. Deliver something useful, and your salesperson can start the next conversation by asking what they found helpful and what still needs attention.

That’s a much better place to begin than chasing someone whose last interaction with your company left them feeling conned.

If your campaigns are producing activity but too few worthwhile sales conversations, our complimentary GTM Checkup can help identify where that experience breaks down and what we would change first.

Request your complimentary GTM Checkup.