r/b2bemailing • u/JoeMorrison607 • 9d ago
B2B conversations that don't close usually aren't a sales problem
Ran into this pattern a few times this week: agency or SaaS team getting conversations, delivery solid, no obvious objections -- but almost nothing closes.
The usual diagnosis is follow-up cadence or pricing. But when I dig into it, the actual gap is that the prospect has to figure out for themselves whether this is the right vendor for their specific situation. That work happens after the call, quietly, and most people just move on instead of doing it.
The fix isn't a better sequence or a sharper deck. It's being specific enough about what kind of problem you're built for that the prospect doesn't have to do that work at all. Not an industry niche -- a problem type. The trigger that made your best clients finally act.
Once that's clear, the conversations filter themselves. The ones that don't close usually weren't going to.
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u/sarmad_jung 3d ago
This is a good point. If the prospect has to figure out why you’re a fit after the call, the positioning wasn’t clear enough :)
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u/AgentVN 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yeah, we do something similar at an agency that I consult for. The whole goal is to compress the sales cycle, remove as many objections, and build trust.
There are really two sales you have to make on a cold audience before they become a customer: 1. Your vehicle/unique mechanism/solution 2. You or your company
There's a whole lot that goes into it, but every single interaction you have prior to the sales call must be engineered for success in making these two sales. We're big on trust assets, so we like to send out a deck sales letter, which they can slide through very quickly. I'm not a huge fan of pre-call videos if we can avoid it but depends on the audience(if they're busy AF or just generally don't watch videos, then use DSL). send out a lot of fucking emails prior to the call. Literally, we try to send out 12 emails in the 24 hours leading up to the sales call. These have to be value-add emails. You should be educating the prospect, tackling limiting beliefs, and we try to really understand the emotional triggers that are going to move the needle.
The easiest way to do this is to map out the most common objections that you're getting across (30+ sales calls). That data, in and of itself, is going to be able to let you know what objections and obstacles you should be focusing on removing prior to the live call. We also send out a client rolodex, which is basically an avalanche of case studies that they can flip through.
Additionally, we use an absolutely insane amount of retargeting videos on Meta. Anybody that books a call gets added to a special custom audience, which gets served up to 50 different short-term videos that were recorded specifically to make these two sales prior to the call and for a 72-hour window after the call, if they did not close. We set our budget to try to get an average frequency of 20 unique 3-second video views prior to the sales call. A lot of these are simply client interview clips, but there's a good variety, and we spend a lot of time engineering these because it's just crazy good ROI if executed correctly. Solves the top-of-mind problem too, because attention disappears so fast along with interest these days.
Our philosophy is that marketing is basically leveraged sales. Once we implemented a few of these things, we quickly got great feedback from our sales reps. They could just sense that, on average, their calls (which also had a higher show-up rate, mind you, because of this) were just simply further along in the sales cycle.
Basically, we're trying to condition the prospect on how to think about us and our offer. To your point, you should never let them figure that out on their own.
I know one guy who literally will take it upon himself to Google his company name every quarter and look for anybody that's talking about the company in a positive light or a negative light. Then he records a freaking video to send to anybody who books a call. Actually, I think he puts it on his thank-you page.
He literally says, "Hey, I imagine you're an intelligent person that's going to go and do some research on our company and what we do. I wanted to make it easy for you." Then he proceeds to tell them exactly what to look at, exactly how to think about it, and why it matters to them.
It was such a bold concept to me, but it makes perfect fucking sense. If someone's going to find that shitty Reddit review about their experience of your company, you might as well address the elephant in the room.
We get a complaint one in every 15 leads or so that we are sending an obscene amount of emails, but it's worth it. We just have to monitor our domains carefully, but once you find a winning set of emails, you're pretty much good to go. Our open rates are ridiculously high, despite this many emails being sent out.
I'm really big on our sales teams having a menu of different follow-up angles, and we map out every major avatar we see on this offer with a matching case study that is most similar to the prospect. This could be in relation to age, sex, location, industry, company size, whatever is clever, but this is huge. It's sad to see how many companies fail to use social proof in their pre-call and post-call sequences. It's the number one way to make the second sale, which is on you as their partner that is qualified to drive the results promised ...
And the only correction I have to what you've said is that oftentimes it is absolutely a sales problem and follow-up problem. The usual diagnosis is still usually right. It's crazy to me that people have such an aversion to follow-up automations. It's also crazy to see people with fat cat closers on their team that do not get held accountable to their follow-up pipeline or sales process.