Return to winstonwrites.com | Get future articles as emails
All day long people at work are open to a welcome distraction. And a welcome distraction is just another name for entertainment.
When you show up in a prospect’s life, they classify you.
You’re urgent, novel, postponable or ignorable.
You never want to be postponable or ignorable.
The mistake companies make is to aim for urgent.
It’s a mistake because your urgent is never the reader’s urgent. They already have a full life, it doesn’t include you, and they don’t see a problem with that.
You can always tell when a B2C-trained outreach marketer is doing a B2B project. They try to use urgency tricks that don’t work in B2B, like scarcity.
Companies don’t buy things they can’t buy again (or buy more of). So scarcity doesn’t equal urgency. And a timed discount doesn’t work well either. Companies buy when they’re ready, and you’ll either give them that old discount when they’re ready to use it, or you’ll get nothing because they’ll buy from someone else.
Urgency that a cold prospect will care about, in B2B, is very hard to achieve.
But being novel, different, a welcome distraction, entertainment … that’s a different story.
Even the busiest people have tiny slices of their day that are unstructured. And they all look for welcome distractions.
Let’s repeat that: literally everyone is open to welcome distractions during their day.
(really, the more stressful and hectic their day is, the more they welcome a brief distraction).
So, some tips to get conversations with strangers started:
- More work isn’t a welcome distraction. If your cold message requires the reader to work, you’ll be assigned to one of the bad categories
- Don’t try to be funny. At all.
- Be friendly, not cold or stiff. Professional, sure, but not stiff.
- Keep it short. Understand your place, you’re a quick distraction between meetings and other stuff.
- The reader is probably experiencing your message on a phone as they walk somewhere, or leaning back in their chair.
- If you REALLY want to exploit this option, think about your message as a lure into a longer one. Like a cold open at the beginning of a movie that drops the audience right into the action. But you’re doing a DM to a video, or an email to a landing page.
In other words
Your prospect has short open time slots during the day that you can get invited into. Be easy to understand, short, and interesting or different. And expect to need to do this 3+ times before they engage directly.
Thanks for letting me be one of your welcome distractions today 😀
Notes:
- You already knew everything I said above, because you are like your readers. You like welcome distractions, and you seek them out during your workday.
- Unpopular opinion: webinars are popular because they’re one of the only acceptable forms of workday entertainment.