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one of the most important concepts in allowing people to move through your funnel is to give them agency and we talked about that earlier when we talked about psychological principles giving people choices means they're more likely to make a choice you can see here that keep does this they say hi decker thanks for your interest and keep we're happy here and look forward to sharing resources to help you solve your biggest business challenge to get to the right place please select a topic so you notice they have actually five calls to action because there's one in the bottom here this is a bit counter-intuitive because you may have been told that when you're doing email copywriting you should just have one call to action to maximize conversion but with business to business marketing we are not selling impulse buys we're not just trying to persuade somebody by now click click click click click right now we're dealing with longer time horizons and the end goal is persuading somebody to become a customer and that's not something that happens immediately it happens after a series of persuasive steps that are involved so not everything that you do is about getting them to buy sometimes it's just about getting them to become educated more informed so we have four different calls to action choose your own adventure style and then we have another link at the bottom to move people to a further stage in the final which is actually more detailed on keep itself as product as opposed to just general information that may be category generic another key thing is you always want to give people the option of moving to the next stage so that may mean having free demo at the bottom of every email at the bottom of every white paper it might mean having a free consultation it might mean sign up for free trial it might mean buy now see our pricing page so whatever that next step is you want them to take always give it to them don't aggressively push the next stage don't assume they're ready for the next stage just give them the option of moving to that stage so that they have the choice another problem that we see in business to business is a good problem to have which is customers or prospects that are are ready to buy like they're just they just need a few little questions answered but then the salesperson and the marketing people try to funnel them through this this very narrow restricted step-by-step process it's like no if if i'm ready to talk about nuanced features i'm going to make a buying decision probably in the next two weeks so just let me see the product don't don't hold me back so this is the idea of agency and that's what we're doing here so when somebody requests a white paper with sharp spring they're given the option right away do you want a live demo yes or no okay it's not aggressive but it's optional here you just received an email with a video and they're already upselling you to the next stage which is schedule my demo schedule my demo shows up at least twice in this link proposify they sent out an email fulfilling or sorry this is a thank you page after requesting state of proposals so they wrote a white paper that is applicable to the software so it's about proposals proposals are very close to proposal software so it's possible people that were that downloaded this are interested in proposal software so once they download it they're already upselling them on the thank you page i'd like a demo our business proposal experts would love to show you how i can skyrocket your close rate okay skyrocket they're using a lot of enthusiasm here and cut friction from your team's sales process click here for a demo of proposify in action so it's cool there's some brand personality here they're using exclamation marks it seems like a very likable company to work with okay and probably the the single biggest part of business business copywriting when we're dealing with the funnel stage where we're dealing with kind of internal metrics tied to the sales team is addressing objections there are going to be a whole host of objections about why people are not moving to the next stage or about why they're not buying which is like the last stage other than upselling existing customers so an example of this is there's this software out there that's for sales automation outreach is one of those sales loft is another and one of the objections i would have as a marketing consultant is why why would a company need marketing automation software like marketo but also need sales automation for emails like outreach so outreach looks like they've recognized that this is an objection so they've created content that's intro to marketing automation plus sales engagement the ultimate power couple so we're trying to say is we're not competing with marketing automation we're complementary we work well together here's some copywriting to explain why so one of the most important things is you need to do research and there are all sorts of ways to figure out what the objections are one way one of the easiest ways to do research is to simply look at the lost reason codes in your crm so salesforce or whatever if you're a small startup and maybe you're not that sophisticated you can just pass sales about what objections customers often bring up one of the keys to research would be paying prospects for their time to give you input and it's not just prospects but it's also people that have actually already been lost they've not moved to the next stage they're not responding to sales well maybe if you give them a 50 gift card you can find out okay why did they not move to the next stage and abandon your company another thing i'd love to do is just ask questions on quora you can do the same thing with reddit and facebook groups to figure out okay here's a product why might somebody not purchase it and often the reasons are like these ones listed above so uh why are they not trying buying or progressing in your funnel it may be because of price or they may tell you it's price but it's actually something else competition competitions better or cheaper so those two can be related timing um the huge problem in business to business is that there's a buying cycle and they may be doing budgeting at the beginning of the year and you're trying to sell them aggressively something now they're just they're not going to care they won't respond so you know lowering your price just not going to help the dressing competition who cares it's the timing issue features you just don't have the features that they want so if that feature gets released you want to make an announcement to the customers about that uh problem or product awareness they just don't know enough about their problem or the product so um let's let's think of some examples here so in copywriting sometimes you ask for credit card information when people sign up for a free trial or sign up for you know some sort of temporary thing or to unlock some capability and they're gonna be like why do you need my credit cards so they're just they're not gonna convert they're not gonna move to the next step so you can one of the easiest ways to persuade people to do what you want is to tell them why you're asking them to do it put in your credit card because we can't support we need to verify who you are or it's so we can set up automated billing next month if you choose to do it but don't worry it uh you have the option of disabling it or it could be hey no don't worry we're not going to automatically bill you you have to opt in we'll send you a reminder email to cancel your subscription something like that it may okay another objection your product won't work with my software we'll just put out some copywriting say yes it'll work with your erp your crm whatever my developer needs to approve it um okay well let's uh let's talk to your developer let's create some content that would help address that my needs are too specific okay well let's talk about customers that had specific needs and we can write a case study to convince them my software already does that so then you need more copy explaining why existing software doesn't actually do that and here are the limitations so you can see the the reasons that people aren't progressing in your funnel can be numerous and you could try to address all of these but let's focus on the ones where you think the biggest problem is okay so then it's a matter of creating content that actually addresses those so let's say that we've gone through the data we figured out okay price is the problem okay so case studies that prove return on investment would be the easiest thing it could be an roi calculator that shows return on investment and cost savings okay timing's the issue well we can sometimes we can't do anything about that it's just the big bureaucracies they move slowly there's not much you can do uh but you can't have time sensitive offers and automatic scheduled follow-up so let's say the their budgeting happens in december well well probably won't happen in december let's say february um we'll send an automated email to the uh to the person saying hey are you interested in talking last time you said after uh when the budgeting gets started you may be interested and you can help work with the sales team to develop those automated one-on-one emails using tools like outreach all right competition so easy just do some writing using comparison charts comparing you to the competitors and what their limitations are if there's a specific competitor that you're losing to hone in on that don't waste your time with competitors that are insignificant features new features announcements as i mentioned product awareness well maybe that means there needs to be a five-minute video or a pdf brochure that talks about the product so that people are actually more informed when they go into the sales conversation okay maybe it's problem awareness well you can create content that is research showing how big the problem actually is one of the things that i really want to highlight here is that not all copywriting is direct response i know when i first started copywriting there was this big argument you're either doing brand awareness marketing or you're doing direct response marketing and the thing is that it's not that simplistic there's not just direct response and brand awareness there's product awareness there's problem awareness there's product awareness and objection handling but the key mistake that business to business copywriters make is they think that everything needs to be measured it's it's only worthy to send an email out if you're able to measure the click-through rate well one thing that i did was i took all the emails where people had to click a link to go to a blog post or click a link to download a case study what i did was i took all of that content copy and paste it all the content from the case study all the content for the blog post put them into the emails themselves and then i measured the pipeline generated after a quarter and guess which one performed better it was the nurturing emails or people didn't have to click it was where all the nurturing content was in the emails themselves so it's not it's not about tricking people into clicking things and the releasing information okay if you need somebody's contact information you just go and buy it you can buy a list you don't that's not the hard part of marketing hard part of marketing is persuasion now direct response makes it easier to measure so if we look at our funnel here it's easy to measure all of these things when you're making sure okay we have a specific stage that shows they're in they're engaged we have a specific stage to show they're qualified and then that they've had a conversation but but that's this is more an outcome or a measure of success but it's not the cause generally the cause is more here it's understanding where the customer is at and what they need to know in order for them to progress through here so don't don't get too obsessed with trying to measure everything because what it's going to do is it's going to force you to prioritize things that aren't empathetic and don't necessarily persuade somebody to become a customer and that's why the close rate on leads is extremely low copyrighting is way too focused on conversion not focused enough on persuasion and psychology okay so an example here is this video from linkedin showed up at my feed and it said uh in a remote world you're meaningful ways to bring your best and culture life learn how new employee advocacy and product features blah blah blah and then there's a video okay to learn more you know everybody tells you oh learn more is a terrible call to action well if i'm not ready to have a conversation with sales then what the heck am i supposed to do right i need to be educated and their goal i'm guessing is just to generate as many uh views as possible which is similar to brand awareness marketing right it's not getting me to sign up right now so if you want to maximize your funnel you need to not just think in terms of lead generation but you need to think in terms of full funnel optimization okay which brings me to one of my major points which is that copywriting for the most part in business to business in my opinion is lead nurturing it's not lead generation lead generation is a joke okay i i remember one of the first successful legion campaigns i did was i had i created a landing page so that in order to access the brochure for this college you had to submit your information and a whole bunch of people signed up for the brochure but nobody very few of them actually were ready to talk to a salesperson to become students so what what value is that to the business it's nothing right it's just it's just an email address an email an email that hasn't been nurtured is meaningless so that's why you as a copywriter your number one focus is lead nurturing it's it's persuading people that you've identified and targeted to get to the point where they want to buy the product and that that that's a a prolonged series of stages so when you're obsessed with measurements and click-through rates and things that are easily tied to attribution you're you're incentivized to create clickbait so things that like trick people and deceive people into uh providing information and then what you're what you're gonna get is people are gonna give you emails uh there's ways around that like you can fulfill your content through email so they have to give you a legit email but they're going to give you a phone number and the reason is they don't want to become customers they don't want to talk to sales people all they want is your information and if that's all you're doing is you're just creating information that's valuable to customers but not valued with a company then you're not doing your job your job is to create value for customers also to create value for the company the value for the company means paying customers so don't confuse click bait behavior with buying intent to create buying intent you often you need to use channels that don't that aren't easily measured so this might be offline events trade shows speaking engagements it might be podcasts okay not easy to track it might be conversations through word of mouth that you have no idea are taking place but you need to create create campaigns regardless that convince people to do word of mouth even if it's not trackable okay attribution is not your number one goal as a copywriter it is results it is paying customers okay the last thing i want to talk about in this lecture is that in business to business sometimes what we're doing is what you might call account based marketing which is kind of a trendy thing right now it's actually been around for a while and it's because there are buying decisions that are not just made by individuals or individual leads it's actually a buying group so as we're looking at funnel performance what we may be tracking is multiple people in in one company and how they're behaving and often what influences those individuals is going to be different so for example a ceo might be persuaded by conversations about return on investment but a cto is only interested in security ease of transfer uh switching costs in terms of training of staff stuff like that and so the the buying group is is here so that there's a series of concentric circles that can represent the market and in the middle is individuals so these are individual people's directors vps c-suite etc they are in a buying group so it's like a buying committee you might call it a demand unit and then beyond that is they exist in an account some account is usually a company or maybe it's a certain regional outposts for a company depending on how big the company is you're targeting now one of the most important things to recognize is when you get beyond that into the wider market there are essentially two groups of prospects that you're going after two types of accounts those that are in market and those that are out of market the in-market people are actively looking for a solution or they should be in other words they have some sort of immediate need maybe some trigger event happen where they're they they should be they should be looking for a product in your category to solve their problem but the wider group of people is out of market these are people who are not in the market for your product right now they don't really have a need right now there's no pressing need to buy it and the way you market to these two groups can be very different so for example within market you might have intent data that tells you okay they're they have purchase intent you see buying behavior that they're taking and we know that they're they're probably going to be buying from us or competitor okay so let's focus the copywriting to them in a way that resonates hey the best crm for manufacturers or something like that now out of markets a bit different this is becoming more important when you're a larger business because what you're trying to do there is stay top of mind you want to increase the brand awareness you want to increase the word of mouth so that when the need arises you can hit those people but usually we're more focused on short-term revenue when we're small medium-sized businesses we can't think in terms of the longer time horizon so the focus is usually in market customers so customers that are uh have the potential to become a paying customer in a short time frame such as within six months or something like that