How many times has a lead generation program produced poor results?
I’d guess it happens a lot more than you’d like. You just can’t get prospects to engage, return calls, or enter into a dialogue. It took a recent earthquake to give me a few ideas on how to get things rolling.
A little over a year ago, I was working in my office in the San Francisco Bay Area when a small earthquake hit. It didn’t do a lot of damage, but it did shake things up a bit. Three days later, this sticker arrived in the mail:
The sticker contained useful instructions on how to turn off a water heater in emergencies – an emergency just like the earthquake that had occurred three days earlier. 
It was unusual for me to not simply toss this out. But, something about its timing and utility appealed.
I went down to the basement to apply the sticker and noticed a large pool of water under the heater. Obviously, the earthquake had dislodged a pipe coupling and caused a leak. Had I not received the sticker, it could have been months before discovering the leak – and the damage could have run to thousands of dollars.
Contact numbers of local plumbers were listed on the sticker. I called one. Two hours later and seven hundred dollars lighter, the leak was fixed. I was delighted!
We use this example with our clients. We challenge them to discover their prospects’ earthquakes. What are the business problems that keep prospects and clients awake at night? With that information, we can start building up the sales provocations to activate lead generation.
The sales provocations become the content for blogs, informational pieces, or most effectively the title of emails. It works. For your sales and marketing messaging, think about the potential buyers’ earthquakes – the immediate and pressing pain points that impact them. Build content from the perspective of the issues your prospect wrestles with during the day, and possibly worries about during the night.
And just as that mailed sticker provoked me to visit my dank basement, link a call to action and a provocation to every communication you have with your client. It will pay off!
Learn more about Espresso’s B2B Lead Generation services.
