Why Your Lead Generation Strategy Needs To Be Cultural

Generating interest is a common first step in lead generation. But when it comes to that, you can sometimes be surprised at the reasons for why your prospects are not giving you any. It may not because they are disbelieving the facts you cite or the value you have shown.

Sometimes it is just the culture of your industry that is turning them off.

Is Your Lead Generation Strategy In Tune With Culture?

Studying the culture of a market is not something exclusive to B2C brands. Culture also thrives within the work place of your target businesses. Therefore, you cannot escape the need to consider its influence when you are trying to generate interest for sales leads. If you think that culture is only a subject to worry about when targeting foreign prospects, then please know that is but the tip of the iceberg.

Still, that does not answer the main question: Just how does the culture of your industry turn off prospects?

Culture Is An Extension Of Business Image

Think of your industry’s culture as simply an extension of your business image. And as you are well aware, marketers place a lot of emphasis on having only a credible and appealing image because it will affect the success and stability of your entire B2B lead generation campaign. That is the ideal but if you extend that further to an industry, you will realize that your industry’s image that actually comes first to prospects’ minds when they encounter your business.

But to make this easier, here is a B2C example: This article from Bloomberg reports on some very surprising statistics regarding men’s attitude towards the fashion industry. And according to one founder, it shows that the market does not necessarily dislike the industry. They just dislike its cultural image and focus:

“‘Men don’t hate fashion, they just hate shopping the way it’s designed for women,’ said Ben Lerer, founder of Thrillist, which gives men tips for activities or products and then sells them. ‘The young generation of guys love to shop, they love to talk about the brands they like and they really care about how they look.’

Now for a B2B example: telemarketers. Telemarketers are no stranger to having their entire industry parodied and ridiculed. But if you actually look underneath that, you will find that it still operates on a lot of sensible marketing principles like customer engagement and identifying prospect needs.

The obvious solution is to challenge this industry image by simply starting with yourself and showing how you operate differently from how your industry has been culturally perceived. This not only means changing your own company’s work culture but also taking time to understand the culture of your prospects.

As a matter of fact, plenty of B2B telemarketers do this already by adopting additional tools that express their true desire to simply connect with prospects (be it through the phone or otherwise). Take a lesson from them and use a more culture-oriented strategy!