Less Is More.

Today’s Marketing Cookie is about understanding the delicate balance between providing enough information to engage and inform your audience, while avoiding the curse of success that could hinder their progress in the buyer’s journey.

When potential customers have comprehensive details about your products and services, they feel empowered to make better, more informed decisions. This is especially crucial if you are selling an enterprise product with a long and complex sales cycle. By providing content that prospects are actively seeking to solve their problems, you build genuine trust and credibility for your brand.

It all makes perfect sense. By educating your prospects, they will develop a stronger connection with your brand and are more likely to convert into customers — except for when they don’t.

At a bustling enterprise healthcare software company, the new VP of marketing noticed that the company website had little to no information about their products, leaving prospects with more questions than answers. Recognizing an opportunity, she created a simple FAQs section, addressing common questions the sales team had been receiving.

Her work led to immediate positive feedback, as the sales team sang her praises and encouraged her to continue developing content discussing the features and benefits of their software. The website soon explained how their software works, how it integrates with current systems, and how it differs from the competitors.

She created use cases, videos of the product in action, white papers, and spec sheets. Over time, the website transformed into a rich resource, driving a spike in organic search traffic and positioning the company as a trusted authority in the industry. Conversion rates increased, the time to close deals was reduced by half, and customer satisfaction skyrocketed during implementation due to transparent expectations. All of this demonstrated the power of providing thorough product details, but a new, unintended problem began to emerge.

As the website had become more and more comprehensive, the flow of leads from interested, inquisitive prospects began to drop. While “deals won” were through the roof, the inbound requests for demos of the software, which had been a few per day, were now less than only a few per month. This prompted an internal review to investigate possible causes.

Was the drop due to changes in market demand, a new competitor, an economic downturn, or industry-specific challenge affecting budgets? Nope. 

After looking closely at the demo requests coming into the pipeline, she noticed that they were incredibly qualified and entering the pipeline near the bottom of the sales funnel. Then it dawned on her: by explaining every detail and answering every conceivable question, she had educated their prospects to the point where they no longer felt a need to speak with a sales representative or see a demo.

I’ll tell you more about how we helped fix this situation in a future cookie, but for now, it is important to realize that sometimes success can have unintended consequences. 

Her efforts to help sales by providing prospects with all the information they needed were well-intentioned, and her work clearly raised the company’s profile as the trusted authority in their industry. However, her approach left little room for curiosity and interest in a peek behind the curtain. She was too helpful and learned that sometimes less is much, much more. If only she had followed the wisdom of today's fortune that suggests, "Freed from desire, then you can see the hidden mystery."