“Google Schmoogle”, AAAA Aardvark Plumbing, and why it's harder for BDMs to open doors

Depending on your age, the term ‘Yellow Pages’ will mean many different things.

If you are of my vintage, you are likely to remember the physical books, big thick yellow things (two books in the big cities) that were as useful as step ladders and door stops as they were for finding service providers. We recall with glee when the forerunner of SEO was to name your business ‘AAAA Aardvark plumbing/electrical/legal’, to make sure it was listed at the very beginning of the section.

(Fun fact: in the online version of Yellow Pages this is still happening. If I ever find myself in Bossley Park and need a plumber, I will be sure to give AAAA Anytime Ontime Plumbing Services a call).

Younger generations may know only of the Yellow Pages as a historical curiosity from a long-lost age, perhaps as the source of one of Australia’s most iconic television commercials (themselves becoming a curiosity) – ‘Not Happy Jan’.

She wasn’t happy but she understood sales cycles

Of course, if you are a student of business failures, you may also be familiar with the phrase ‘Google, Schmoogle’, uttered in 2005 by then Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, who claimed that Yellow Pages would be ‘bigger than Google’.

There can’t be many business predictions as spectacularly wrong as that one.

While most countries stopped printing physical Yellow Pages directories several years ago, Australia remained an outlier, and as recently as 2022 was still printing and distributing books in certain regional areas, mostly to the complaints of residents.

The death knell for Yellow Pages – and similar hard copy directory type businesses around the world – was of course sounded by Google, and the internet more generally.

This didn’t just change the place we went looking for details of a business, it changed the way we actually shopped, full stop. For everything from grocery items, to clothing, to travel, to cars and machinery, the sales cycle changed irreversibly.

The B2B sales journey has changed

For starters, buyers – B2C and B2B – became far more informed. Information asymmetry was a thing of the past, with a few mouse clicks we can now research and compare all products within a given category, including pricing and even customer reviews. There is nowhere to hide in the digital age.

Secondly, as an outcome of the point above, sales cycles started to get longer and more complex, as potential buyers spend more time doing their own research. It often means they don’t need to engage salespeople until much later in the process, although when they do, they are generally better informed, and ready to act (meaning the very end of the sales cycle may actually now be shorter).

What’s the implication of all this when we are wanting to reach time-poor financial advisors?

In simple terms it means that the journey from top of funnel – awareness raising – activities to the bottom of funnel sales decisions are likely to take longer for your existing and prospective customers to complete.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it means the ways to ‘nudge’ your prospect along that journey are less likely to involve a salesperson and more likely to involve content that actually solves advisor problems.

We know that advisors are more reluctant than ever to open the door to a BDM. And who can blame them? Looking after clients, running a practice, keeping up to date with stock market developments and staying compliant are all time-consuming business priorities.

Mid-funnel activities

The mid-funnel describes that part of the sales journey where a client gets to learn more about you and your offering. It’s an absolutely critical stage, especially for a high-complexity, high-value category like financial services. Getting this stage right can drive ROI not only through sales, but by ensuring the sales team is dealing with warmer leads, and by ensuring the right type of customers are sold to, leading to more stickiness.

In an article I read recently, the author claimed that well-executed mid-funnel marketing can create 50% more sales-ready leads, with 33% less investment required.

Tactics that work well in the mid funnel phase

• Targeted newsletters
• eBooks
• Case studies
• Fact sheets
• Whitepapers
• Research reports
• Email campaigns
• Targeted advertising
• Gated content
• Blog posts
• Events, and
• Educational seminars/webinars

Content is hard

According to one study, the average time taken to write a B2B blog in 2019 was around 4 hours, up from around 2 hours in 2014. (Using this post as an example, I can certainly attest that 4 hours is way closer to the truth!). One explanation given by the researchers is that blog posts themselves are getting longer – a 2,000 worder isn’t uncommon – reflecting reader demand for longer content. Whitepapers are also an effective tactic at this stage too.

This reliance on long-form content is problematic for many businesses, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, many lack the bandwidth to create such content with any regularity. The ideation, the writing, and the signing-off can be very resource intensive. Secondly, crafting content that resonates with the intended audience can be hit and miss without genuine market insights, the gathering of which can also suck bandwidth Without these insights, content can fall flat.

Insight led content – 45% more responsive

Written thought leadership remains one of our foundational offerings to corporate partners, allowing them to build their reputation and credibility in a specific area, while simultaneously addressing key advisor issues and challenges.

Content topics are data driven and insight led, identified from the thousands of conversations taking place on the Ensombl platform each year.

By tapping into the Ensombl advice community and crafting content that aims to solve advisor issues and challenges, our content is essentially co-created with advisors. As a result, our content resonates more strongly and delivers a higher return on marketing investment.

Indeed, research across the Ensombl platform shows that readership of content based on community member insights is 45% higher than standard corporate content.

Now that would make Jan very happy.

To find out if Ensombl could help you connect with a fragmented, time-poor financial advisor audience, get in touch for a chat.