From Gift Card Skeptic To Believer: Using Incentives to Book Better B2B Meetings

If you’ve been considering trying to use incentives to generate leads for your B2B business, we’ve got a platform that lets you magnify the positives and mitigate concerns.

The first time I heard the notion of dangling gift cards in front of prospects to generate meetings, I was very skeptical. It seemed gimmicky. I worried it might cheapen a brand. But, now, I’m converted.

Or, more specifically, I should say I’m a believer that using incentives and a well constructed digital qualifying and prepping system can be a very effective way to book meetings for some B2B businesses. As is often true, the difference between a free-for-all and an effective, scalable system is in following the right steps. In this case, the key is a methodology that helps you find the right customers, grab their attention, screen and educate them, and then pre-prep your sales team.

First things first, this isn’t for everyone. But, for B2B businesses whose main path to purchase includes running demos and have:

• A cost per lead of $100 or more and a cost per meeting held of $300 (if you’re already finding great customers cheaper than this, congrats!!)
• And an average contract value > $10,000 (there are costs in here so the payout for your business has to be worth it)

Who are currently having a hard time breaking through the clutter on LinkedIn or Meta as evidenced by:

• Low return on ad spend
• Not enough leads, let alone high quality leads

At it’s best, how does it help:

• Good targeting focuses initial outreach (the right decision makers at the right companies, as well as common sense exclusions). 
• Gift cards or other incentives provide “thumb-stopping” power that cuts through clutter and can easily be digitally distributed.
• You can utilize a digital platform to ask qualifying questions to confirm you’re focusing on finding prospects while filtering out prize-chasers or unqualified businesses.
• You can use the same digital platform to force a view of your demo video to educate and engage interested prospects in your USP and further weed out others. 
• You can enable direct booking of meetings for the Direct ability to schedule a meeting and share pre-qualifying answers and interests with your sales team.

I wasn’t a believer until I saw it myself. Sweeplift’s CEO Keith Wright saw brands using incentives on LinkedIn and recognized how the platform he created to help companies do market research could help at every step of the way.

Here’s how:

• Sweeplift is built to leverage all of the targeting capability of any walled garden platform (LinkedIn, Meta, Google, TikTok) or email list 
• We can help you create outbound ads with the thumb stopping imagery of the gift card itself and the perfect wording so that the prospect understands they’ll have to be pre-qualified and take the meeting.
• We’ve got any/all legal fine print your legal team requires.
• Once a prospect clicks into your offer our platform seamlessly takes them into pre-qualifying questions that ensure their business qualifies as a great prospect or disqualifies them.
• We can then create a forced view of your 1-3 minute product demo. This is where your true prospects get educated on what you do and why its better. And, often, prize-seekers get annoyed and drop off (which is also good).
• Finally, the newly-educated prospect can book a meeting with your sales team. Now, assuming you have a good offering, they’re coming to hear more about how you can help AND to collect their gift card (we find that by this point, the card is secondary)
• At the same time, your sales team is also fed key information about the target before they get in the room. They don’t have to waste time with discovery questions or a demo and they can refine their pitch based on what’s important to the client.
• Now your first meeting is like a second meeting. 

For us, and for our clients, this has changed everything. Every day we turn on our LinkedIn campaign for a few hours and shut it off by noon when we’ve booked all the meetings the sales team can handle. And, while the number of meetings we’re able to book is a huge benefit, what’s even better is the quality of the conversations. By the time we sit down with prospects, they already know what we do and we already have a pretty good idea of their pain points and the way we can help solve them.

The process is layed out here on our website and you can book a meeting directly with us here.

Still have reservations? I don’t blame you. Let us know what you think in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer you.