What Is First Contact Messaging?

First contact messaging is any point where you typically meet a prospective customer for the first time. Ads. Your home page. Postcards and sales letters. Outbound emails. All cold outreach is first contact messaging, and a lot of inbound is too.

Almost everybody starts by trying to inform or educate the prospect about the company. That's usually the wrong approach.

The first company a prospect visits, before they can even describe their problem or what's available, creates a better-informed prospect by informing and educating. Everyone after that is just creating a differently informed prospect. The utility drops with every company, until by the seventh one saying the same thing it's close to zero. Prospects don't particularly like being differently informed, and they don't give you any credit for it.

So do what almost no one else does. Instead of talking about yourself and your solution, focus on the first half of the master B2B sentence: we understand your negative present. Almost nobody dwells there, and there's a lot of value in it. It gives the prospect a sense of safety. It gives them a sense of hope. And it gets you on the short list if you show, clearly and in a way that resonates, that you live and breathe and eat and sleep the problem they're trying to solve.

You don't have to solve every problem. They would doubt you if you implied you did. But for the one problem they're researching, say it like you mean it: we know this backwards and forwards, we invented half the language for it, this is what we do all day, every day.

That's how you get onto the short list for round two, when someone one level up researches which vendors to talk to.