Yes, you read the headline right.

Before you think I’m crazy, consider this, the cost per click, cost per lead (@ 5% conversion rate), and cost per customer (@ 20% conversion rate) using 10 popular B2B Google AdWords keywords:

Yes, companies in competitive industries such as those above are paying hundreds and often thousands of dollars for a single lead, and thousands and often tens of thousands for acquiring a new customer.

And this doesn’t include the additional costs of things like lead nurturing, webinars, white papers, content, and all the other things that go into converting a lead into a customer.

Expensive? You bet.

But it isn’t just AdWords or paid search.

Think about all the costs that go into your marketing: website, web design, SEO, content and blogging, email, social media, staff, benefits, taxes, and it goes on and on and on.

Expensive? You bet.

You know what’s also expensive?  People’s time.

In fact, people value time more than they do money.

We all get calls from sales people asking for “a moment of our time” to tell us about their great product or service.

But we usually say no, we’re too busy, we’re not interested, and for those of us who have our own businesses (and don’t get paid a salary), time is literally money.

So what if we got a call from a sales person asking for “a moment of our time” followed by “which we’ll pay you for”?

Okay, that got my attention.

Why Paying People to Try Your Product or Service Might Make Sense

We’ve already established that businesses are paying a lot – a whole lot – to fill the marketing funnel and acquire leads.

So what if you could drastically reduce those acquisition costs, take those savings and pay a portion of them directly to your target audience?

Yes, as in literally paying them to attend your webinar, demo, event, or to test your platform or start a free trial.

When I say paying people, I don’t mean yelling from the rooftops and advertising everywhere that you’re willing to pay people to engage with your business (and getting all kinds of scammers, spammers, and people looking to get something for nothing).

I’m talking about targeting the exact people you want to market your product to, making a list, and then approaching them and offering them money for their time.

You’ll get a lot less hang-ups, a lot less no-replies, and a lot more interest from those you want to sell your product to.

You’ll spend less time marketing (saving costs), have a shorter sales cycle (saving costs), and have a higher conversion or close rate (saving costs).

An example:

Your company offers hosting solutions to enterprise customers (e.g. 500+ employees), and the specific target audience is CIOs at these companies.

You pay for PPC, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media, marketing automation tools, and webinar tools with the end goal to get CIOs to sign up for a demo.

Let’s say you’ve crunched all your marketing numbers, and you figure it costs your company $2000 to get a quality lead to sign up for a demo (which sounds high, but remember you’re targeting enterprise customers), and you close 20% of quality these leads.

In other words, it costs you $10,000 to acquire a new customer.

What if you scaled back on all those marketing costs, literally reduced them to zero…as a test.

Using LinkedIn you make a list of 50 CIOs that you want to target.

You then reach out to these 50 CIOs and offer them $200 each for 30 minutes of their time to attend a demo.  This $200 could be cash, a gift certificate, or even go to a charity of their choice – it’s all up to them.

How many would respond, consider your offer, and take you up on the demo?  Keep in mind for those who do and take the $200, you’ll likely have more engagement and response just based on the psychological theory of reciprocity.

If you got 10 out of the 50 to agree to a demo, and closed 1 out of those 10 (which is entirely realistic)…then you’ve just cut your cost per customer acquisition from $10,000 to $2000.

Now that’s crazy (in a good way) 🙂