© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

Remember that time you went to buy clothes – you casually touch or look at a dress and the salesperson starts following you? From that point on, you are pressed with clothing suggestions, hand-guided to the trial room, and complimented as you try something on, all the way till you step into the payment queue. (Wonder how this works at an AmazonGo store.) And all you wanted was to “look” at a few clothes! And if you really liked something, you would pick it up. If you needed help, you would ask. (Of course, I could be exaggerating, it has been years since many of us went on a shopping trip just for fun. Hopefully, not any more.)

Apparently, by touching or looking at a dress (before the inconspicuous salesperson’s eagle eyes), you have engaged in a “hand-raiser” – you have shown interest in buying. But this is where a huge sea of miscommunication separates the customer and the company/salesperson. The customer, by their own definition, is a “potential” customer and just wants to look. The customer, according to the company, wants to buy and would like to be helpfully nudged till purchase. Clearly, this does not make for an easy customer relationship!

This situation comes up online when you simply want to consume content but the content creator/provider thinks you want to buy their products. Because the content provider is actually a service provider or product seller, and they see every interest in content consumption, i.e., hand-raise, as a purchase intention. For the company, providing content becomes merely a way to collect leads. And they diligently follow it up with sales pitches which become spam for someone who is not interested in buying.

Obviously, the catch is that not every hand-raise is a lead. (After all, as all teachers would know, students might raise their hands in class for a variety of reasons: answer a question, ask a question, bring up a new point, request to leave the room, and so on.)

Is there a way out? The easier but less helpful solutions are: for the customer, don’t sign up simply for content, sign up only if you really intend to purchase; for the company, don’t put up content if your assumption is that every hand-raise is a lead.

But one better way out is to design different content with different purposes. For instance, present a set of content meant for people who are looking for content (and that only builds your brand and makes your company a thought leader at best, it does not bring in sales), and another set of content which includes marketing material explicitly set out for customers closer to purchase. Alternatively, when someone signs up for content, give them the option to indicate what they are there for, content and/or purchase. All of this would reduce wasted salesperson effort and raise salesperson morale.

The big question is: at what stage does your potential customer become a buyer? That would tell you whether a hand-raise indicates interest in looking or in buying.

Note: A shorter version of this article was posted earlier on my LinkedIn page.