The Deadliest, Most Common B2B Client Acquisition & Sales Mistakes - Predictable Growth

what's going on guys in this video uh kevin and i we are going to be sharing some of the most common mistakes that we see companies make specifically in the b2b services industries right so just some context on both of us kevin has many years of experience leading sales and growth at enterprise companies like indeed which had

thousands of employees all the way down to rapid growth startups um that have you know anywhere from 20 to 100 plus employees right and then um myself i've had experience serving hundreds of clients ranging from freelancers all the way up to billion dollar companies and so what we want to do in this video is share some of

the most common mistakes that we see and share specific examples as well as solutions so that you as a company owner can allow your marketing and sales to really thrive and avoid these mistakes all right so that's good how's that sound absolutely wonderful all right cool so the way that we're going to kind of structure these mistakes

is by going through the four different pillars of predictable growth which involve resonance which involves your offer your messaging your positioning second pillar is omnipresence that's about your ability to create omnichannel content show up on multiple channels and move prospects down the funnel third is acquisition which is all about your sales process so how you convert conversations

into paying clients and then fourth is fulfillment which is all about how you actually fulfill on the promise that your sales team is making and then retain and cross sell upsell retain clients for many years all right so those are the four pillars so we're going to kind of free ball free style this a little bit because

you know we're going to just kind of dive into a lot of the war stories from the front lines from the last few years so yeah um why don't we kick it off with yeah residents i mean starting with residents and maybe share a little bit about what that really means residence what that means is does your

offer the messaging and the positioning of your solution resonate with your specific target audience specific target audience being your the avatar for your ideal client and so what we find with we found it with our own business when launching new products we find it with other companies all the time is that if you don't have a specific

ideal client avatar then there's no way you could possibly create an offer and position that offer with the right messaging so that it resonates perfectly with that one subset of ideal clients right and so i think it really starts out with picking where you want to be an expert which industry which sort of sub category two or

three you want to be an expert in yeah and i think what is so common with companies and again we have experienced this ourselves when launching new products is that unless you decide that you want to become an expert in with one specific group through providing the solution that you're offering you're never going to be able to

become an expert it's only until you master that one subset where then you can open up the supply and reach a larger audience but you're never going to take off unless you have a an expertise in a specific category yeah of helping people yeah and and like i would say at least 80 of the companies we talk

to are relying primarily on referrals right because they do great work but they don't have the marketing and sales systems and communication streamlined so that they can scale beyond referrals right so like one of the companies we were talking to peter they have a 10 million dollar per year e-commerce agency and same same instance they're having a

hard time getting traction with business development to a cold audience because they have no clearly defined niche right and so they have had i think hundreds of clients and gotten amazing results in a wide range of e-commerce companies but their business development is very generic and because of that they're only generating what like 15 leads a month

right so when it comes to expanding into an audience a network that hasn't heard of you before you can't just sound like the email that everybody gets flooded with in their inbox every single day you have to know exactly what the problems are that your specific clients or prospective clients are facing and speak directly to those and

so in the case of this one prospect you know they're doing 10 plus million dollars a year strictly offer referrals and some of the biggest challenge that this business development lead had was we can't come up with that secret sauce of the right messaging in an email the right messaging in linkedin content and twitter content whatever the

case may be you know they've had quite a few calls set up from cold outreach but no deals were closed and that's because they can't speak specifically to the problems that their ideal clients are facing right um so that's you know that's number one is really you got a niche down you have to become an expert in

it so that you can truly understand the problems that each one of these clients feel and then speak directly to them with cold outreach with solutions to those exact problems um so that's you know numero uno i would say i guess moving on to omnichannel is you know after you have that resonance defined in that niche defined

um you want to make sure that you're showing up in front of that specific target audience all the time wherever they may exist so if you know you're in b2b if you're in a b2b services company market you want to be on linkedin i mean that is the professional network for business today and if you're always showing

up with content that is relevant with solutions to the problems your audience is facing when it is time for these prospects to buy they're going to know exactly who to call and it's those people that have been speaking to their problems providing solutions and staying relevant for months yeah and like i think one of the biggest mistakes

we see companies make is you know let's say they launch a biz dev campaign which is targeting you know brand new prospects nobody's ever heard of before that haven't heard of you before sorry um and again only like one to five percent of that market is going to buy and and ready to buy today so if you

don't have some sort of omnipresence built in then you're literally missing out on 90 to 95 of prospects and that's a huge hole in in your marketing and sales funnel right and so that is a very common mistake that we see which really is you know not having omnichannel content and then also not having content that is

going to nurture prospects from the point of the initial contact all the way to under understanding what you do how you do it how it can help them and them being ready to sign up and you know start working with you so yeah and just kind of to recap the when you're diving into a new market expanding

outside of referrals like matt said one to maybe five percent of that audience are already in the market for a solution that you're offering and have the budget allocated you reach out to them your message resonated perfectly they set up the call and you close them as a new client the remaining 95 percent uh are still ideal

prospective fines but the timing's not right budget doesn't free up until next quarter or next year whatever the case may be and so instead of having an army of business development reps providing that manual outreach to stay relevant whether it's through emails whether it's through messages whether it's through just let me tell you about this new product

we have omnichannel content is going to replace that manual repetitive newsome or like nuisance provoking outreach that is a waste of time for everybody and so i just kind of wanted to mention that you know having content available that speaks directly to them is going to convert that remaining majority over the courses of you know mom's quarters

years yeah and and to add on to that um i think kind of on the flip side of that because again what i mentioned was and what kevin mentioned is how important it is to have that omni-channel content right so a big mistake that people are making is not having that content or only focusing on business development

only focusing on sales development because again it's like that prospect can only get so much information from that initial contact to the sales appointment right and so typically most prospects like 80 plus percent of prospects are going to need more information before they're ready to consider even buying right and so if you're only doing biz dev and

you're not accounting for that omni channel content and building that into your funnel then that's a huge huge gap huge mistake that many many companies are making right yeah i think you know in order for not for omni channel content to be effective it has to be informative or content that educates your prospects on why your solution

is the best and bring value to your prospects as to why this is going to immensely impact their lives for the better and in order for it to replace that common sales process people need to engage with hours worth of content right prior to buying but as long as you're staying consistent and you are bringing value you

are educating them then by the time they're booking that sales appointment they're 80 to 90 percent through the sales process they're negotiating some details working out some of the fine print but then they're just about closed so what that does is allow your business development reps your sales reps instead of reaching out to a lead list that

they've spoken to or pitched in the past just to stay relevant your valuable content is going to do that and their calendars in turn are going to be freed up for closing calls to be booked all day every single day so um that's really the purpose of it right yeah because like i think high value content will

outperform a sales rep or a sales development rep nine times out of ten right because again clients are a little bit skeptical of you know overly pushy or um you know i think in general just because of a lot of marketers and blah blah blah you know people's trust levels are a bit down right so the way

that you build that trust is through content right high value content on multiple channels that brings people from top of funnel to middle of funnel all the way down to bottom of funnel so that they're ready to self enroll into your process service etc right so um so yeah yeah i think that's that's a good summary of

omnipresence and resonance so now let's get into acquisition and from my experience you know we've both run lead generation marketing sales services b2b services in the past and this is probably number one right because no amount of leads is going to fix a bad sales process right and i can't tell you the number of clients that we've

had that were not able to continue more than two three months because we sent them too much business or too many prospects and their sales process was not ready it was not dialed in it was not refined it was very manual it was not systematic and so that is a huge huge huge issue and mistake that we

see a lot of companies make right and when you're talking about expanding outside of referrals the sales process is different so if your sales team has only ever known closing new business based on a referral that came inbound that's i mean just much easier right and much different i don't know if i want to see easy it

is easier well it is because because like and that's why you know we'll talk to some clients and prospects who are oh yeah my close rate is 60 50 and like yes that's that may be true but the reason is because these are coming from people inbound referrals right and so those are always going to close at

a higher clip but that's not that's not an accurate metric when you're going out to cold traffic or to less warm traffic and so that's why the sales process has to be refined and optimized for both inbound as well as outbound right so maybe you can talk us through the outbound sales process versus the inbound sales process

sure so um you know similar to inbound when it comes to outbound you do have to qualify i mean even inbound prospects you should qualify and i think it comes down to not just do they have the money to invest in our solution but do they meet the standards of the ideal client avatar that our team is

investing their time to partner with and work with and i think you know just by having a thorough understanding of okay i'm gonna get on a discovery call and i need to understand everything that this client is facing when it comes to bottlenecks challenges hurdles opportunity costs time costs monetary costs that my solution can potentially alleviate for

them and oftentimes when it's an inbound all of that discovery goes by the wayside because you don't need to sell them you know they came in inbound because they were interested in the service solution so there's much more actual selling quote that takes place when you're on an outbound sales call that primarily is in the form of

a discovery process because selling really isn't just telling people why your solution is great why your features are better than the competitors it's a thorough consultative process of understanding exactly what this prospect is going through with the the value that they're missing out on by not investing and implementing the solution that you're offering and so the conversation

is just much different and it's not rocket science by any means it just needs to be taught to a salesperson if they haven't had any introduction to it previously so that's really the main difference but you know it's having a checklist of what are the questions that i need to ask that'll uncover the opportunities for me to

position our values so that it's a no-brainer right yeah so just to kind of like summarize you know there's there's inbound prospects which is a lot more passive because again these people are coming into your ecosystem and they should always be going through some sort of pre-qualification form or survey or something then just make sure that okay

are are they worthy of occupying an hour of my sales reps times or a half hour of their time right so it's it's critical that you have those qualifiers built in how we do it is we do it through um we have application we have an application form and then we have a calendly that allows prospects to

book and only if they're qualified will they be able to book on that calendar right so that's the inbound process then the outbound process is again when you're reaching out to somebody that doesn't know you and so instead of giving them a form you are manually taking them through on a call those qualifying questions and just evaluating

if there is a fit and then once there is a fit then you take them to the final consultation where you're actually going to be making an offer and then hopefully closing that new client right and so that's that's the process and just one other thing i want to add here is another huge issue um that we

see with sales is that clients do not qualify prospects right and they literally just say yes to anybody that will pay them and the problem with that is when you do not have strict qualifiers you do not have a strict niche then your sales process is different your delivery process is different your onboarding process is different your

your retention process is different and so every new client is changing your process in a multitude of ways right and so when you do not have a set avatar a set niche a set offer and set qualifiers you are susceptible to working with people that are not an ideal fit and and we we've been through that a

lot this year where we went from we went from making uh you know we went from having i think it was like six or seven clients and then we changed our model we refined our niche we refined our offer we refined our sales process and we went from seven or eight clients down to two to three clients

and we were making far more money with two to three clients right and so that's something that is really really critical because again you being the expert provider the solution provider you need to be able to disqualify your prospects right there your clients are going to be the number one thing that utilize you and your company's time

that's just case in point and so what matt is saying is by properly qualifying and only working with those clients that live up to the standards you set right you're going to be saving a bunch of time by working with exponentially less clients but making exponentially more money more revenue because you set those standards and you've upheld

them which is the case for those and something that we implement with all of our clients in the first two weeks of working together right right and you know this is a big part of of how we help companies increase revenue with less clients and and increase that ltv because again the way that you do that is

by having a tight offer type niche tight sales process tight fulfillment and when you stay within that niche and stay within that qualified prospect zone you're not re redoing the wheel every single time you get a new car right exactly that's not what you want to do you want to shoot it down uh as if it's an

assembly line people don't have to think twice and when you do that as well leading us into our last thing is by having your process process when it comes to fulfillment the same and standardized that's when you can actually implement automations to that process so that you can remove the amount of labor and money invested internally to

actually deliver for that client uh while speeding the process up and allowing your capacity to increase by taking on more clients because it takes less time to fill right yeah exactly so yeah the last thing here is fulfillment which we've kind of touched on with the previous points because again everything's connected all these pillars are very very

much intertwined but yeah when it comes to fulfillment i mean 95 of agencies and service providers would be completely unable to add a lot of work went into that [Music] well don't don't move it [Music] we got a little holiday halloween special here we are um yeah so the last part here is fulfillment and yeah again this

the most common mistakes we see here also go back to the offer go back to the niche because again if if you're accepting anybody that will pay you which is 90 of companies um then every new client's going to be different right so if your process changes every time you get a new client then that business is

impossible to scale it's impossible to automate it's impossible to streamline because again things are changing every single week right and so the biggest mistake is again not defining a specific avatar a specific niche with a specific offer and having a specific fulfillment process to solve that specific problem for that client so that's fulfillment and um you know

that's predictable growth yeah that's that's a kind of a high level overview of a lot of the mistakes a lot of the issues that we see companies make um and i hope that this has provided some insight and maybe helped alleviate uh you know brought some awareness to where you can optimize your process optimize your strategy so

that you can unlock predictable peaceful growth that's right thanks so much for checking us out here uh we'd love to chat with you if you found this interesting if you want to speak further head to our website book a call with myself kevin happy to get on the phone and see what's going on peace out not really

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