Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. My name is Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
This is Jeff Amerine, glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey man, but this has been a lot of fun. We’ve got three weeks under our belt talking about sales, marketing, the psychology of selling, the art of persuasion and influence. We’ve talked about crafting your brand promise and your brand messaging and storytelling and that kind of thing. Today we’re gonna be talking about winning more business. Just jump into how do you get clients. How’s that sound?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, client acquisition is super important. And again, there’s a scientific way to go about it. So talk a little bit about how important it is to understand your target audience.
Jeff Standridge:
Okay. Yeah, you know, the first red flag I see in a lot of businesses that we work with is when we ask the question, so who’s your ideal customer? And the response is, oh, anybody can use what we have. Anybody can. And everyone, that’s right. And my response to them is, you know, you may be right that anyone could, but you will go broke trying to sell to everyone, because you can’t create an effective messaging strategy to get the attention of everyone. And so what happens is you shoot for the middle and you really don’t resonate with anyone. And as a result, you run out of money before you get your first client.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, or you target messaging towards a group that you might like to market and sell to, and you find out that messaging is completely alienating to your true target audience, and you see what happens on the backside of that marketing campaign. We’ve seen people that are a little tone deaf to who their real customers and their ideal client profile are, and they end up doing a pretty remarkable job in destroying value in the business.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, you know, I like to suggest that when organizations go through this UVP, this unique value proposition, or they go through their ICP, their ideal client profile definition, when they’re working on both of those things together, here are my ideal clients, and here’s the unique value that I feel like I bring them, is to really spend some time thinking about, and we talk about target or stakeholders rather, primary, secondary and tertiary, right? We talk about primary stakeholders being the end users, the primary beneficiaries of their product or solution. We talk about secondary being the economic decision makers or the technical decision makers, right? So many times you’re selling to an individual employee population as your primary stakeholder, but the economic decision maker is gonna be somebody some higher up in the organization. Or it could be if it’s a software solution, yeah, the end user may be an accounting person, but your technology organization is gonna have influence into the economic decision because of the tech stack that they may be working with. And then your tertiary are those other ancillary influencers that can either be positive influencers or can be saboteurs. And so you really need to know who those are in an organization or when you’re looking to identify who your buyers are. But really stepping back and building a profile and understanding if you’re a B2C business, if your customer is a consumer, and we call that business to consumer market, then you really need to understand their demographics. Are you selling to young millennials? Are you selling to Gen Xers?
The greatest generation is kind of just age range. Who are the people that generate the greatest amount of your sales or whom you think will generate the greatest amount of your sales? Who are those ideal folks for whom the buying path is much simpler and much easier? So demographics and then psychographics. What are they thinking? And what unmet need is it that you’re filling on behalf of that demographic segment? Does that make sense?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it totally does. I mean, the idea of really understanding who that customer is in enterprise, by title, by position, by, by business type, having the granularity of understanding is important, the same with the consumer too. I mean, you ought to be able to rattle off something that looks like a very detailed description of who that person is as a person, where they live, what they do with their time, where they work, you know, what they spend money on. All that stuff will help you make much more precise targeting and do a much better job with customer acquisition.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, so in a B2C business, we’re thinking about demographics and psychographics. In a B2B, where we’re selling business solutions to other businesses, we’re still thinking about demographics to some degree, but we’re thinking more about, as you said, title, role within the organization, buying authority, etc. But we may also bring in some firmographics, which are the industries that you particularly serve the size of companies that can actually afford your products and solutions, maybe in terms of number of employees, number of locations or number of, or amount of revenue. You got these, these firmographic components that you bring in. But then when you get the firmographic element identified and you start identifying the buyer in there, the CIO, the CTO, the CFO, the CEO, the VP of engineering or whomever, then you have to start getting into some of those psychographic things as well.
What problems are they having? What challenges are they having? What unmet needs do they have? And how do you go about crafting a unique value proposition to actually address those unmet needs, so to speak?
Jeff Amerine:
And once you do that, you’ve got some of the more customer understanding. You know that ICP, that customer profile. What next in terms of strategies for client acquisition? Where do you go next?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, then you got to figure out how do you get in front of them? You know, if you know who your ideal client profile is, whether it’s B2B or B2C, then you start asking your question, what’s the most cost-effective way to get in front of as many of them as possible on a regular basis? Um, and, and you have to understand, and I think you mentioned this in a previous episode about the fact that, that it’s sometimes it takes six or seven times to getting in front of someone, uh, to, to before you actually get their attention. I saw a stat not long ago that said that an actual cell, actual transaction usually occurs somewhere between the eighth and 12th interaction with someone. In fact, 90% of the time, it happens between the eighth and the 12th interaction, but 90% of salespeople give up after the third. And so that’s where you have the disconnect there. So you got to figure out how to get in front of them because you’re going to have to get in front of them multiple times, hopefully using multiple channels and multiple media, so to speak, email, telephone, digital marketing, paid ads, what have you. And you need to start having a mechanism to, and messaging to actually get them to take action.
Jeff Amerine:
And those channels and modalities are all going to be different and likely different depending upon who it is that you’re trying to get to, whether or not they’re going to respond to social, whether or not you need to use traditional media, whether or not, you know, white papers and sort of thought provoking stuff like that is interesting, whether or not it’s got to be some personal, you’re going to go to trade shows. All that stuff is you can’t just peanut butter over every single ICP you’d have. It’s got to be specific to what will work best with that particular group.
Jeff Standridge:
And the more of them that you’re using in tandem, the better, right? Um, you know, unfortunately I see a lot of people who will, who will buy a, a very high priced campaign of sorts. Uh, maybe it’s a, a lumpy mail package that’s, that delivers an actual sample, uh, or a video brochure or, or something that, that different, it’s kind of different and differentiates them themselves from their, from their competitors.
But then they have no follow-up strategy. And they think that they’re gonna spend $10,000 and they’re gonna send out 100 of those, or a thousand of those, and they have no follow-up strategy. Well, the phone is almost never going to ring just because you make one interaction, or you make one outreach to a set of prospects. You have to have multiple channels to get in front of them and to follow up. Never underestimate the power of direct outreach across multiple media, multiple times. I have everyone that I work with create their dream list 100. What are the 100 clients or customers that you dream to do business with? Anybody can come up with 25 or 50. You have to push a little bit harder, but anybody can come up with 70, 75. But when you start trying to get that last 25 to get to 100,
It forces you to think differently about, uh, whom you’re going after and where they might be located and how you might get in front of them. And then you start working that list and you work that list multiple times, as I said, eight to 12 times per until they tell you no. And even when they tell you, no, you ask them the question, do you mind if I follow back up with you in about four months or three or four times a year?
I’d like to still keep sending you some of our thought leadership content because I think it might help you in your business, whether you call on me to do anything or not. Is that okay? And you stay in front of them. You know, I had a client, it wasn’t even a client. It was a presentation that I did for a group of nonprofit executives. And you know, we don’t really do a lot of work with nonprofits unless they’re very, very large nonprofits. And this was a group of fundraising professionals. This is probably seven years ago.
Jeff Standridge:
And I had a conversation with them, talked about strategic planning and board development, I think was the topic. And I’m kind of provocative in my presentations and asking some real tough questions about how they operate when I work with nonprofits in particular, but particularly any organization. And fast forward two years, and I got a call from a CEO of a very large nonprofit who was there.
And she said, you know, I’ve got your presentation here from two years ago and you, you asked some questions that I couldn’t really answer then. And I’ve been observing and I can answer them now and I don’t really like the answers. Would you mind coming in meeting with our, with our executive board, our executive committee of our board? And I said, no, I’d be glad to do that. So two weeks that we schedule it two weeks later, I’m driving down to Little Rock and, um, she, she texts me and says, can you bring a bio our other consultant is bringing about, well, I didn’t, first of all, didn’t know I was going down there for a tryout. I thought I was just gonna go down there and have a conversation with these guys. And so I looked in the back of my truck and I had about a half box of books. And so I just carried in 10 copies of the innovator’s field guide, and I laid them down face first with backup where I had a bio on it, put it in front of the 10 seats, and I said, that’s my bio. And that organization hired me on the spot for two, three month engagements.
Jeff Amerine:
Sure.
Jeff Standridge:
Uh, which is a fairly, fairly lucrative just in and of itself, but toward the end of that second engagement, one of the board members who happened to be a board chair of a very large organization down in South Arkansas, uh, wanted me to do, wanted me to talk with their CEO ended up signing that client. And we’re now in our fourth year with that client. He referred me to another client and we’re on our second engagement with that client.
That then got three other clients that were in the sphere of influence of that original client. And we did one engagement with one, we’re on the second engagement with another, and we’re in the first engagement with another. And so all told over the last, call it five years since that presentation seven years ago, it’s probably been close to a half a million dollars of revenue that came from that thought leadership presentation that I did and the thought leadership of having a book and being able to lay that book face down with a bio on the back, that I can equate to about a half million dollars of revenue for our organization.
Jeff Amerine:
And you committed to the process. That’s the thing. I mean, you committed to the process. You stayed with the process. So if you were to think about it in terms of lifetime value of that initial customer acquisition of that first customer, it’s going to be a significant lifetime value for the effort that was put in, you know, to give another example, to follow up with another example, that’s kind of apropos, our friends at AptiG in Little Rock that have built a great company, a market leader in educational and software and marketing software for educational institutions picked a very difficult vertical to sell into school districts. And what they said repeatedly was we committed to the process. We had people that would commit to the process of continuously having those multiple touch points with this audience that we began to understand. And the key was just committing to the numbers of the process. It’s a law of large numbers. Those multiple touch points and staying with it. And ultimately it becomes a sort of rolling snowball in an industry like that, where if you commit to the process, you’re going to begin to have more inbound than outbound because you become a known. And so the difficulty of the grind in the early days lets up, but you don’t let up. You continue to push hard in that space with the tactics that work in client acquisition.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s exactly right. Couldn’t agree more. Well, we’re gonna need to probably land this plane in a future episode. We’re gonna be talking about client retention. In fact, why don’t we just do that in the next episode? Because here’s the deal. Client acquisition and client retention. I would say that client retention is also an acquisition strategy. That the easiest client to sell is one that you currently have. The easiest client to upsell.
Jeff Amerine:
For sure. Land and expand, ready?
Jeff Standridge:
That’s exactly right. Land and expand. So we’re going to talk about that in the next episode where we talk about, uh, the value of retaining your existing clients. This has been another episode of the innovation junkies podcast. Thanks for joining.
Jeff Amerine:
Sounds great. See you next time.