Do You Know How To Feed Yourself?

Many businesses grow through partnerships, referrals and word of mouth. 

As a result they have little knowledge or experience of winning new business cold from strangers. 

This is often where we are brought into the mix to solve a problem. The referral pool is running low and partnerships are ending. 

The company has never learned to feed itself. 

The problem is that an animal that grows learning to feed itself is very different to an animal that has grown being hand-fed all its life. 

A company that has had referred business, might have a range of services available specifically to cater to the requests of large clients. 

This means infrastructure, overheads, salaries and whole departments created to serve only one or two whale clients. 

It also means that most of the staff are dedicated to delivering work and not much margin of time or resource has been dedicated to bringing in new business. 

This is of course a reason to seek help, but might require more help than first anticipated because whole roles and departments might have to be shifted or evaluated in the long term if cold outreach is to sustain the company.

Second, a company that has had business via partnerships might have rather vague language around what they do because, well they have done a bit of everything. 

Marketing materials and sales collateral are not really sharpened when big contracts are won via relationship alone. 

This requires getting super specific about who you help and how you help them.

The process is painful to arrive at because so much of the past has been built on doing a wide variety of things. 

It’s not impossible to narrow in on what the customer needs and will pay for but unfortunately it may often not always be what the company would most like to be selling.

Finally, a company that has won deals via word of mouth might have pretty much no or low sales capability. 

Sales might have consisted of a short demo and then a signed contract. There may well be no process around educating, or addressing objections, shifting beliefs or otherwise addressing questions required to take a lead to the point of sale. 

As a result, often when such a company comes to us to generate new leads via cold outreach, we have a much larger job to do than simply run cold outreach. 

We have to work with their lack of experience with sales calls, lack of sales process, lack of knowledge of the needs of a cold market, lack of any lead nurture content, thought leadership content, case studies or lead tracking and follow up. 

Companies often approach cold outreach with the attitude of an animal that has been hand fed all their life. “Bring me food.” 

However cold outreach services only work when a LOT of work has been done - experimenting with audiences, market research, funnel design, message split testing, case study preparation, sales follow up process development, sales call process refinement and even whole business design and restructure. . 

This means cold outreach becomes much harder, slower and more expensive than first anticipated. 

In order for cold outreach to work, a company needs to change its shape somewhat to become a much more aerodynamic animal, lean in operation, with extra resources and energy available to the chasing, hunting required to land the next meal. 

Do you know how to feed yourself?

Hey I’m Jen 👋

🚀 I specialize in helping experts to grow a business they love.

🔔 Follow for more tips on articulating your value, generating leads, selling more premium clients 

✍️ Join my email newsletter for more content like this: www.bearskindigitlal.com

♻️ Repost this if you think it can help someone in your network!