3 Mistakes To Avoid

January 07, 2024

Hello!

And welcome to The Acquisition Letter.

Here, I will be sharing insights and learnings as an Acquisition Consigliere at some fast growing B2B companies.

In the last 12 months, we’ve had clients add over 1m ARR, others add 40-50k per month and others finally break through to getting hundreds of leads per month after not being able to sell for years before.

The truth is, most companies that I see are making a couple crucial mistakes that are absolutely killing their acquisition. That is what we will cover in today’s email.

They focus on selling to their network and relying on referrals

If you are selling exclusively to your network it is likely that (unless you become famous) you will eventually run out of people that know who you are.

This might not be today, and it might not be tomorrow, but in 99% of cases, you eventually get forced to convince strangers to buy your stuff.

When this happens, there is a much larger gap in trust compared to selling to people who already know you, which often leads to a lot of struggle - at least initially.

When you reach this point, it is important to approach your market as a beginner, and learn the true pain points and desires they have, rather than just trying to sell to the cold market the same way you would sell to someone you’ve known for a decade.

It might sound obvious, but trust me, this is a very common mistake.

Appealing to small segments of the market

Keep in mind that at any moment only 3% of the market are looking to buy.

90% of people are unaware, 4% of the people are problem-aware and 3% of the people are solution-aware.

And of course, we love going after the 3% that are product aware and most aware, as we should, but we don't ignore the 97% unaware being the most important stage.

Because - ALL of the scale is in the 97%. If you optimise for getting the 3% you will get sales but that also means you’re leaving 97% of potential prospects completely ostracized.

What you can do is drive leads with a valuable thing that gets them to respond, add them to pipeline and nurture them into buying your high ticket stuff OR hit them with a lower commitment front end offer that can act as ‘bait’ for your main offer.

For example:

Unaware - cancer growing that they can’t feel - what are the symptoms they could be feeling but don’t know about?
Problem Aware - have pain in back
Solution Aware - have pain in back and know they need chemo
Product Aware - have pain in back and know they need chemo and are shopping around a few places but are unsure
Most Aware - shopping around for a chemo vendor and only need the deal

You want to address each of these people differently being aware that most of the scale occurs at the lower levels of awareness.

Not doing enough volume

For context, for some clients we will send over 50,000 cold emails per month.

Some companies don’t even do that in a year, or even two years.

Obviously you don’t want to be spammy, but if you have a good offer and you can help people, you should sell it to as many people as you can.

If you are sending 3,000 emails per month, and your direct competitors send 30,000 emails per month, how will you ever keep up?

You won’t.

But the real key is, if you aren’t sending enough emails, you will get market feedback too slowly, whereas if you send more emails, you will find out if your offer is resonating very quickly.

If you send 30,000 emails and nobody replies, you will immediately know that you are doing something wrong.

If you send 3,000 emails and nobody replies, you might want to send a few more to let it play out. Meanwhile the company that sent 30,000 might have been able to pivot to other angles within a few days compared to a few months.

Expand that over a multi year time horizon, and the team that has put in 10x the work will be far more than 10x ahead, because not only have they done more work, but they have gained more insights and learned more about the market, which gives them a significant skill advantage.

But anyway, that is all for today.

Make sure to reply with your questions so I know what will be best to write about!

See you tomorrow, I have something good for you.

Leo