I was working with a business owner who was trying to build up her sales pipeline.
She was inundated with well intentioned advice…
Hire a marketing firm, hire a salesperson, redo your website…SEO, cold outreach via email campaigns, outreach on LinkedIn, go to events, conferences, etc.
All of these can be effective…but…we dug in further…
She had a solid ideal customer profile. Without giving away too much detail…they were renowned scientists and scholars (PhDs).
She, herself, has a PhD from one of the most prestigious universities in the world…so I asked her:
Do you think they are hanging out on LinkedIn?
Do you think you can reach them with a cold email?
Do you think they are going to do a google search for your somewhat sophisticated consulting offering?
NO!
There was another scenario where the target customers were CEOs of REITs. They also are unlikely to be spending a lot of time on LinkedIn or responding to cold outreach of emails.
In each of these cases, the business owners had access to a rich network of people that they could tap into…people where they already had relationships that could start to work from.
From here, we build out a process for building relationships and networking.
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