Egg Farmers and Chicken Feed - A Lesson in Restrictive Marketing
Eric Peterson
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When it comes to qualifying leads, there's typically two methodologies I run into:
The truth is both of these have merit depending on a multitude of factors ranging from product/solution, demographic, financial qualifications and more. It's too much to detail out in one article. Instead though, let me focus on a mistake that I see often.
Speaking broadly, think of the two paths above as being defined by scalability and your current position in that journey. If you are at a place of revenue where you have met your initial goals and are in the position of scaling your operation, the time investment of discovery meetings on prospects who truly have no ability or desire to be your ideal customer can have a financial drain on your bottom line. At the same time, if you are functioning before scale, you may need to utilize discovery calls to really be a qualifier rather than utilizing a complex vetting funnel.
This actually can be a good challenge to have, because of data. It can give you real metrics on outliers. This is less important in B2C or product based businesses, but in the B2B marketplace the 80/20 rule really can have some misnomers. Most of us have heard the rule that 80% of your revenue may end up coming from where you spend 20% of your time and work towards optimizing that client base. However, I personally find this to be less concrete in practice.
This is because the whole reason for the 80/20 rule existing is actually due to optimizing towards outliers in the first place. That 20% are outliers anyway. So one thing that can be forgotten or overlooked in the rush of business operations is outlier data. Sometimes that data can be the key to pivoting your business towards new ideal streams of revenue that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
This is why I think even when scaling it can be a healthy practice to have in your vetting procedure a catch-all question to take advantage of uniqueness if you can tie it to your industry tangetially. I'll try to limit some of this ambiguity by using a really terrible analogy:
If your vertical is selling to egg farmers, would it be worthwhile data to take that weird meeting every once in a while with the guy who instead makes chicken feed.
If they do not become a customer there is still value in not only potential strategic partnerships but also pure data for potential new revenue streams or business pivots.
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This has become invaluable in my own businesses across tech, publishing, and (of course) marketing/sales. It is absolutely, always, the meeting that I'm not excited about that turns out to be the surprise hit of the day, where I meet someone I have a ton in common with, completely unique opportunities that I would have never considered, and more. I would not condone this for every business at every stage of growth, but I really have taken the perspective of viewing every new contact meeting as an opportunity to figure out what worlds they play, what their interests are even outside of our immediate mission, and what excites them creatively. It has proved invaluable.
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My name is Eric Peterson and I am The Awesome Team. Between 25 years of media and content creation, holistic metric-based ad engineering, and peerless funnel design, I am an awesome team in one middle-aged singular man. I offer three services:
No matter what, I only take on the projects that I know I can bring at least 20% more revenue to within 90 days or less or I work for free. That is my guarantee. If you want to meet so we can discover whether or not I have the right solution for you, please do connect with me.
Cheers,
Eric