Are you spending your time, money and energy on the right kind of marketing?
Now, I’m not asking you to choose between brand building or sales activation. Both are important and you need to invest in both.
Your business requires a strong brand, that (potential) clients are able to recall, recognize, and trust.
On top of that, you also need marketing actions that drive conversion, which leads to sales and revenue for your business.
And that’s where things go sideways…
Picture this:
You’re part of a 15-year old, niche law firm. Within its niche, the firm is well known and has a solid reputation. Which helped the firm grow organically to about 20 employees.
Yesterday, the 5 partners decided they want to bring a new service to market: open courses. They spoke to a few clients and are certain there’s an appetite for upskilling talent in the legal industry.
The partners want you to create awareness and generate demand for the courses. And they also have some ideas: online ads, a brochure, and dedicated web pages.
In other words: lots of marketing materials targeting potential participants.
Stop them right there! Continue down this path and you’ll set the whole firm up for disappointment.
Two reasons:
- You don’t have the resources.
- It’s not how you achieve success.
Should you take open courses directly to market, you’d need a huge funnel.
Let’s say you need 5 participants for each course to break even – no profit.
In order to get these 5 participants, you’d probably need to reach 500 potential participants who are actually in market.
If you’re running 10 courses and you’d also like to generate a profit, you probably need to reach 20 times that number: 10.000 potential participants who are actually in market.
That’s a big number and it will only get bigger. Because you don’t know who’s in market and who isn’t.
Chances are you don’t have the people, time, and money to actually reach that many people. You simply don’t have sufficient resources to play this number’s game.
Also, you’ve never been in the number’s game.
You’re part of a professional services firm. An organization that sells relationships and trust. Not to anyone, but to a very small group of key clients.
Look at your current portfolio. I bet you that 20% of your clients generate 80% of your organization’s revenue. Maybe, even more.
Which means that your sales activation apparatus is limited to a limited group of people (i.e. your colleagues) who have been cultivating relationships and trust with a small number of key clients.
Instead of taking your solutions directly to market, it’s probably more effective to focus on account based marketing.
Put the clients you’re already in business with on your short list. Think about your ideal clients. Put them on a wish list. Map the DMU at those clients. Include the relationships your people have with key people at your client.
It won’t help you win a prize for best marketing campaign. It will, however, help you reach your goals.
Hope this helps!
Thank you for reading MBD Spark #83 (formerly The Nudge & MBD Boost), sent on May 27, 2025.
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