From Idea to Action: Sales Workshops for microbusinesses

[nefinn]

I will be trying B2B Customer Acquisition Workshop idea. In essence it is a full day workshop to do hands of customer acquisition, target audience is microentrepreneurs and experts who want to turn their expertise into business and get new b2b clients (in Finland). Idea itself is variation of something older, main differentiation factor to that and all the competition is the hands-on part.

When I first compared it to the CENTS, I was pretty devastated, as I checked only control. Need I couldn't check, because I don't have hard proof of demand yet, but I know there is huge demand for customer acquisition in general.

In my depression I was chatting with ChatGPT and I asked it about it, and that made me realized on some aspects I had thought little bit wrong way about CENTS. So even thought ChatGPT too cleared only control and need (which still needs to be tested), but it of highlighted these:

• Entry: While entry barriers may not be extremely high initially, building a strong brand and unique offerings can create significant barriers.
• Time: With strategic efforts, the business can be made to operate with less direct involvement.
• Scale: The potential for scaling, particularly through online platforms and additional services, is significant.

And that finally got me thinking again, these all can be solved. Especially time and scale feel pretty manageable. Entry in open market very anyone can do anything is probably impossible to completely own, but the value scew and process of delivering value can be made so legendary that it does not really matter anyway.

So with this line of thought I feel like this idea is worth executing on. Biggest first hurdles are of course to get the first paying customers and then to deliver in way that they legendary value. This is especially true, now that I am settling with higher price point 990 € per workshop and more personalization, but I won't know any of these things without putting it out there and then adjusting as needed. There are other options I've seriously considered as well (like lowering price point to allow more customers per workshop), but I decided this should be the first thing to try and then if it doesn't work out I will figure out other options.

Also one obstacle I need to personally to resolve is my LinkedIn presence, which I've confused feelings about. One aspect of that is that after being different things on LinkedIn and online, I don't feel like "whole" at the moment and this I need to figure out somehow. Also I've lately grown to appreciate privacy quite a lot so I also need to figure this part out. But I will in time. And to overall brand building I feel like LinkedIn will add great value.

I will start with some direct marketing along with LinkedIn posts about this topic and overall beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. Landing page should be ready in a day or two so first aim is to drive traffic there and see how that goes and overall get some kind of echo about the offering. Then assess and adjust.

So sales and marketing part I think should be fairly simple.

Actual value delivery part is at first for me to deliver. In time I can build video materials for most of the theory and then human system to scale the hands-on parts. Another option is to build bigger events, in these I see upsides as well as downsides.

But now, first things first. I will post an update in a week or so for you, and also for me to keep accountable on this.

 

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[nefinn]

Update after one week of work.

• Decided on a name for it and did some quick and cool graphics for it to be used in Landing Page, LinkedIn and Ads.
• Landing page up and running. Final testing some trouble with forms, had to wrestle a bit to get that solved. Also forgot about the Google Analytics that takes up many days, but it should be online by tomorrow.
• On my personal LinkedIn I published a post about this which did pretty good it got a 3000 views so far which is decent for an service ad essentially and I got a few potential leads from there.
• First list of hand picked prospects ready, I will send it out on Monday.
• Set up a campaign for Google Ads and will start that next week too. My hypothesis is that with this specifications, I should be able to get couple leads which then should be convert to at least one deal per month.
• Email copy A ready, I am also doing version B as well to see which works better.

I got some faint echoes which are mainly positive this week. Some leads, and I need simply to continue the sales and marketing now and listen to the market feedback.

I am not totally fixed on the service offered yet, so I might adjust it based on the feedback as well. I am still quite convinced that the need I am solving is correct, but the way I am solving it might need some adjusting.