There comes a point in every business’ journey where only chaos is created, and growth left to stagnate, in the absence of proper strategy and preparation. 

This point usually starts around the time business leaders feel they’re ready to grow beyond referrals and word of mouth, typically around the 500k – 3m revenue mark. 

What many don’t realise is they’re now entering the world of cold outreach. Talking to people who’ve never heard of you or received any form of recommendation, from someone they know and/or trust, to work with you. 

They’re called cold leads and you have to work hard to earn their trust. 

It’s a totally different ballgame and many business leaders struggle to understand the significance of switching focus from warm referral leads to cold outreach leads. 

Before this transition, most business owners are used to: 

• Small, single focus projects (e.g. website) 
• Thinking 2-6 months ahead at any given time 
• Not having to think about building trust with strangers 
• Dealing with leads who need very little convincing 

If that’s you, whatever you think you know about business growth be prepared to start from scratch because cold outreach is a very different world.

The absolute game-changing nugget of information that’ll help you make sense of it all is the 95/5 rule. 

This lovely little rule informs us that only 5% of the market is ready to invest into new services at any given time, meaning the vast majority of leads you generate will not be ready to buy.

You can expect only 1-4 new clients in your first year of cold outreach. This is normal, but keep micro-investing into 2-6 month projects and you’ll never see positive results. 

The magic happens after the first year. 

When enough time has passed, some of the 95% of leads you generated, who weren’t ready to buy back then, will start to mature and you’ll see the number of new clients increase significantly every year. 

To achieve this, you need a lead nurture system, this involves:  

• Identify 15+ attributes about your ideal customer 
• List out 20+ pain points and sales call objections 
• Carve out smaller, fixed price service packages 
• Create a TON of hyper relevant and concise branded content 
• Build an automated content delivery system (e.g. newsletter) 
• Revamp your online presence to present you as an authority 

Otherwise, you’ll have to trust me on this for now, your reach out efforts will just annoy people and they’ll never come back to you. 

All of this, and a lot more, has to fit perfectly together like a jigsaw puzzle.

This is when strategy becomes important and why, if you’re trying to grow beyond word of mouth and referrals, you should strongly consider embracing our B2B Growth Framework. It’s designed to help companies understand the whole growth journey by giving you the foresight and knowledge needed to find success. 

Eight simple stages to align every component of branding, marketing, sales and operations. Interested? Let’s have a chat.