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Countable Ops Manual

Building Our Client Base

Table of Contents

Purpose

This chapter documents our approach to taking on new work so we curate a group of clients we love working with over time, and stay profitable. Formerly titled “Sales” and renamed to reflect our increasing focus on stable long-term clients and SaaS-style opportunities.

Scope

This root page serves to anchor the resources that are linked out to different documents in greater detail.

Customer Persona

For our B2B consulting business, we generally work best with:

  • Small to medium enterprise, or medium businesses, from 20 to 200 employees.
  • 10M to 100M revenue.
  • progressive, flexible and data oriented entrepreneurs.
  • A decent level of digital savvy is helpful to understand opportunties.
  • They may want to hire us for a skunkworks, or strategic project insulated from their organization’s process.
  • They want help taking advantage of the latest web technology.
  • They’re more interested in a longer term trusting partnership than a one-off project quote/contract.

Process Goals

  • If we can get 2x as fast at writing proposals (and we find enough good ones in salesbot), we can probably write (and therefore win) twice as many. This is probably easier than increasing our win rate (in revenue wins).
  • If we increase the size of proposals we apply to, to be in the optimal range of 100k to 500k, that will also increase our performance. I know we talk about ideal size and even score it, but there’s definitely some strategic imperative to focus on this size range. If we double our deal size, all other things equal we double our win rate.
  • Our win-rate is already really high, but any small improvement there means we can spend more time working and less time writing, and also increase our revenue proportionally.

In summary, we want to steer everything (salesbot included) to find 4 or 5 $300k proposals every month, and get faster at writing them via templates, practice, etc.

A dedicated staff member would be hired for the heavy-lifting, and we could win 1 deal a month, which is more sustainable than one every ~3 months as we do now.

See also Discovery

Day to Day Practices

  • Talk to your clients every week at a minimum. If you’ve worked on something, ensure you show what you worked on, ask for feedback.
  • When communicating with clients, a functional link so they can test it is best. A short video demo is great, or just an email with screenshots is ok too.
  • Folks who are receiving Salesbot digest emails should catch up on reviewing their RFP “inbox” at least once a week. Share any promising leads in the #sales channel in Slack.

Roadmap

  • Improve at asking for referrals.
  • Develop some outbound process such as surveying prospective companies we’d like to work with on what solutions they want.

Research

Some stats to keep in mind: There’s a 2% close rate on the first “touch” or contact with a customer. This raises to 80% after the 12th touch.

Channel Research Process

  1. List all the places you could connect with customers and capture leads.
  2. Include creative ways such as finding out who “knows” your customer, and who they pay attention to.
  3. Sorty the channels that have the highest expected value (most qualified, numerous, valuable leads).
  4. Test the top 5 channels by investing a few hours and/or a few hundred dollars.
  5. Repeat the above step, slowly re-ordering your list based on the number of leads you actually get, and increasing the budget.
  6. When you start getting sales, this can replace leads as the criterion to order your list.

You now have all the information you need to optimally invest your advertising budget.

Lead Filtering Basics

Both recruiting and sales processes act as a great filter to find those who believe in the same things as us.

The following set of inquiries outlines the filtering steps necessary. Our prospective hires and clients should answer yes to these core questions:

  1. Can we articulate one of the following together? A problem, opportunity, or vision.
  2. Do you believe in ruthless experimentation with the goal of making a big impact?
  3. Will you help to propel our shared team towards this vision? Do you have the capability (resources, skills, motivation) to do so?

If the answer to all the above, we might do great work together.

Let’s prototype a relationship - we’ll complete a 3 week project together with no commitments. After this, both parties can decide if we want to pursue further work.

Marketing

Defines how we communicate with potential clients.

It screens for clients with similar values, with whom we’d like to collaborate on exciting projects. To anchor this, revisit our Value Prop for Clients

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