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How to find more customers

How to find more customers

The 8 ways to get customers & inside look at my own strategy

Brian O'Connor
August 24, 2023

Read time: 3 minutes

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

A few years ago, this $1B+ communications SaaS company was in trouble.

They said yes to every customer request. It kept changing their product until customers didn’t understand their options.

Sales flattened.

So they called us in to to re-package their products and build their strategy to launch into new channels (SEO, paid, affiliates, sales etc).

Today’s issue is for you if you’re not getting as much revenue as you hoped (& want to consider new ways to get customers).

Stay to the end to see a map of my own approach to get customers.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

8 ways you get customers

We spent 3 months redesigning their products.

We killed some. Combined others. Ended up with a few left.

For those products, we a growth plan: 1) which customers to focus on? And 2) where do we find them?

The 8 places we considered to find customers included:
1) SEO
2) Email
3) Sales
4) Paid Ads
5) Affiliates
6) Distributors
7) Social Media
8) Customer Success

But not all the channels made sense for this client.

8 ways to get customers

We considered these 8 for the client.

They just wanted to evaluate 3: customer success, sales, and affiliates.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
There’s other ways to get customers that we didn’t include (PR campaigns, billboards, hosting live events etc).

We choose these 8 that we thought were most relevant.

How we built customer strategy

We built our first theory using internet research, asking consulting experts, and asking client experts.

But we needed an external opinion.

So we held interviews. I personally held 4 or 5 interviews a day!

Experts:
• Consultants
• Industry experts
• Client experts (pricing, sales, customer success)

Customers:
• Current customers
• Competitor customers

Competitors:
• Ex-employees

After each interview we’d re-frame the theory with new information we just learned.

Ultimately we needed to answer 2 questions:

1) Which channels should we focus on?

2) How do we use those channels to get the highest return for our time/money?

Now these questions sound simple, but we had 100s of questions to figure out before we got there:

Who were the real users?
What was their pain?
Where did they hang out?
Which channels have the highest conversion today?
Which channels are competitors using (and finding success in)?
What are the benefits? Drawbacks? How do they apply to our client?
Which channels can we WIN?
Etc etc

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

We paid a service to find us customers to interview. GLG or Alphasights (we had better luck with GLG).

It’s an expensive way to find customers, but it’s fast.

I’ll link to more resources to interview customers at the end.

So what happened?

For this client, we focused on 3 ways to get customers:
Affiliates, Sales, and Customer Success.

By “focus” it means we gave more resources (time + money) to those channels. And the other channels? We kept funding, but at normal amounts.

Why did we choose these 3?

Because we have a competitive advantage in those channels. The other channels are critical, but didn’t need as in depth strategy.

Affiliates:
We had an affiliate advantage since we already built strong affiliate relationships. We built priority placement into the affiliate deals.

Sales:
Re-focused the sales teams on our new avatar. Gave them new upsell options and faster processes to close deals (cut 30 days off the time it took to close a big deal).

Customer Success:
We redesigned the solutions the customer success team could provide. Changed metrics to track renewals and upsells.

So how can you choose the right channels to focus on?

If your revenue isn’t what you expect how can you grow it?

If you’re not using one of these channels, don’t freak out and add them on. Here’s a few guidelines to decide what you need.

8 channels to get you more customers

1) Can you optimize your current channels?

Optimizing current channels is likely the highest ROI because you don’t need to learn as much, and already have the systems in place so it’s not as time expensive.

Systems = people, processes, and tech.

2) Which channels do you expand into that use your current strengths?

Use your current strengths (in other words - what do you need to invest the least amount of time + money to get into)?

Strengths include:
• Talent: writing, speaking, storytelling, SEO
• Relationships: Influencers/affiliates, distributors
• Existing assets: Do you already have a blog? An email list? Sales team?

3) Test. Test. Test!

You won’t know what works until you test it.

Start with a small sample before you invest big with your time + money.

Bonus section: Here’s a peek behind the scenes at my own customer growth strategy

To use myself as an example, to grow this newsletter over 13,300 readers, I started only on Twitter for the first 6 months until I got it down to a system.

Then slowly added on LinkedIn, SEO, ads, and affiliates. Eventually I’ll add more channels (Instagram, YouTube, Podcasts). But the right systems need to be in place before expanding.

Here’s a map of my own customer acquisition flow below.

My own customer acquisition flow

If your business is over $1M in revenue and you want help thinking through your customer acquisition strategy. Grab some time (for free) and I’m happy to talk you through your growth channels.

And that’s it!

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
Twitter
LinkedIn

P.S. I’d love to chat and get to know you.

If your business is over $1M in revenue and you want help thinking through what channels you should use to get more customers, grab some time for free and let’s hop on the phone.