Building out the niche

Now we'd decided on where to niche what's next?

I think the absolute best thing about identifying a niche you can ‘sell’ into is that suddenly everything becomes clear.

Its like magic.

Where previously we huffed and puffed over what to say and to whom, the way forward literally presented itself.

From our offers to the lead magnets to the website.

And thats what we spent the next few weeks doing. Rebuilding the site and creating marketing collateral. I also went about recreating my LinkedIn audience in the shape of the niche.

It was hard work, but made easier by the clarity of the message.

We want to do RevOps (revenue operations) for Medical Equipment Manufacturers.

There… Easy!

Kind of…

We created three new ‘things’ that looking back were a massive task in and of themselves.

Productising our services

Where we once had a price guide like a bible of all the things, we know have one page with just three things on it.

For those interested, they are our ‘offer ladder’

1. A low cost ‘app’ we can instal to deliver our training hands off.

2. The actual consultancy retainer..

3. A high price super duper ‘do everything for you’ offer.

It doesn’t really matter what they are, but note the simplicity. 1, 2,3. Thats it. Clearly, there are options between the lines, and depending on the conversation we have with the client, any kind of mix is possible.

This really was hard

Don’t underestimate the work that went into this. As a ‘full service’ HubSpot agency that wanted to move into consultancy, we needed to shift a lot of stuff around to get to the simplest offer we could.

We had prices for different types of work (onboarding, migration, development, training, consultancy) We had various packages worked out to support clients at different points in there HubSpot life cycle.

And of course, in having to reinvent the proposal for each client, every time we talked to them, based on their ‘unique circumstances’ a whole load of other stuff that have been created priced and pitched.

There were a ton of landing pages with different price points, packages and positioning. It felt a bit like they were all fire and forget! None of them especially ‘worked’ in terms of bringing leads in, and we were in danger of competing with ourselves due to the lack of consistency.

No consistency, and worse, we were making work for ourselves as we reinvented everything we offered, every time we offered it.

Start from the start

So we went back to the beginning. What did we do (now we knew it was RevOps) and how did we do it.

I still think the most useful part of the niching processes so far has been working out our own process for getting results for our clients.

There is a real pressure when you set out to do this. There are no excuses.

We aren’t being led by the client and able to use the ‘excuse’ “Well… thats what you asked for!”

We were putting our money where our mouth were and committing to a process that we would take someone through in order to get them to win.

And that process had to work every time for every client. Be portable and robust enough to stand up to scrutiny and lots of use.

The phased we wanted to take everyone through were simple enough:

1. Strategy - The planning phase

2. Implementation - The doing phase

3. Optimisation - tweaking

4. Acceleration - Putting the foot down.

But what actually went into each phase? Who did it? How was it delivered and documented?

This part of the process alone has been worth the cost of the consultancy work we have done so far.

We went from a basket case riffing on the spot with each new client we spoke to, and became an actual business with processes and methodologies. We have even started to think about changing the name of the business as it doesn’t really reflect where we ended up.

AND we now have a consistent pricing structure too.

The Educational Email Series

The next phase of development work we did was to create an email series we could use as a lead magnet. The idea is to define the problem your client faces so directly and in a manner that resonates with them, that they immediately appreciate that you appreciate their business.

We had actually done this part of the work as part of Nick’s process was to think about the following little system to help us get to understand what we actually do.

1. What are the 5 actions your clients take that leads to problems?

2. What are the 3 biggest problems these actions lead to?

3. What is the one big negative outcome that follows?

And as we knew (or thought we knew) the answers to those questions, building the email series was easy.

I wrote 5 emails (Which potential clients are still downloading even now) that details each of the actions taken that led to mistakes. And obviously talked about how to repair those actions to stop the mistakes leading to down stream problems.

The big five are:

1. Not having a CRM strategy

2. Not adhering to a data strategy

3. Not taking the chance to streamline processes

4. Not integrating systems to create one source of truth

5. Not training the teams involved so that they can use the new CRM

Clearly, the intention is that the client will read this mistakes and recognise them for ones they make themselves, and be so impressed with the ways I suggest the overcome them they will immediately commission us to help them do the same!

The Website

And the final piece - no, not the first piece, the final piece, now that we had worked out what we did, how we wanted to do it, and the mistakes our clients were making that led them to a place we could help with it, was to build our website.

We had a very clear idea that our website needed to be functional and not (just) pretty.

It was there to help our idea client navigate through our offers and services and identify themselves in the clients we help and the conversations we were trying to have.

Throw in a bit of social proof and there you go. A modern functional website.

We started by representing the educational email series with its

1. Strategy

2. Data

3. Process

4. Systems

5. Adoption

messages as the copy for the home page. Someone was kind enough to say they love our home page copy as they read the first bit and felt like that had to read to the end. This is of course what we are going for.

Having written this up in a more concise manner we then proceeded to get rid of almost every other page we’d had on the site!

That is, any page that was now redundant due to our focus, any page that didn’t add to the message that we were a RevOps firm for medical equipment manufacturers was taken down, and removed from navigation.

The site is basically now one page. The home page, a section to get in touch and an about us sections. Oh.. and a ‘blog’ section.

Thats it, from hundreds of pages to like 4….

That took a BIG leap of faith.

Now we were ready

Ready that is to take our message to the market.

We had also decided too many channels was causing us to spread ourselves too thin and so we decided to focus on LinkedIn.

The strategy was simple. Connect with the ICP. Write stuff they would be interested in. And book those meetings!

And the results so far…?

Crickets! Nothing, Nada….