The biggest pain for almost every business is finding more customers—here’s my braindump

There isn’t a single company on the planet that doesn’t crave more business. By nature, companies exist to generate a profit.

Whenever you’re doing any kind of market research and digging around for some of the common industry pain points, every single one of them will include finding customers or increasing client/customer LTV.

Hubspot even posted this article about different pain points a business is likely to have. Number #1 is finding customers.

In some form or fashion, this research always digs up something directly related to generating more revenue and turning more of a profit.

When it comes to the most common pains of every business, it’s always about FINDING CUSTOMERS. (And for those “I oNlY wOrK oN rEfErRaLs” people—grow up lol. If you’re not trying to grow your business, it’s dying. I don’t make the rules.)

I am lucky enough to be connected with a few folks who are very prominent in their respective industries—I get to see a lot of their customer-finding successes.

I also see when they struggle with or f*ck something up (as long as they share it online, of course). We all do it; we all have these struggles. Everyone messes up. We’re all just trying and failing, trying and failing a little less each time until we hit a vein of sucess.

(Btw whatever you’re thinking about trying along your own customer-finding path, just try it. 🙂)

No matter where I look—and because I have been surrounded in the digital marketing world for the last 7–8 years—I see even the most successful companies craving more new business. No company is going to try to hold their baby back from making a lot more money.

Almost every company out there has limited resources, right? Every company wishes they could spend more on marketing to get in front of more eyeballs. With almost everything you do in marketing, you have to target the right people, say the right thing, and do it at the right time.

And when you’re able to put the right message in front of the right person and do it at the right time, every time… you’re going to feed your hungry beast (your company).

Marketers have all the vehicles needed to take a person from cold prospect all the way up to raving fan and buyer.

Today, marketers have the ability to educate prospects so they conclude they need to buy. Honestly, you barely even need a traditional sales team for a lot of products and services out there. Especially SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). In almost any industry, there is a vehicle for marketers to take someone from cold prospect all the way up to raving fan and buyer without ever getting on the phone with them. I’m not saying it’s necessarily easy either, but you have everything you need today to accomplish it.

Everyone thinks they need an outbound team blitzing phones and inboxes too. You don’t. Folks on LinkedIn LOVE talking about cold calling and how awesome it is. Cold calling sucks and we all know it.

Your company serves an industry with a need—otherwise, it wouldn’t even exist

Your business/company was started because people were willing to pay for the product or service you provide.

The biggest pain

The biggest pain for any business out there is finding new customers or clients. And the biggest pain of finding new customers or clients is the rising cost of acquisition.

Any company head with a brain is going to be marketing/advertising to find new business. You can even nail down how much each new customer costs to acquire. So let’s say that number is $100 (just to keep this stupid simple).

Company XYZ is paying $100 to acquire each new customer. They’re spending $10,000 per month on acquisition (digital ads, offline ads, etc… anything geared towards getting more customers).

So… Company XYZ is netting 100 new customers per month.

But they want to increase that number to 200.

Over the next few months, they want to strive for 200 new customers per month.

A very common mistake is simply jacking up that marketing budget. If they’re already at 100 new customers per month and want to get to 200, an idiot will just say “increase your ad spend to $20,000 per month”. It simply doesn’t work that way. You’ll hit bottlenecks and you’ll saturate your audiences too quickly because there aren’t enough people who are ready to take the next step and sign up with you.

My point here is: you can’t just double your marketing budget and expect to achieve 2x the results. The more you spend on digital ads, the higher the acquisition costs will be.