Marketing problems vs fundamental business problems

For small B2B services companies

Do you have a marketing problem? Or do you have a more fundamental business problem?

Getting a handle on which type of problem you have can help you decide how to proceed.

In general, marketing can’t solve fundamental business problems.

Marketing may be able to facilitate as a secondary contributor, but fundamental business problems affect the viability of the business. They need to be driven from the top, with all hands on-deck.

A word of caution: if you see one or more of these problems in your business, you may be headed for the rocks and (depending on the severity) there may not be enough time to steer the ship out of the way before you crash into them.

Examples of fundamental business problems:

If you’ve got fundamental business problems and you’re not already sitting, you should definitely have a seat now. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it does cover some heavy hitters.

There’s not enough interest in the problem(s) you solve.

This sounds like it falls within the realm of what’s called “demand generation”, and sometimes it might. However, I mostly don’t believe in demand gen for small B2B services companies.

It’s not that I think it’s not possible. I do. I just think the fraction of companies that this is applicable for are so small that it makes me uncomfortable. This is the land of true innovative startups. There’s a place for them no doubt, but it’s not the majority of B2B services companies. The majority of these companies are out there to solve problems that:

already exist
potential customers know they have.

How marketing might help: marketing may be able to help you figure out how to translate a subset of the problems you solve into a problem with more market interest.

There are too many other options in the market that look just like you do (to a potential customer).

There are two aspects to this. On the one hand, there may actually be too many other options in the market that look just like you do. That’s a REALLY hard problem to solve. On the other hand, it may just appear that you look too much like too many other options to a potential customer. That’s a slightly easier problem to solve, but still challenging.

In either case, if a potential customer can’t compare / contrast you against other companies, then they may start looking at one of the few comparison points they have left….. price.

How marketing might help: the first step is to identify if this is a perception issue or an actual issue.

If it’s an actual issue, you’ve got to start niching yourself down (see Why you need a niche and what to do about it). If it’s a perception issue, then your messaging and content may be able to improve your positioning.

You don’t have enough of the right experience.

Lack of experience creates a trust barrier. Your customer isn’t confident enough that you’ll be able to help them.

How marketing might help: a lot of what you’ll need to do falls in line with: Marketing strategy for launching a new service (note that a large chunk of this article has little or nothing to do with marketing).

Your sales team doesn’t know how to sell in the current environment.

Sales is hard. And I don’t mean kinda hard. I mean, HARD.

It takes a lot of self-awareness to be good at selling.

A good salesperson needs to understand their strengths and shortcomings, so they know both what aspects of themselves to work on / grow, and what aspects to leverage to remain authentic.

A lot of the fundamentals of good selling (empathy, trust, clarity) are pretty timeless, but that doesn’t mean they’re being practiced by your salespeople. In the past they may have gotten away with not being so great at sales, due to scarcity of information (you know, the internet). Not anymore.

Check these out for some thoughts on sales and selling:

Your revenue is dropping, quickly

Your revenue is dropping quickly, to the point of desperation and likely layoffs, and you’re hoping marketing can save you.

If you’re in this situation, you probably don’t want to turn to marketing to fix it.

You need help immediately, and marketing isn’t generally going to be a short-term fix.

You’ve got to be honest with yourself about how you got here in the first place.

Was it lack of long-term thinking?
Not keeping a pulse on where the market was headed over the past several years?
Leveraging a dying business model?

You need to home in on the crux of the issue. Perhaps this article can help get you some ideas about what’s going on under the hood: Assessing the health of a B2B services business. I feel for you if this is your situation, as this likely won’t be easy to pull out of.

Examples of marketing-focused problems:

Marketing problems are not small problems either.

There’s a good chance you spent years creating these problems, and they may take years to reverse and start heading in the right direction.

The main difference (assuming you don’t have any fundamental business problems) is that you’ve got a fundamentally sound, financially viable business, despite having one or more of the issues below. That’s an important piece to this puzzle.

Your digital presence is focused on the wrong problems

This may be a messaging / positioning problem. Perhaps the way you think you’re helping isn’t the way your customers see you as helping.

Perhaps you’re too focused on creating content that’s not helpful for your customers.

You fit well in the market, but don’t understand how to get in front of the right people

You’ve done wonderful work that would be impressive to potential customers, but you don’t know how to get that info out of your head and in front of the eyes of your potential customers.

You update your website, create articles and social media posts, but nothing seems to get traction.

You’re focused too inward

You’re too focused on yourself as a company and not enough on your customers. You do a lot of self-promotional blabbing. Talking about how you’ve got a new office, how you won some local award that only a tiny fraction of your customers care about, how you hired a new employee. Those are generally not good marketing topics.

Good marketing can help you improve your empathy over time.

Next Steps

Be careful not to mis-diagnose the issue(s) at hand.

Be honest with yourself. Do you have a marketing-focused problem or a more fundamental business problem?

In learning mode?

Check these out: