💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week

🪄 Growth Magic

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• Most people do not realise to what extent everything in business is a numbers game.

• Anyone who claims they can easily run profitable marketing campaigns for any company is a charlatan. There are far too many variables.

• Also most people don’t understand how big the number of shots required is to find something that works.

• Everyone always highlights their wins and doesn’t talk about what didn’t work. So you necessarily get a skewed perspective from the outside.

• It always seems like there are people who have it all figured out. So when you try something, whether a new business or a new marketing campaign, you feel like you should succeed quite often. When you try 10 things and none of them works, you think you don’t have what it takes and give up. But in reality, the odds are pretty much the same for everyone.

• The people who “have it all figured out” simply internalised that 100 or more attempts are needed and don’t give up.

📧 Lemlist

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(Lemlist sponsored this issue of Business Brainstorms.)

🧭 Start Somewhere

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• Not a new idea but well articulated and always worth remembering.

• Scheming and planning beyond the absolute minimum required are usually a waste of time.

👨‍💻 Lookalike Leads

• One of the most effective ways to find new customers is to look at your current customers and then ask “Where can I find more companies like this?”.

• But searching for similar companies using traditional filters like “industry”, “keywords”, or “company size” is highly inaccurate and results in incomplete lists.

• The latest AI tech is surprisingly good at matching by similarity. So I started building my own AI-based database of companies.

• We’ve been using it at Sales.co for a few months now and results so far do look very promising. A lookalike-based campaign for ourselves performed 47% better than the test campaign based on traditional filters.

• If you’re interested in building a target list of companies for your B2B business you can try it at TAMTakeover.com. (Instead of current customers you can also use ideal customers.)

• It’s completely free right now, no strings attached, as I’m looking to get some feedback and want to test edge cases.

🏀 High Agency

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• Great example of high agency behavior from Shaquille O'Neil's biography.

👿 Abusive AI

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• In the comments someone linked to the Pavlok wearable. It helps “strengthen and reinforce positive habits with a chime or vibration, and deter negative habits with an electric shock that works every time”. Getting an electric shock does seem like a much more effective approach to, for example avoid social media sites, than trying to block them.

• Now imagine combining this with an AI wearable that actually records everything you do and then nudges you in the right direction when it sees you grabbing a bag of chips in the supermarket or speak in a way you don’t want to etc.

• Weird? For sure. But Pavlovian conditioning does work and I at least would love to try this.

End Note

As always, if you’re enjoying this brainstorm, I’d love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up.

If your B2B business looking to systematize and scale your outbound efforts, my agency Sales.co might be able to help.

You can learn more about sponsoring Business Brainstorms here.

Have a great week,

Jakob