💡 Business Brainstorms 💡- My favorite ideas of the week
#1 💡
In my university days everyone had to attend a workshop on stress management.
The one golden nugget I took away from it is that stress is 100% a framing issue.
You only feel stressed when you think you can't handle it.
Absolutely nothing wrong with a full calendar, juggling dozens of balls at the same time, as long as you feel chill inside.
#2 💡
“It’s better to do the hard thing then talk about it instead of talking a bunch hoping that the hard thing eventually becomes easy.” - paraphrasing from the latest Tropical MBA podcast.
I’ve said it before but it’s such a common trap that it’s worth repeating: building an audience is a distraction if your real goal is something completely different.
Would it be easier to do X if you had a big audience? Sure.
But that doesn’t mean that building an audience is the best way to achieve X.
If you real goal is something different, you will fail at building an audience. The attention economy is extremely competitive and only the obsessed tend to win.
Simply doing X will be faster and simpler than trying to build an audience.
#3 💡
I’m not saying that trying to stay on top of things is a smart goal.
But helping people to stay on top of their industry/niche is definitely a huge market. Industry Dive, for example, sold for $500M+.
Think Mailbrew but more niched down to specific technical niches plus with AI generated summaries.
#4 💡
If you try to apply what you learn in virtually any copywriting book or course in a B2B context, you will fail miserably.
The same is true for most sales hacks and closing techniques.
On a surface level you might think “it’s all just human nature, right?”.
But in all of my experiments the answer was a resounding “Nope”.
Why?
In B2B sales you’re dealing primarily with extremely smart, busy professionals that have tons of experience.
They see right through it when you try to do use AIDA, SPIN selling, or fake scarcity.
They’ve seen it all and often used it themselves before.
These standard sales techniques will hurt more than they help.
Instead, the key factors in B2B sales are competency and honesty.
Nothing kills my interest quicker than booking a sales call only to be greeted by a fulltime closer who has absolutely no technical competency who tries to pull some cheap tricks on me.
The key thing prospects are looking for in a sales call is reassurance that your product will solve their problem.
Not in the form of surface level phrases but by providing the exact details of how the problem will be solved.
The deeper someone can understand my challenge and then explain the technical details of how they can help me, the higher the chances I will buy.
At my agency, we’ve tested both.
Having someone just focused on taking sales calls vs. having other team members who actually do the work on the backend take sales calls.
Looking back it’s obvious why the second option is superior.
Someone who actually does client work can always casually reference recent experiments and results.
“Oh yeah, last month we tested X for one of our clients who also targetes Y. We noticed Z.”
That’s the kind of stuff prospects want to hear in a call.
Memorized case studies simply do not have them same effect.
We also tested every single copywriting formula you can imagine.
AIDA, PAS, BAB, whatever.
The winning formula was always simply explaining the offer and its benefits in the most straightforward way.
“I’m reaching out because X. I’m confident we can help because Y. Worth a chat?”
Also definitely do not try to write at a 5th grade reading level like all copywriting gurus recommend.
You need to signal competency and you can’t do that if you’re writing like a teenager.
Honesty + competency.
That’s really it.
#5 💡
Ngl, this one hit a little bit too close to home for me.
As we’re adding structure and processes around our agency work, I feel like everyone is doing more and more meta-work instead of doing the actual work that delivers values to clients.
Feels like a law of nature that this happens just like entropy keeps increasing unless you actively fight against it.
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.
Have a great week,
Jakob