A friend of mine told me their company didn’t land a new customer in over a year.
This was a decent-sized company with entire sales and marketing teams hired to do exactly that. Yet despite all their efforts and large sums of money, no one was buying.
Being naturally curious, I asked why. My friend listed several possibilities, noting it might be a mix of factors. They tried different tactics: offering discounts, launching sales performance incentive plans (SPIFs), applying more pressure across departments. Nothing worked. The more these initiatives failed, the greater the pressure mounted. He was starting to worry the company might not make it. Until one day, they finally identified the real problem, and suddenly customers went from ignoring them to banging down the door.
Fortunately, my friend’s company turned things around. Many do not. There is endless content about how to initially find “product market fit” (PMF), the point where there are clear signals of demand and willingness to pay, but far less about what happens when momentum stalls.
This can happen to anyone. A multi-billion dollar company disrupted by a new competitor or technology. A Substack writer wondering why paid subscriber growth has flatlined.
Past success does not guarantee future success. Just because something worked before does not mean it will continue. Sales rarely vanish overnight. There are usually signals, breadcrumbs, warning you it is happening. Ideally, you make adjustments before things stall, but if you are already staring at flat or declining customer growth, there are steps you can take.
Keep reading if you want to learn what to do when nobody wants to buy from you!
But first, make sure to hit the Subscribe button to join 1,000+ other Subscribers that get Serviceable Insights delivered directly to their inbox each week.
If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:
Why Isn’t Anyone Buying?
Every day more than $300 billion changes hands. If you can’t capture any portion of this spending, the problem is you.
Your inability to land new customers likely stems from a failure in at least one of the following areas:
Offering (the Product/Service you provide)
Marketing (awareness & perception)
Sales (How you acquire customers)
To gain initial traction, you need to be at least competent in all three, especially if you operate in a competitive market. As a new entrant, you start at a disadvantage in sales and marketing because nobody knows you.
Even without being best-in-class, you can usually win some customers if the market is big enough. However, as you try to scale from a handful to many, competition intensifies and prospects get harder to close. If you fail to maintain an edge in one or more areas, you will gradually bleed out until your sales grind to a halt.
Normally this doesn’t happen overnight. There are signs or breadcrumbs indicating there’s an issue in one of your functions.
Here’s how to gauge whether you’re doing well, just okay, or badly across each department:
Product: Offer A Product People Need
Are you offering something somebody needs?
You probably read this question, thought yes of course and skipped to this sentence. But pause. There’s a difference between a want and a need. The difference is simple: you can live without a want.
People want plenty of things, but wants are impulse-driven and fleeting. Sometimes they give in, but when money is tight or they think rationally, those purchases can wait.
Needs are different. When people actually need something, they will not wait. They will defer other payments and change their behavior until the need is met. Everyone needs food and shelter, but beyond that, needs vary. For some people being a member of Soho House, owning a Rolex or a Hermes handbag is non-negotiable because it’s a key part of their personality. They will downsize to a smaller house, skip meals or even go into debt if they need to.
Seriously. When I worked at a luxury gym, I often saw people pull up in six-figure cars only to have their credit cards declined for a $200 monthly membership. They’d rather bankrupt themselves than admit they couldn’t afford the lifestyle.
Credit card lending props this up, but even shopaholics eventually hit a limit. At some point, they must prioritize. That could mean choosing between Pilates, spin, cardio boxing, or the trampoline fitness class they only tried once.
This is why your product must feel indispensable. If customers believe they can live without it, they probably will. Everyone assumes their product is essential, but most are actually nice-to-haves.
There are ways to evaluate this. Investors will cite metrics such as Daily or Weekly Active Users (DAUs & WAUs), activation rates, page views etc. but there’s a simple way to know if people need your product or not. Magnetism, stickiness, and evangelism.
Regardless of the state of the economy or their own financial situation, if people are scouring the earth looking for what you offer and active customers spend more money with you over time, this means you’ve become ingrained into their default behaviors. We previously discussed why inertia is a powerful thing. The longer a customer uses a product, the less likely they are to change. Software giants such as SAP 0.00%↑ or CRM 0.00%↑ have managed to keep clients for decades, and most will remain, since they’ve built most of their IT infrastructure on these companies.
These are great companies, but there are many viable alternatives. Just because customers aren’t actively looking to leave, this doesn’t mean the product/service is good. They might just be waiting for somebody else to come along, that actually understands and gives them what they want. On top of their purchasing behavior, if they are actively recommending your product and singing your praises, without paid sponsorships or affiliate codes, they probably really like your product. A friend of mine discovered the bidet toilet while in Japan and now that’s all they talk about. They installed one in their home. They proudly show it off anytime people are over. Perform demonstrations. Comment dismissively anytime they see toilet paper. I can confidently say this person needs a bidet.
They key thing for you to determine is how do you build a product your target audience can’t live without? How do you make your customers love you as much as my friend loves their bidet?
Marketing: Do The Right Prospects Know You?
Contrary to what prime Kevin Costner taught us in Field of Dreams just because you build it, they will not come. Peter Thiel discussed this in Zero to One but the belief amongst engineers in Silicon Valley used to be that sales & marketing was mostly fluff and all that mattered was the quality of the product.
While engineers might still believe marketing is inferior, startups have accepted that they won’t reach billions in revenue without a functional go to market strategy. When most people think of marketing, their mind goes to Don Draper and Mad Men pitching ideas for commercials while drunk off scotch in the middle of the afternoon. Marketing is much more than that though.
I could talk to you about the 4 Ps of Marketing (Product, Place, Price & Promotion) but I will allow you to discover the joys of Marketing 101 for the first time yourself. You can judge the efficiency of your marketing efforts in a much more simply way.
Do the best potential customers for your product:
know who you are
know what you offer
Have a positive impression
If the answer is yes to all, your marketing efforts at a minimum are serviceable. Speaking of serviceable, please Subscribe to Serviceable Insights so I don’t need to fire my marketing and product departments.
If your ideal customers are not even aware of you, then your marketing efforts are insufficient. If they know who you are but have no idea what you do or think you suck, then your marketing effort needs improvement.
Perhaps you are targeting the wrong customers to begin with. If an exotic animal dealer tried to sell to people in an apartment with a zero pet policy, they would have a difficult time. Spending more money on Google Ads and TV commercials might increase awareness but it won’t translate to more sales (more on that later).
Before going wild on fancy jingles and expensive logos, identifying the right customers is essential. This isn’t a marketing initiative alone. It’s normally a joint function involving product, sales, customer success and other departments. Regardless of who owns this decision, marketing needs to know what the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is to base their efforts around.
If you think your ideal customer is anybody/everybody, then you don’t know the problem you are trying to solve. The need to satisfy. As such your marketing efforts are reduced to tossing darts against the wall. In the dark. Blindfolded.
Figure out which person has the greatest burning need for your product, make sure they know who you are, what you offer and why you’re the best solution. It might be too much to ask for marketing to convince prospects your best solution but at least they can create a sense of urgency and FOMO, compelling them to act.
Cuing it up for…
Sales: Hunt or be Hunted
When I used to frequent night clubs I noticed two dating strategies: Spray & Pray or Stand & Wait.
Approaching somebody in a nightclub is similar to a salesperson contacting a warm lead; by visiting such an establishment they have performed an opt-in activity, indicating they could be potentially interested in what you have to offer. In some cases though, they might only be looking for men that are at least 6 foot 4 inches tall, making at least 7 figures per year, with midnight navy blue eyes and a vacation home in Mallorca (we discussed this phenomena in Is pretty (male) privilege thing.)
Men with weaker offerings could outperform by employing the Spray & Pray approach. They might have faced a lot of rejection but all it took was one yes. I saw one of these gentlemen get rejected by 6 women in the span of 10 minutes, but by the end of the night he had the more phone numbers than anyone. Compare that with the other dudes standing around, spending $50 on gin and tonics, to not approach a single female and declare the night to be a movie in the Uber ride home.
This might seem like a silly example but this highlights the difference between organizations with sales versus those with non-existent or weak sales functions. You can have the best product in the world, but you won’t win many customers or land dates if you don’t have an effective way to approach them.
It’s a silly example, but the point stands. You can have the best product in the world, but without an active, effective sales function, you will not win customers.
I’m not advocating pure Spray & Pray, but between the two, most companies would be better off leaning that way. Sales teams should pursue every qualified lead. If marketing has done its job, they won’t waste time on the wrong prospects.
Too many salespeople, however, act like the guys standing around in clubs. They wait for marketing or BDRs to hand them perfectly warmed-up leads. They also probably expect hunting to be as easy as deer tying themselves to the roof of their car.
I go more in detail in How To Not Suck At Sales but it is sales’ job to understand a prospect’s needs, connect the current state to their desired future state, and show why your solution is the best way to get there. Ideally the product delivers, and marketing has primed the lead. Even then, sales must connect the dots, overcome competitors (including the “do nothing” option), and reinforce the customer’s decision.
It’s not an easy job and even when they are hunting it doesn’t always yield. You can try forcing them to wear a shock collar and give them a zap anytime their activity levels drop but this alone won’t fix things. They need support from across the entire organization, or they will be heading into a knife fight with a banana.
This is why when growth stalls when your product, marketing, or sales lose their edge. Fix one and you may get back on track, fix all three and customers will come knocking. The real winners are the ones who keep earning product-market fit every day, so the next time you see weakness, ask yourself:
“Are you selling something people want, or something they can’t live without?” How can you be sure?
Are you targeting the right customers? Are they aware of you and have a positive perception of what you do?
“Are your sales people hunting or waiting to be fed?
If you can’t answer these questions, you shouldn’t wonder why nobody is buying.
Thank you for reading. If you liked this article please Subscribe below. I publish articles on a wide range of topics from business, books, current events or anything on my mind.
"Software giants such as SAP+0.58% or CRM-0.33% have managed to keep clients for decades, and most will remain, since they’ve built most of their IT infrastructure on these companies."
And of course Oracle, whose founder Larry Ellison was briefly the richest man in the world last week.
"Sales: Hunt or be Hunted
When I used to frequent night clubs I noticed two dating strategies: Spray & Pray or Stand & Wait."
We know which strategy Larry would use. ;)