The Quintessential Business Problem

TASC faces the quintessential problem of business: growing the business.

But contrary to popular opinion, the way to solve this problem isn’t to “do marketing.” (Because what does that even mean?)

If you caught Chapter 0, you’ll know that TASC’s leadership claimed the following problems:

• “Digital marketing doesn’t work for us. We’ve tried so many things, from LinkedIn ads to content posting, but with no results.”
• “Our partners can’t keep going to more meetings to get more clients. It’s unscalable.”
• “We need more leads.”

And the following priorities:

• Brand-building
• Increasing visibility online
• Getting more clients
• Getting out there

But here’s the thing.

While those might sound reasonable, they don’t actually paint a clear picture of what the business needs to grow. And when there’s no clear idea of what the business needs to grow, there’s no clear path to take to get the business unstuck.

So that’s why we start out TASC the way we start out all our clients: with a PIP (Problem Identification and Prioritization) session. (We wrote a whole article on PIP and how to do it. Check it out.)

Might sound simple, but it’s actually a crucial step most small businesses miss.

Let’s go through the process together so you can see how we narrowed down priority #1 and a plan of attack to get TASC unstuck.

The PIP Session

Stage #1: Constraint

The first stage of the PIP session is to identify the constraint of the business.

Looking at the information we’ve been given by TASC management, we can pinpoint that:

• they’re overstaffed (they have idle consultants)
• they have a bare pipeline
• they don’t have high client attrition, but they just don’t have that many clients

So they’re clearly demand-constrained, and in the sense of getting new clients rather than keeping existing ones.

That means their priority #1 is actually new client acquisition. Forget brand-building or getting out there. They need money!

Stage #2: Approach

This stage is probably the reason TASC partners say digital marketing doesn’t work.

They’re a small business with limited capital and runway, which means they need to go with a specific approach to new client acquisition. But their marketing efforts have been scattered around:

• thought leadership initiatives
• brand-building
• internal communications (including to existing clients)
• (and then also) lead generation

The first three are mainly indirect means of new client acquisition which would better fit a broad approach, but with limited capital, it means that the actual client-getting activities are being given only a slice of the resources.

So, the approach that TASC needs is actually specific.

Stage #3: Process

TASC is demand-constrained and they need a specific approach. But what process is best for achieving new client acquisition?

• Paid ads aren’t sustainable considering both their budget and their niche (very high-trust industry)
• Referral or partner programs may work in the long run, but right now they’re both constrained by and constraining the partners
• Sales and closing optimization are unnecessary at this stage since there’s no real pipeline
• Funnel-building is also not needed yet

After discussing with the TASC team, we’ve determined that building a content marketing-powered client acquisition engine is the best use of TASC’s resources and aligns most closely with their goals and our expertise.

Recap

As a result of our meeting, we’ve:

• identified and prioritized new client acquisition as the major constraint to business growth, and set aside everything else
• opted for a specific (direct) approach to getting new clients
• decided to go for building a content marketing-powered client acquisition engine to fuel TASC’s growth

Now that we’re all clear on the problem, it’s time to get started on execution. And it starts with an audit of TASC’s audience, positioning, and current content marketing efforts to create the tactical game plan for what needs to happen next.

That’s where we’re headed now.

Chapter 2: The Audit

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