Mistakes to avoid for B2B service providers

As a business owner, it is easy to make mistakes. There are so many demands on your time and so many conflicting priorities, that even the most experienced businessperson will sometimes do the wrong thing.

But, as a B2B service provider, it is essential that you stay competitive and there are lots of mistakes you can easily avoid, as long as you stay focused. These are the mistakes which are holding your business back and preventing you from growing as much as you would like to.

Recommendations and crossed fingers

Recommendations are a good way to win new business, but they’re not good enough to really grow your business. And hope or crossed fingers are even less effective!

To win new work and grow your business, you need to have a strategy in place. Your strategy should set out how you are going to reach your target audience. It should ensure you are the perfect fit for your perfect client – the customer which is looking for exactly what you have to offer.  

Growing your fixed costs

It’s inevitable that as your client base grows, so too will your costs. You need new staff and new resources to ensure you can deliver for your customers. But there should be economies of scale in growing your client base.

The rate at which your fixed costs grow needs to be slower than the rate at which you acquire new clients and earn new income grows – otherwise you will be working harder, but not actually making any more money.

Not setting standards for your team

You want the service you provide to your clients to be of a high standard – higher than the standard of your competitors. To make this work, you need to set these standards for the whole team (including any freelancers or outside agencies working on your behalf) to follow.

Otherwise, your clients can end up with a patchy and unpredictable service, depending on which member of your team is working for them at a particular time. If the service is inconsistent, you can be sure they will look for another business to fulfil their requirements.

Working in, not on your business

When you start out in business, inevitably you have to do everything. It is stressful and tiring and can become completely overwhelming, meaning you lose sight of your targets and aims.

As your business grows, it is important to step back. Hire the right people with the right skills and delegate tasks to people whose skills in a particular area are almost certainly better than your own!

That frees up your time to focus on the bigger picture of how to grow your business and work for your dream clients, supporting them with the very best services you can provide.

Advertising for the sake of it

Advertising is good. Advertising without a proper strategy is a waste of time and money.

Your business should have a proper funnel strategy – targeting high value offers to the right businesses at the right time.

Your ads should appear on a number of channels which your dream clients are known to use and ensure that all leads are captured, connecting you with the very best clients.

Ineffective delegation

Delegating tasks is a big step in the right direction for a growing business.
But delegating without having a clear system of leadership which gives you the time and space to strategise, delegate and automate can be detrimental for any business, including a B2B service provider.

Effective delegation is about differentiating between the tasks you need to do yourself and the tasks you can pass on to your team (and making sure the team members have the right skills and experience for their allocated tasks).

Service delivery chaos

If you are working 60 to 80 hours a week for your business to just stand still, it is likely there is a problem with your systems.

If you don’t have clear system in place, which you can use any time you need to acquire a new client or deliver a productised service, you waste a huge amount of time, which can lead to stress, as well as a loss of focus on other important areas of your business.

Having no KPIs

It’s easy to fool yourself that your business is a success if you have no way to measure it.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the numbers that show you the return on your expenditure – have you picked up the right number of high value clients for the money you spend on staffing, advertising and other resources? Or are you spending a lot of money for very little return?

Check your business performance against KPIs regularly to ensure your company is heading in the right direction.

Getting involved in everything

It’s hard to let go and step back from a business you’ve created. But you’re not the best person for every job and you shouldn’t be doing every job.

It is impossible to scale and grow your business and provide the best possible service to your dream clients if you feel you have to have 100% control over everything.

Instead, you should focus on building a reliable, trusted and secure structure to help you let go of particular projects or aspects of the business, to allow other experienced team members to carry out the work to a high standard.

Spending too long in meetings

If you are spending six to eight hours in meetings every day, how are you ever able to do the actual work?

Meetings are tiring, making you less productive. And the longer they are, often the less focused they become.

Make it a priority to reduce the number of meetings to bare necessities and work to keep your team members and clients focused on a clear agenda, with only effective and relevant communication when in meetings.

Static team structures

People are your most valuable resource because they bring in the skills your clients need. But the skills clients need change over time. And the days where a team consisted of the same group of full-time staff members all working in the same office are long gone.

Sometimes you will need more staff for a short-term project, so it is important to have the flexibility to work with freelancers, part-timers and staff on fixed-term contracts. That way, you aren’t paying the salaries of staff who suddenly have very little do, because a big contract or project has come to an end.

Remote working means your team members can literally be working anywhere in the world, so you really can get the best people for a project – not just the best people living in the same town.

Not monitoring team members’ hours

By failing to monitor the billable hours your team members have worked, you could end up paying them for work which hasn’t been done.

Monitoring hours worked shouldn’t be a distraction from the main focus of the business, as there are ways to monitor what you do with work hours which are easy to set up and can be automated.

Not getting commitment from service providers

You run a B2B service provider yourself, but you almost certainly rely on services from others too – from lawyers to accountants and even office cleaners.

Just as you make a commitment to your own clients, it is important to get a clear commitment from your service providers too – for a set number of hours a month or a response within a certain timeframe, for example. Without that, you are left with uncertainty (and time wasted chasing the service provider), which detracts from the work you are doing for your clients and can even prevent you from delivering a service on time.

Accepting low profits

If your profits are less than 15% before tax and interest (EBIT), you are never more than a few sales away from having to lay off staff or even going out of business.

Check your company’s profitability regularly and take action to make any adjustments to move past a tolerance for low profit margins. You may need to improve the quality of your services to justify increasing your prices to ensure your business is more profitable in the future.

Selling services individually

Selling every service you provide individually is a big problem for a B2B service provider. It means you need to put far more time and energy into every sale than is necessary and you risk failing to meet client requirements.

Instead, work on understanding a client’s needs and focus on creating a productised service which will meet the needs of that client and many other similar clients.

Selling the same services as your competitors

When it comes to attracting and retaining clients, your business needs a USP.

But when you are selling services to other businesses, it is all too easy copy your seemingly successful competitors and sell the same services they are selling. Don’t be tempted to lower your standards and your prices and jump on the same bandwagon as everyone else.

Avoid this mistake by clearly defining the solutions you provide for client problems. Even if you don’t invent a brand new solution, but you doadd value to an existing one, make sure you highlight that to clients and prospective clients.

Not knowing where the next client is coming from

If you’re never sure where your next client is going to come from, you need to ask yourself questions about your business model.

An effective revenue-generating business strategy is based on specifically knowing who your target clients are, where they are, what their problems are and how you can solve them.

A targeted sales funnel, focused on advertising the right products in the right places for your dream clients, will help you to reach them and keep a steady flow of new clients who want to buy your services.

Trying to retain staff and clients at any cost

Retaining talented staff is tough in today’s competitive market. Retaining valued clients is tough too. But that doesn’t mean you should acquire and keep every client and every talented team member out there, whatever the cost.

Identify your ideal matches (for both clients and employees) and put a figure on their value to you. However good they appear on paper, if they are costing more than they are bringing in and don’t maximise your return on investment, they aren’t the right people for you.

Focus instead on finding those clients and team members who really are a perfect fit for your business.

Sales pitches aimed at you rather than the client

B2B clients are drawn to service providers that spell out loud and clear what’s in it for them.

Make sure your pitch is speaking the client’s language and that everything is geared towards what they will get, rather than what you will do.

When pitching, either face-to-face or online, avoid using language like “we do” and “we are” and instead focus on “you get”.

Most B2B service providers will have made some, if not all, of these mistakes in the past. But the good news is that, while the mistakes are easy to make, they are also easy to put right.

It only takes a small shift in priorities, and even in the language you use, to make your business and your services more appealing to clients and potential clients - and ultimately increase your sales.