Losing A $15,000 Deal. Lesson Learned: Others Have Failed Too

We are in the process of losing $15,000 a month in recurring revenue for a single client’s ad spend. We have been talking to them for a couple of weeks and it is imminent.  As much as we don't like it there are a few important lessons that we learned from this: First and foremost, this client is a B2B company. That means they target other businesses as their customers. We specialize in B2C clients. That is our niche. It is very difficult to target business owners through online marketing.  There isn’t a good way to find them that we have seen. There is no checkbox in Facebook or Google for somebody to mark that they are a business owner. If there were it would be very different. We end up basing our assumption on their hobbies, interests, and professional designations, which people rarely post. The next lesson was it is usually pretty difficult to help a client who has previously tried numerous times to solve their advertising problem to no avail. This client came to us after they had hired other agencies in the past who were also unable to help them.  If a potential client insists on going with us, especially if they are a B2B company we now know we must proceed with the caveat that it may or may not work out. But frankly, it’s better to just stick to those who you know you can help. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — For more information on the show, and to check out past episodes, go to journeyto100million.com!