Why good B2B service firms attract the wrong-sized clients

A fit-out firm in London wanted projects between £250k and £500k. It had the people to deliver them. In a year it took thirty enquiries and signed one, and the one it signed was small. A £300k deal with a signed letter of intent went quiet. The founders assumed the problem was volume, or sales, or luck.

The size of the client is decided before the enquiry

The buyers a firm attracts are decided by how it describes itself, long before anyone picks up the phone. A firm that describes its services attracts whoever needs those services, at whatever size they come. A firm that describes a specific outcome for a specific buyer attracts that buyer and loses the rest. Most established service firms do the first because it feels safe. It is why their diaries fill with small jobs.

The fit-out firm's website sold attractive offices. Attractive offices are what a growing company and a two-person start-up both want, and the two-person start-up enquires more often. The larger buyer had no reason to pick this firm over the three others in the tab bar, so they compared on price, or went quiet.

Why referrals hide the problem for years

Firms that grew on referrals rarely notice this, because the introduction did the positioning for them. "Talk to them, they did ours" carries the reason to choose, so the website never has to. The explanation never gets written down. When the firm decides it wants bigger work than referrals bring, it turns to marketing, and the marketing points strangers at a page that gives them no reason to pick it. The enquiries come back the same size as before.

I have watched this across sectors. A production studio with sixteen years of work and Emmys on the shelf filled its diary with £10k jobs when its market contracted, because sixteen years of introductions had never required it to say what it was for. A CRM consultancy with a strong delivery record read as one more partner for the software it used, and its deals sat at £3k to £5k.

The decision that was never made

Underneath the wrong-sized clients is a decision the founder has avoided: which buyer the firm is for. An industry is a category and a job title is a label; the buyer is a person in a situation, with the budget, a problem that is costing them something now, and the intent to act. Choosing that buyer means deciding which enquiries you would rather not receive. That is the part that feels like loss, and it is why the decision gets deferred.

Once it is made, the rest follows. The category changes from what the firm does to the thing the chosen buyer is trying to buy. The message changes from what you do to what changes for them. The enquiries that arrive are fewer and larger, and the small ones thin out, because the page has stopped speaking to them.

What more marketing does

More traffic brings more of the same enquiries. A better close rate closes more of the wrong clients. A rebrand produces a better-looking version of the same description, which attracts the same clients, better dressed. Each of these is bought before the decision because each feels like action, and each leaves the firm where it started with less money.

The test

Take your website and swap your name for a competitor's. If the page still reads as true, you have described the category and left yourself out, and the market is filing you with everyone else who does what you do. The fix starts with the buyer. It is a decision, and a campaign cannot make it for you.