This Under-Utilized Method is Helping Small Health Businesses Improve Client Acquisition
When you are working to increase client acquisition, you need to:
Set it up strategically.
Have a clear understanding of where you’re headed and the yearly plan of operations down to the monthly.
Be able to guide and lead your team tactically, week by week, day by day.
"[Client acquisition] is an outcome, not a goal. It's a function of doing numerous things right, starting from the moment you target a potential prospect until you finalize the deal." - Jill Conrad
In this article, we will explore how to create an effective client acquisition strategy for your small health and wellness business. We will discuss the importance of strategic planning, understanding your target market, and optimizing your processes to enhance acquisition efficiency. By the end, you will have a clearer understanding of how to align your efforts with your business goals to achieve sustainable growth.
Table of contents:
Why Do You Exist?
Start With Why
Where Will You Play and How Will You Win?
Understand the Value of Solving The Problem
Why Do You Exist?
Michael Gerber's "E-Myth" distills the type of people who start businesses into three categories: practitioners, managers, and entrepreneurs. Over 70% of the world is filled with practitioners. The reality of starting a business based on a skillset you possess, is you sell that skillset to bring in revenue. And so because you can do something, you say yes to the revenue, and that's normally how a company grows. However, there is a point in every business's maturation, in every business's history, where you have to decide why you exist, what you're gonna be the best in the world at, and how you're gonna profit from that. Because at the end of the day, profit is the engine for your growth. It's the engine for your own prosperity as a business on this journey.
Every hardworking entrepreneur that I’ve worked with comes to this point in the road. It requires saying no to a lot of other things that you could do in order to say yes to what you're excellent at. Client acquisition starts with a clear strategic direction. So ask yourself these questions: Why do you exist? Where will you play? How will you win? What are you the best in the world at? This is the jigsaw puzzle that you must solve to find the right customer, right market, right pricing.
Out of the original Fortune 500 list from 1955, only 9% remain today. One of the most successful among them is Procter & Gamble, now known for its household brands like Tide. Their strategy can be boiled down to these key questions.
Start With Why
In Simon Sinek's landmark TED Talk, he talks about the importance of starting with "why." People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. While this ethos is motivational, it's hard to operationalize. That’s why we have instead chosen to revert to Jim Collins and his book ‘Good to Great,’ and ask you to define this through a clear purpose. We use Collin’s hedgehog concept to do this.
This model is based on an ancient Greek parable that Collins brings up in his book. The reality is a hedgehog's not good at much, but they are very good at one thing: They are good at rolling into a ball and letting those spikes come out to protect them. And so while the fox is agile and good at many things, the hedgehog is great at one thing, and that protects them. So, what Jim Collins found in his landmark study was that all the great organizations clearly had a north star. They had a hedgehog concept, they had a reason for why they exist. They had a purpose.
You can take this hedgehog concept and make it clear to your entire organization why you exist, what problem you solve for whom, and the financial engine that keeps the organization alive. This clarity is the first step in strategically aligning your team to increase client acquisition.
Where Will You Play and How Will You Win?
Once you figure out why you exist and what kind of impact you're trying to have on the world, it's important to get very clear on where you will play and how you will win.
Understanding the problem you solve for your clients is crucial.
In Clayton Christensen's study "Competing Against Luck," he illustrates this with the example of milkshakes. If I were to ask you to help me sell more milkshakes, undoubtedly you would say, make them thicker, make them thinner, add flavors, make them cheaper, add sprinkles, add, add, add. Very few people stop and ask the most critical question, what is the problem that the milkshake solves?
In the pre-pandemic world, 60% of milkshakes were bought between 7 and 9 in the morning by solo commuters, solving the problem of boredom during the commute. What is the competition? Coffee, the bagel, the healthier version of a milkshake, the smoothie? If you think this data doesn't matter, think again. Starbucks responded to this need by creating the Frappuccino, a caffeinated adult milkshake.
Another 35% of milkshakes are sold to parents alone with their kids after 6:00 PM Mostly fathers. So what problem is that? It is solving the problem of the family moment. Now, what are we competing with? We're competing with having a catch, going to the movies, going to the park. We're finding a way to spend time together in a memorable way. So I want you to think about that. 90 to 95% of the people who buy milkshakes are solving just two problems.
When you get clarity over the problem you solve, you can start to understand what your technical skill can do. There are many problems you can solve with many technical skills, but you need to choose what skill set you're gonna use to solve what problem. This becomes critical.
If you are going to grow your business, you absolutely have to make the transition away from “any revenue is good revenue.” This is the key to understanding your value and selling to the right people at the right time. Fall in love with the problem you solve, not your current solution.
Understand The Value of Solving The Problem
Once you determine the problem you solve, you need to identify who you solve it for and the value of solving it. The value triangle states that the price of anything falls between the cost to deliver it and the value a customer places on it. If you get the price line too close to the value, no customers will buy it. If you get the price line too close to the cost line, it's not profitable enough to deliver it.
We all know the price in the market that we're currently charging, and we generally understand our cost to deliver it. The challenge is figuring out the value to the client in a world where most value is perceived. Here’s what you can think about: Value has to do a lot with time and place. It has to do a lot with why that person is choosing to buy it from you.
For instance, a physical therapist's value changes based on the urgency and situation of the service. If you have a minor muscle strain and plenty of time before your next athletic event, you might not be in a rush to seek immediate treatment. You could schedule a session at your convenience and work on a gradual recovery plan. Now, change the scenario to sustaining an injury a week before a marathon you've been training for months, and the value of immediate, expert intervention to get you back on track skyrockets. The expertise and techniques used by the physical therapist remain the same. To get your perceived value right, you need to understand when you deliver your service and to whom. Therefore, what is the value?
You don’t decide your value, your customer does. On the cost side, you can sort out how to do things faster, better, with less resources. At the end of the day, the job is to have the widest triangle by ensuring the client gets the most value so you end up with the most margin.
Conclusion
The challenge in front of you now is to ensure you understand why you exist, what problem you solve for whom, and what the value of solving that problem is. Take this exercise away. Take the hedgehog concept away. Make it clear. If you get this right, this becomes the north star for your organization, and everybody gets aligned with this. Get to work on defining your strategic client acquisition plan to improve your client capture, increase efficiency, and experience higher conversion rates.