We usually talk about industries and markets of our clients. Today, I will talk about BizXpand and our market.
For us, the big inflection point was the "great SaaS re-evaluation" of 2022 — this is when the value of growth vs profits changed completely. The re-evaluation dramatically reduced the global demand for engineering and business development teams. Nearly all of our engineering services clients felt the hit almost immediately and were no longer viable clients.
Our client profile has shifted
Our typical client shifted from being a "local hero" based in Warsaw looking to expand into DACH, and is now more likely to be a well-established company based in Paris that has substantial experience on the DACH market, may have cut global business development budgets, but still needs leads.
This shift from growth to efficiency is nothing surprising, but became very real for us despite the fact that our targeting did not change. As a result, we adjusted our website and messaging to make us more suitable for an experienced buyer and moved away from the "what is outbound".
Meeting rates stayed strong — but conversion softened
We get our leads 3 ways: referrals, inbound (e.g., this blog post), and outbound ("eating our own dogfood"). Everything regarding quantity is roughly the same. Outbound, if anything, converts to meetings at a slightly higher rate for us.
The biggest difference is that meeting conversion (first meeting to new client) is approximately half as good. For us, the solution was simple: get 3x the outbound leads. This worked and helps us grow when others are shrinking.
Our next new market: DACH itself
Traditionally, we assumed that companies in DACH were well served by agencies focused on their local markets. It will not come as a surprise that it is easier to get meetings for a Munich-based company than a Barcelona-based company when reaching out to a prospect in Nuremberg.
The surprise for us was how much DACH-based companies spend on local-to-local outbound lead generation and how unsophisticated our competitors are. As a result, we now have a new German language site (before we were only English) and are actively making our business more German-to-German friendly in order to pick up some of this market. This, however, is still theory — we will hopefully see the effects in Q2.
Client churn is higher — by design and by necessity
This is partially because we have good lead flow and feel confident enough to end collaborations when the market or the personal fit is not right. The other reason is that there are a number of companies with significant lead flow pain and we find ourselves designing high-difficulty campaigns.
For example, an engineering services company needs to pivot away from selling skills and into a vertical segment that would have a more business-centric value proposition; however, with this shift, industry references and differentiators are not yet in place — making the campaign harder to convert.