profile

Rod Aparicio

What's coming

Published almost 2 years ago • 1 min read

Here are a few themes that are recurring in the small/medium business I see.

Which ones do you feel you resonate with?

  1. You're struggling with getting your sales to be better.
  2. The market is highly competitive.
  3. You're pushed to play on (the lowest) price.
  4. You can't say No to customers. That's losing business (and stupid).
  5. If you say No to a customer, you're losing opportunities.
  6. Your competition is poaching your customers.
  7. Your revenue goals are not where you want them, despite everything you've tried.
  8. Raising prices has a big pushback from your customers.
  9. You can't charge more than what the market can hold.
  10. Discounts is the way to win business.
  11. Your closing rates are approx. 40%
  12. You apply to biddings, and win less than 30% of times.
  13. When giving proposals, you need first to "have a feeling of the customer" to know how price-sensitive they are.
  14. You respond to all the RFQs (Requests For Quote) that go into your inbox.
  15. You need to figure out how to fix/improve your costs to be profitable.
  16. Your margins are below 20%.
  17. If I ask you "How much are your top 20 customers making?" you don't have a clear, fast answer.
  18. You charge based on your time, effort, difficulty, materials + a margin.
  19. Your prices are based on the market.
  20. You rely on giving samples of your work (for free or for peanuts).
  21. You need to build strong relationships first, then talk shop.
  22. You can't give away how you do things. That's your secret sauce!
  23. Prices are given only in your quotes.
  24. You don't talk price BEFORE sending a quote/proposal.
  25. You need to accommodate to your prospects' budget.
  26. If they tell you they're tight on money, you need to concede so that you don't lose business.
  27. You trust their promises to grow and expand with you will happen. So you give them a "better" initial price.
  28. You have to tease the competition with lower prices, so that they lower theirs too.
  29. The focus of your business is on the revenue created —no matter how.

Lemme know. :)

Rod Aparicio

Get one tip, question, or belief-challenge that just might change the way you market, to help your customers buy. A *daily* email for b2b founders on improving your business —without the bullshit.

Read more from Rod Aparicio

LLMs are awesome language prediction models that tend, as with anything that's scaled-up, to the average. They're great at helping you see patterns —when you have learned what patterns look like. They're also great at making your thinking and voice sound average. To strip you out of your originality. At creating strippers of thinking. The more you leave your thinking to LLMs, the more you're stripped-out of your voice. Don't be one. Your customers care, hire you, and love you for YOUR thinking.

2 days ago • 1 min read

"The order of the factors does not change the product"... until it does. When entering a market, do you look for the right product for the market? Or do you look for the right market for your product? When defining which one is the starting point. The right product for a marketYou unveil a need and find a way to satisfy it. The right market for a productYou develop a product and now have to find which need it satisfies. Both are valid ways. The journeys will be different. The focus, the...

3 days ago • 1 min read

Pricing is how a business sets a price for an offer. It can be based on costs, marked up on a market assumption, based on the capital invested, on the market standard price, on how much it's worth to the customer compared to their gains. There's no right or wrong way to establish prices. However, there are ones that are less controllable (on external factors), and ones that leverage the profitability of your margins (I tend to go for this last one).

4 days ago • 1 min read