Business generation: how to take your company to success

Business generation is a funnel, not a talent. It has four stages, and almost every company complaining about a lack of sales is stuck at one of them specifically, without knowing which.

This article shows how to identify the stuck stage and what business matchmaking solves at each one.

The four stages, and where each one gets stuck

1. Reach. How many companies of your ideal profile know you exist. It gets stuck when the market is large and you are invisible in it.

2. Access. Of those companies, how many let you speak to whoever decides. It gets stuck when you have contacts, but they are people who do not sign.

3. Conversion. How many of those meetings become a proposal. It gets stuck when the pitch is generic or the price is not positioned.

4. Retention. How many customers stay and buy again. It gets stuck when the delivery is good but the relationship ends at the invoice.

Before investing in anything, write down the four numbers from your last quarter. The stage with the largest percentage drop is where the money should go. Investing in reach when the problem is conversion only raises the cost per customer.

The two numbers that decide everything

Cost of acquisition. Add up everything you invested in winning customers over a period and divide it by the number of customers won. Invested R$ 5,000 and brought in 10 customers? The cost is R$ 500 per customer.

Customer value. The average order value multiplied by the purchase frequency and by the average length of the relationship. A customer who buys R$ 400 a month and stays 18 months is worth R$ 7,200.

With those two numbers, any commercial investment decision becomes objective. If the customer value is not several times greater than the cost of acquisition, the problem is not a lack of effort: it is the model. Raising the volume will only accelerate the cash squeeze.

Where business matchmaking comes in

A business matchmaking event is one where business owners sit at tables, introduce themselves within a controlled time and change table each round, meeting a new group at every change.

It solves, above all, stage 2, which is the most expensive to solve by other means. At a table of 6 seats, you talk to 5 people per round. Over 8 rounds, that is 40 conversations with company owners, in one afternoon, with no intermediary and no prospecting queue.

Compare that with the cost of scheduling 40 cold meetings with decision makers. The time and the effort are not comparable.

It also helps with stage 1, because forty companies come to know you exist, and with stage 4, if you use the event as a recurring meeting point with your customer base. What it does not solve on its own is stage 3: a weak pitch is still a weak pitch, only now repeated forty times. Work on that in how to present a product or service.

Taking part or organising

They are two different decisions, with different arithmetic.

Taking part costs the ticket and an afternoon. The return is measured in qualified conversations and in how many became a proposal within 90 days.

Organising turns the event into revenue of your own. Venues with quiet hours, coworking spaces, accountancy firms, associations and agencies use that route because it makes use of an existing client base and generates regional visibility. The arithmetic is in how to turn business matchmaking into a source of income.

Mistakes that block business generation

• Confusing movement with results. Many events, many cards, no contact

followed up. The bottleneck is not the diary, it is the process.

• Keeping no record. A contact that is not written down does not exist. A

simple spreadsheet solves it.

• Talking only to whoever looks like a customer. A good part of the business

comes from referral, and whoever refers is rarely the buyer.

• Not measuring by source. If you do not know where the customer came from,

you do not know what to repeat.

• Stopping after one edition. A commercial relationship is built through

repetition. One event a year builds nothing.

A 90-day plan

• Days 1 to 10: establish the four funnel numbers and the two numbers for

cost and value.

• Days 11 to 30: choose the stuck stage and a single route for tackling it.
• Days 31 to 60: carry it out. If the route is an event, attend two

matchmaking events or organise a small one, with 30 well-selected people.

• Days 61 to 90: measure. How many conversations became a proposal and how

many became a contract. Only then decide whether to scale.

What to do when it does not work

If you attended events and nothing happened, check in this order: did you follow up within a week? Did you have a specific ask? Did the event's audience buy what you sell? In most cases the problem is in the first question, and it is the easiest to correct.

If you organised and the event generated no business between the participants, the problem is usually curation: too many people who do not buy from too many people. See curating participants and selecting participants.

Predictable business generation does not come from a brilliant idea. It comes from knowing which stage is stuck and repeating, month after month, the action that unblocks it.