Simple Customer Acquisition

How you can create a system that turns strangers into buyers (as a small business)

Bonjour friend,

great to have you here! This one is a gem and here’s a neat little overview of what you can expect:

• Why it matters that you understand customer acquisition on a first-principles level

• Why you think this is complicated (and who makes you think that)

• How you can use a different perspective to gain a real edge

• 7 questions to get clarity on customer acquisition

Let’s make things simple.

Why it matters that you understand customer acquisition on a first-principles level

If you build a product, a service, literally anything, and this thing is supposed to become a business, you need to sell it. If you think about it that way, your business has only two things to do really:

1. Selling

2. Delivering

Everything else should support either of those two (HR, Legal, IT...).

Given the fact that selling is literally 50% of what your business does, you should understand the principles of how to acquire customers.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you don’t understand the process of turning a stranger into someone who gives you money on a first-principles level, I promise you, you will get confused along the way.

---

If you don’t know me, at this point you might be wondering who the hell I am. Let me do a quick intro so you feel more comfortable reading on. I started working in sales about 13 years ago. Along the way I went from sales rep to lead to manager. A lot of my friends are small business owners and on my 39th birthday I realized that they will never have the money to hire me (haha), or more precisely, someone like me. They have great businesses, but they are stuck with either amateurs or one of those awful growth agencies. So I started sales_essentially and made it my goal to give small businesses leading sales capabilities for a fraction of the cost.

---

Why you think this is complicated (and who makes you think that)

My guess is that you don’t hear the term “customer acquisition” too often (am I right?). You’re probably used to people talking about marketing, go-to-market, pre-sales, sales, business development. It sounds like those are all different jobs with different objectives and different skill sets. It sounds awfully complicated, something for pros. If you run a small business, if you just started your own thing, chances are you’re not going to hire five different people anytime soon. But hearing all these different things in their own lingo is the reason you think customer acquisition is way more complicated than it actually is. And this is not a bug; this is a feature, because there is a whole industry living off the perception that it is complicated. Don’t believe them.

And before you say, “But hey wait a second, bigger companies need all of that, right?” No, not necessarily. Costco doesn’t have a marketing department and they have the highest customer retention rate of all consumer businesses in the U.S. I helped grow a software company from €300K to €7.5M in revenue and a €75M exit in less than five years with one person working in marketing (shoutout Claire!).

How you can use a different perspective to gain a real edge

Ready for the red pill? (Or whatever that Matrix analogy was.) Let’s ask some questions.

1. What are we trying to achieve?
   → We want to get new customers reliably and consistently.

2. What do we need for that?
   → A system that turns strangers into buyers.

Sweet, let’s call this system a “Customer Acquisition Engine.”

Let’s ask some more questions.

3. What are the simplest steps to turn strangers into buyers?
   → They need to know we exist
   → They need to get interested in what we can do for them
   → They need to buy from us

Let’s call these three steps:

1. Awareness

2. Engagement

3. Conversion

And this is what we need to do. From here on it’s the how.

And here’s your edge: you’re not looking for marketing, sales, go-to-market anymore. You’re looking for three challenges to overcome and a process that can do that.

Then you only need someone to run it (for some parts an AI agent can do it. For some parts you need a real person.) And here’s the crazy thing: if your customer acquisition engine is tuned in and works, you can hire an ambitious young talent and they can have massive success with it. This can save you so much money on your payroll and it’s a lot of fun to work with hungry and driven people!

At Bookboon (the Danish software company I was mentioning earlier) no one in the sales team made more than €36,000 per year on fixed salary. But because the system was so great, everyone sold a lot and made a ton of money on commission. And because it felt like you were part of something extraordinary, it created this amazing esprit de corps (to this day). How about that for an edge?

7 questions that will get you clarity on your customer acquisition engine

I’ve made a whole walkthrough guide on how to do this but I’m not here to advertise my lead magnet :)

So if you are trying to get sales going for your business, here’s how I would do it. Take half a Monday off and sit down with a white piece of paper or an empty Word doc (don’t use AI here).

Go through these questions and answer them as well as you can:

1. Who am I selling to? → This is your avatar.

   1. What’s their job?

   2. What do they want, if they could be interested in what I am offering?

2. Who am I? (not in the philosophical sense) → This is your Foundation Offer.

   1. What do I do?

   2. Why is it important?

   3. What’s the problem I am solving (from 30,000 feet)?

   4. How do I solve it? (The one main benefit and the one mechanic I’m using.)

3. Where can I find the people I want to sell to? → This is your lead list.

4. What could give them immediate value that I can offer for free? → This is your lead magnet.

5. How can they buy from me if they are interested? → This is your sales process.

6. What information do they need so they can make a buying decision? → This is your video sales letter, product demos, etc.

7. How can I ask for commitment in a call? → This is your closing script for calls and meetings.

I actually wrote an article about step 7, in case it is getting late and you want to wrap this exercise up.

I hope this helped. See you next time.

Lorenz

P.S. If you’re trying this exercise and you have questions, hit me up I can help you (not in a I will sell to you way :)