In Sextas Ímpares #139, I talked about selling services in highly competitive markets. The conversation covered specialization, communication, and the choice of acquisition channels.
How to recognize that your market is saturated
Market saturation shows up when margins keep shrinking and client acquisition costs rise each quarter. Watch for prospects collecting multiple quotes for identical jobs and switching suppliers with little hesitation. These patterns together signal too many competitors chasing limited demand, making growth harder and pricing power weaker across the market.
Competition isn't limited to whoever offers exactly the same service. Any alternative that solves the same difficulty competes for your client's budget, even indirectly. For example, a process consultancy might compete both with another consultancy and with a tool that promises to solve the same issue without human involvement.
When the perceived difference between suppliers is small, the client assumes the outcome will be similar no matter who they choose. It's worth watching a few indicators in the daily life of the business: margin declining over several months, rising acquisition costs, similar proposals scattered across the same channels, and a client churn rate that forces you to rebuild revenue almost every month. Understanding where the real difficulty lies helps decide whether the problem is the channel you're using or the message you're sending.
The trap of low prices
Entering a price war tends to destroy the company's margin and reduces its ability to invest in attracting more suitable clients. Cutting fees without reviewing the cost structure usually means more work for the same financial result, which wears down the operation over the medium term.
In the lecture, I talked about the effect of price competition on margin. A very low price can generate distrust among more demanding clients, who associate rock-bottom prices with a lack of security or experience. At the same time, it attracts less stable profiles, who demand more and switch suppliers at the first discount offered by another company.
When margin gets squeezed, there's little left to hire, improve processes, or invest in acquisition. Billing a lot by year's end doesn't mean much if there's no money left to sustain the team and the business in the long run. If you need to negotiate, adjust the scope of the work, the project phases, or the deadlines, but keep the value aligned with the real complexity of the delivery.
If AI is changing execution, also review the delivery and value of the service you sell.
The weight of specialization
Specializing increases the perceived value of your service because it positions you as the obvious choice for a specific difficulty, rather than just another generic option. Trying to speak to the whole market dilutes resources and makes your communication less relevant to any particular person.
In the lecture, I made the case for the usefulness of choosing a more defined audience. It's worth thinking about how many clients your business actually needs to reach its goals. A business can run well with a relatively small number of loyal clients; trying to communicate with millions of people at once wastes budget unnecessarily.
Imagine, hypothetically, a personal training service. Instead of communicating generically about weight loss, it could focus on people who travel frequently and have already tried other programs without success. The message immediately becomes more relevant to that specific group. Specializing also means turning down projects that fall outside your working method, which requires judgment when deciding whether to accept a proposal.
Building communication centered on the client's problem
Effective communication centers the client's real difficulties instead of simply listing company qualities. It demonstrates how your method solves a concrete problem, offering clear steps the person can follow and understand. This approach builds trust, since clients see practical relevance rather than abstract claims about your business's strengths or reputation.
Today it's easy to produce text and images with automated tools, and that has considerably increased digital noise. To stand out, your communication needs to address specific difficulties, without promising results you can't guarantee. Explaining the steps of your process rigorously builds more trust than vague talk about transformation.
Before contacting a potential client, check whether your message answers these questions: what specific difficulty do you solve, what common mistakes does the market usually make when trying to solve this on their own, what are the clear limits of what you do and what falls outside it, and what tangible result can be expected after the work is done. When the client understands the logic behind your decisions, the conversation stops being just about price.
Ads and content for more predictable acquisition
Paid ads give you some control over the flow of contacts, which reduces dependence on spontaneous referrals that vary month to month. In competitive markets, this usually works best combined with longer-form content that sustains the brand's credibility over time.
If there's active demand for your service, Google tends to be a good channel for capturing people who are already searching for a solution. When the difficulty isn't yet clear to the client, or the method needs prior explanation, video formats on social media help spark that interest without relying on active search.
Video tends to hold more attention and creates some closeness before any sales conversation. Longer content, like lectures or detailed explanations, helps filter clients who arrive already aware of the demands and costs involved. Shorter posts and newsletters work as a complement, showing your day-to-day experience on an ongoing basis.
Social selling and partnerships, without relying only on luck
Doing social selling well means listening, paying attention to interactions, and asking relevant questions to people who already follow your work organically. It has nothing to do with sending standardized mass messages to strangers, but with opening conversations that have real context.
A technical comment or a question left on a post can be the starting point for a useful dialogue, without forcing a sale before it's time. It's worth understanding that person's or company's situation before suggesting anything.
Referral partnerships can also ease the pressure on acquisition cost. When a partner sends you a qualified client, it's common to share part of the revenue generated by that account for as long as the contract lasts, which in practice redirects to the partner the money that would otherwise go to advertising. Even so, these partnerships work best as a complement to your own acquisition channels, not as a substitute for daily control over your campaigns.
Retaining clients to depend less on constant acquisition
Restarting revenue from zero each month pressures businesses to acquire clients at any cost. Building recurring income and offering complementary services eases that pressure by creating steadier cash flow. This stability gives you more room to be selective, choosing clients who fit well rather than chasing every opportunity available.
When a significant part of your client base is already secured through ongoing contracts, there's more room to test channels and turn down clients who aren't a good fit. A client's value over time can grow in two ways: deepening the same service, with more follow-up or a wider scope, or adding complementary services that help solve the main problem, such as including page design alongside campaign management.
Combining services saves the client time and increases the average value of each contract, but it only makes sense if there's margin, tested processes, and real delivery capacity. Trying to do a bit of everything, without mastering the areas involved, tends to compromise the quality of what already works well. To think through this flow in a more structured way, it can help to look at how to build a lead funnel that the sales team can actually work with.
Speed and organization in sales follow-up
How quickly you respond to a first contact tends to weigh on the client's decision, especially when they're evaluating several proposals at once. Taking days to respond to a message or call can mean losing the opportunity to whoever answered first.
Today there are accessible tools for connecting forms to messaging systems and contact management platforms, which helps welcome the request within a few minutes and gather initial information before the sales conversation. This doesn't replace the conversation itself, but it prevents the salesperson from picking up the call without any context.
Technology helps speed up repetitive tasks, but listening carefully, understanding the real difficulty, and proposing a suitable solution still depend on the person on the other end of the call. To go deeper on this topic, the article on how to turn more leads into clients in a service business develops some of these practical decisions further.
If you want to review your company's acquisition and communication, check out our services for online business and sales.