I was having coffee with two business development experts who were former corporate buyers at one of the largest banks in the world, and they told me a story I had to share with you. An elderberry juice maker kept approaching the bank to sell to them. Kept pitching. Never did any of the actual work to see if it made sense.

I hear this all the time from small businesses, and it’s costing businesses millions in wasted effort. In fact, one business owner I met at a conference was actually asking the buyer to help her understand if she was a good fit. Instead of the other way around.

So why does an elderberry juice maker think pitching a bank is a good idea? There are five reasons you’re probably doing the same thing.

Reason #1: FOMO – Fear of Missing Out

You think focusing on one industry or one niche means you’re missing out on all the others. That’s the lie that’s killing your business.

Every single piece of research – including my entire 18 years as a corporate buyer and 13 years helping businesses – shows the opposite. When you focus on one industry and one pain point, you grow faster in that tiny niche. If you pick the right one that the incumbent isn’t serving or is too large to care about, you can hook your way in and scale up through the years by building trust. Corporations want to work with people they trust, people who won’t make them lose face or their jobs.

But FOMO makes you spray and pray instead of being strategic. Stop it.

Reason #2: Selfish Marketing – You’re Thinking About You

Just because someone’s human doesn’t mean they’re your target. Just because they work at a bank and have money doesn’t mean they can buy from you.

You’re thinking: I have an amazing product. These people have lips and stomachs. They can drink juice. But you’re never thinking about what they actually need.

I asked those two bank buyers what they said when the juice maker pitched them. One said flat out: “That’s just not something we buy.” The other said she gets silly questions like that all the time and asks a standard question back: “Do you know which categories we purchase?”

Stop thinking about what you have. Start thinking about what they need. What do they go to bed worried about? What are their KPIs? Think about them for a change.

Reason #3: You Don’t Understand Pain-Based Marketing

Seventy percent of humans purchase based on pain. If there’s no problem, there’s no sale. Nobody’s looking for a solution when they don’t have a problem.

Put yourself in the bank’s shoes. Do the research. See if you can actually solve a problem they have. If there’s no credible link between what you sell and what they’re struggling with, stop pitching them. The juice maker would need to prove that elderberry juice somehow solves a real business problem at the bank – like employee turnover due to unhappiness. That’s a reach without actual evidence. And it has to be believable. It has to be based on facts, not just a suggestion.

Reason #4: You Don’t Know Their Buying Categories

Most businesses have no idea what corporate buyers actually purchase or how they purchase it.

Would a financial institution ever directly buy juice? Maybe for an event. But would they go through a distributor instead of approaching a juice maker directly? Probably. Do you know their buying categories? Their buying cycles? Their buying teams? No. So why pitch anyway?

Figure out what they actually buy before you approach them. It sounds obvious, but it’s the biggest mistake I see.

Reason #5: You Haven’t Done Consumer Segmentation

Just because someone can use your product doesn’t make them your target.

When I worked for BIC pens, we did segmentation research and found the market split perfectly into thirds. One third were bargain hunters – the cheap moms who’d do anything for 10 cents off. One third were pen thieves who stole pens from work and hotels. The last third were loyalists who knew exactly what pen and ink delivery style they wanted and would pay more for it.

Our brand had become completely associated with cheap. We owned the bargain hunters. But we discovered the biggest problem with the loyalists was the ink – the snobs didn’t like our smooth glide. So we completely changed our methodology, developed an easy glide ink, and targeted the loyalty segment instead. The entire category changed for us.

But we had to do the segmentation first. We had to understand who actually bought what, why they bought it, and how they congregated into different groups.

Then we could message to them specifically and in the right places.

What You Should Actually Do

Do the segmentation. Ask: Who uses this? Why do they use it? How do they congregate into different groups?

Then do pain-based marketing. Remember, humans only gather in large numbers around their interests or their industry. If you’re selling B2B, look at their industry. If you’re selling B2C, look at their lifestyle. A yoga mom is different from a foodie is different from a hockey fanatic.

So if you’re selling elderberry juice with health benefits for seniors, you put messaging like “Protect yourself this winter” in AARP magazine and do sampling at high-end senior residences. You don’t pitch banks.

This is linear thinking, but so many businesses I meet are making one or two of these mistakes and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s why they approach buyers saying “Please help me” instead of showing up saying “Here’s how I can help you.”

Know your target. Know their pain. Know why they’d buy from you. Everything else is just noise.

Want to reposition your messaging to grow your leads? Follow me on X, friend me on Facebook,watch my Podcast onYouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk.