I want to start a B2B agency doing full-funnel optimization with an affordable upfront fee plus performance-based pricing — five high-paying clients on 12-to-24-month contracts instead of 15 on $1,500 retainers. My biggest constraint is I lack the skills. How can I learn all the skills required to successfully run this business?
The only way is by doing it. You can talk the talk all day and watch YouTube videos from people like me explaining how to build consulting offers, but we only scratch the surface of what there is to know. The only way to know what you don't know is to go do the thing, struggle, and muddle through the mud and the dirt. I wish I could solve all those problems for you, but any online resource is just the first step. If you want to start a business, actually sit with it. Spend two or three hours journaling through your thoughts on the business. Focus less on why it might not work and more on how it could work. Extrapolate things like basic reply rates. Use what's called goal factoring: you have a goal, then you ask how do I achieve the goal, then how do I achieve each of the things that help me achieve the goal, and so on, continuously working your way down until you've arrived at a big list of actions.
I wouldn't recommend starting with B2B SaaS if you're new to business. Instead, begin with something simpler like an agency that offers a straightforward service implementation. If you still want to pursue B2B SaaS, get your first customer as quickly as possible—don't spend time engineering the product. Create a simple landing page, a basic dashboard, and a minimum viable feature that outperforms competitors, then push it in front of as many people as you can. Keep usage costs low and give away slots so people try your service, learning through feedback rather than planning. If you're just starting out, I would definitely avoid B2B SaaS.
I wouldn't recommend starting with B2B SaaS if you're new to business. Instead, begin with something simpler like an agency that offers a straightforward service implementation. If you still want to pursue B2B SaaS, get your first customer as quickly as possible—don't spend time engineering the product. Create a simple landing page, a basic dashboard, and a minimum viable feature that outperforms competitors, then push it in front of as many people as you can. Keep usage costs low and give away slots so people try your service, learning through feedback rather than planning. If you're just starting out, I would definitely avoid B2B SaaS.
You shouldn't expect to convert every sales call; aim for a 20-30% conversion rate, which means you might need up to five calls to close a deal. If you're less experienced, expect to make 10-30 calls before a sale. Keep your expectations low to reduce pressure—knowing you need at least 20 calls to see success will help you perform better on each call. Think of each call as just another 5% toward your goal. Improving naturally comes from following a process or script, which you can find online or in Maker School. If you're running a web design agency but can't build websites yourself, you're not truly running the agency. Learn to build a couple of sites easily with AI—no need for a friend. Then manage the entire stack yourself. Thanks to Leroy and Kapsa. (Note about uncle being a financial advisor skipped as already answered.)
It's straightforward. Just look for companies that book demos. The reason you have to look for companies that require a demo for their product or service is because if you go for any SaaS company, you'll get a bunch of really low-ticket ones that charge like $5 a month. Instead, you want businesses that charge $500 to maybe $1,000 a month, get people on a six to 12-month plan, and end up making an LTV of six to maybe $10,000. The value there is if you get that SaaS company one more customer, you've now generated six to $10,000 for them. Which means if you're charging three to $5,000, it's really easy to get them one or two customers a month and maximally justify the money they spend on you. So literally just compile a big list of SaaS companies, command-F and have whatever tool you're using look for the word 'demo' on their landing page — as long as they have a demo, you're good to go. You can send mass emails to them through any sort of enrichment campaign like AirSkape, Vain, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, AnyMail Finder, and so on. Then just sell them more customers. The simplest and easiest problem most businesses have is they don't have enough customers. A B2B SaaS company in particular never has enough customers because their fulfillment and back ends are almost completely automated — that's why they're in B2B SaaS. The only real thing they need is to pour fuel on the fire.