One of the biggest mistakes that business owners and salespeople make is chasing after the wrong client. Most prospecting or marketing is haphazard, random, and sporadic with no real thought or clear thinking about “who is our ideal client”?
Most sellers have something they want to sell and they rush out to the marketplace without careful thought about exactly who it is they should be targeting. End result is chasing poor quality prospects that have no need or interest in what is being sold.
If you only get one thing from this blog post, get this, everybody is not your target market or ideal client. The worst marketing mistake you can make is poor market selection or who to go after. I see over and over again, sellers going after the wrong type of client.
Before you pick up the phone, send a piece of direct mail or make a prospecting call to make sure you have picked the right market. If you don’t get this right your efforts will produce very little.
How to increase sales by spending more time “whoing”
There are many, many things that you should know about your “who”. In fact, I have twenty-seven different characteristics and things that I have identified that I am looking for in an ideal client. Everything from philosophical belief, to age, to income, to political affiliation, and a whole bunch of other things really fit my ideal client.
Most folks make the mistake of not putting enough homework in to identify their ideal client. The result is they run off chasing any and everybody in an attempt to try and sell whomever they can get in front of.
I encourage you to begin making a list of at least a couple of different characteristics of your ideal and continue working on it and refining it till it is as focused a laser beam. If you don’t have at least 20 things that you have unidentified as criteria that your ideal candidate must possess, you really don’t have an ideal client. Best case you have sort of a generalization about who you’re going after. And that will tend to hurt you probably more than anything else you do because if aren’t crystal clear like a laser beam and focused on exactly who you’re going after, then you will waste a lot of time, energy, and money chasing people that you have no business chasing and who – even if you get them as a client, will end up not being the type of client that you would want.
How to increase your sales, make your job easier and less stressful
The first thing to consider when you’re looking for an ideal client or target market is; what is your affinity with that market? In other words, what do you know about them, what kind of experience do you have working in that market?
If you have no experience in that marketplace, if you’ve never been one of them, if you’ve never walked in their shoes and dealt with their issues or talked their language then you have a real disconnect and lack of understanding about their issues, concerns and frustrations, dreams and hopes.
You may still sell in that market but it will be more difficult.
About 40% of my business comes from folks who are in the financial services business, life insurance folks, and folks that have a security license. The reason for this is, I was in that business for eight and a half years prior to getting in this business.
I am one of them. I have been there. I know what their issues are. I know what their struggles are. I know what their pains are. I know what their frustrations are. I know what keeps them up at night.
I really do understand that business because I was there. Because of that experience, it makes it easier for me to connect and bond with them. It also makes it easier to establish trust because they know that I know what they are going through.
Rule number one in marketing, and the thing you want to get right is to make sure you spend enough time “whoing” and identifying what niche is your best and most fertile market. If you get it right, you will thrive. If you get it wrong, you will be a broke, frustrated and unhappy camper.