Posted by LinkedSelling in Uncategorized
“What's cooler than a billion likes on facebook? 10, or even 1, of your ideal client.” – author unknown
I heard that quote on an episode of Entrepreneur on Fire.
That is what most of us are trying to do, cut through the masses to get an at-bat with our perfect client.
But, ask yourself, how effectively are you achieving it?
Let's break it down.
Identifying Your Ideal Prospect
The identification phase typically involves two things, demographics and psyschographics.
Each are very important.
Demographics
This is the type of data most people have on their target market.
Ask John, your IT consultant, what types of businesses he's after and you'll probably get a response along the lines of:
“Any business here in the Chicago area that has between 10-200 employees. Oh, and I usually am dealing with the CEO or CFO initially.”
That's demographics. It's this stuff:
- Geographic location.
- Company Size Range
- Revenue
- and employee count
- Ideal Position (who buys from you?)
- Age Range of this Buyer.
- Average Salary of this Buyer.
- Target Industries
- etc…
But if you just stop there, you're missing out on a key piece of the puzzle.
Psychographics
The psychographic profile of your ideal customer includes their “values, behaviors and characteristics.”
(Note: Everything I learned about psychographics, I learned from Dale Furtwengler's Pricing for Profit.)
The questions you need to ask yourself are; is your customer more interested in:
- Image,
- Innovation,
- or Convenience?
- Savings,
- or Relationships?
- Value,
- or Price?
How do they typically dress? What kind of car do they drive? What are the concerns that keep them up at night?
Answering these questions might sound like an exercise designed to manipulate. But it's not.
Think of it this way. If your business model is in line with delivering based on strong relationships and value, do you think that a prospect with a WalMart mentality is going to be a good fit? Absolutely not.
On the flipside, if you're talking to a Mercedes Benz owner, you better not be pushing low price.
Those are the basics of “identifying” your ideal prospect, now let's talk about “targeting.”
Different Prospects Can and Should Be Reached in Different Places!
Here's an exercise that's very much worth your time
Identify your 3 key target prospect profiles, and the top 3 methods for targeting them.
Create a cheat sheet, one for each prospect profile. It might look something like this:
Target Prospect Profile #1 – Lawn Care Company Owners
Description of Prospect:
- Owners or C-level executives at lawn care companies.
- 10 employees or greater.
- Kansas City metro area.
Top 3 Ways They Can Be Reached:
- Direct Outreach (Pick up the phone)
- Email Marketing
- Webinar
Look, you can add as many tactics to the list as you want. But the point is that you want to be focused.
Sure, you can find a lot of these people on LinkedIn, but…
- You can find all of them on the phone, given the nature of their business.
- Second, you know that you can find their email addresses easily, so that's a no-brainer.
- And finally, getting them to attend a webinar will make sense if your product or service is amenable to it.
You've essentially roughed out a mini-campaign. And skipped the stuff that isn't right. Facebook? Not for this market. Twitter? Probably not.
Trade show? Now that might be something to put on the list, but when can you get all of these targets in one building at the same time? Probably not often, if you have a tightly focused market.
The key is balance. Balancing your budget, with the tactics at your disposal, with the predisposition of your prospects.
Build a little cheat sheet like this for each of your target prospect profiles, and you'll have the foundation for a far more effective campaign.
Thanks helpful post.