3
Digging Into the Business Plan for Big Payoff

Let’s spend a little more time talking about your target audiences before we move on, because the key to all business development is to give the right message to the right person. Matching the message to the target audience is still essential in online business development and networking, even though it may seem as if your information is reaching everyone on the Internet.

The first truth about business development is that it’s easier and more cost efficient to go where your best target audience is already congregating, rather than trying to get them to form a new group. That’s the thinking behind magazine, TV, and radio salespeople who show you a media kit that details who reads, watches, or listens to their product. The same thinking is true of trade shows, professional association memberships, and social media sites. You’ll get more exposure for your money if you connect with a group that already exists rather than spending time and effort to build a brand-new group and attract people to it. And while connecting with new prospects is important, remember that you’ll see real productivity gains by deepening relationships with existing clients to upsell them, win repeat business, or encourage referrals, rather than frantically trying to drum up new clients.

Unfortunately, most small businesses and solo professionals have been so busy handling whatever business comes in the door that they haven’t stopped to really think about who their best customers really are. Even fewer have thought about who their customers should be in order to achieve their business goals.

Getting to Know All About You

In Chapter 1, you wrote down many details about your target audience(s). Take out that list, and compare it to the goal/audience/ business development notes you made in Chapter 2. Here are some questions to ask:

~ Does your original audience profile match your new goal/audience/business development notes?

~ Are there second-level or third-level audiences you need to describe?

~ How well do the target audiences you have described match your current core customers? What are the similarities? What are the differences?

Now think about those prioritized business goals again. Your number-one business goal should reflect your definition for success this year. Is your current core customer likely to help you achieve your business goal?

Let me give you an example. Suppose you’re a life coach, someone who helps people clarify their vision of success for their business or career. Right now, your calendar is full of people who coach with you for one or two one-hour sessions and then move on. Very few of them return as clients after their initial sessions. They like you and appreciate the results, but they say money is the reason they stop after just a few sessions.

Now suppose you have as your top business goal to take your clients further through a new five-week coaching program. You would like to charge more for the program than you do for the regular coaching sessions, and your goal factors in two desirable outcomes: 1) making more income from the same amount of time, and 2) locking in a longer income stream.

As happy as you’ve been with your current core customers, and as pleased as they’ve been with your work, it’s not likely that they will be the best target audience for your new program. Why? It’s probably out of their price range. That means you’ll need to identify a new target audience for your business goal that is interested in what you have to offer and that can pay your increased price.

You also need to think about the clients you currently have who don’t fit any of your business goal target audiences. Maybe they were among your first clients when you started your business, and your vision has changed as time moved on. Perhaps you took whoever walked in the door. Maybe some of them haven’t been pleasant or profitable, or maybe the work you’re doing for them no longer fits with your goals. You’ll want to take a good look at their characteristics to avoid attracting more problem clients, and you certainly don’t want to make them a target audience. It’s your call as to whether you gently let the current misfit clients know that you can no longer serve their needs or whether you just let them gradually drift away, but it’s just as helpful to be clear about who you don’t want as it is to know specifically who you do want.

For any of your business development and networking activities to work at peak effectiveness, they need to focus not just on an audience that could buy your product, but on the audience that is the absolute best match for your product. There will always be some less-than-perfect clients who slip in around the edges, but you don’t want to market to them. You want to market to your best customer.

People who were your best customers when you started out may not still be a good fit as your company grows and your goals change. That’s okay. It’s part of the life cycle of a business. You will save yourself time, energy, and money by knowing as much as you can about your best customer so that your message will be on-target to solve their problem/pain/fear. One of the scariest things for business owners is to shift their business development from an original target audience that met their needs when they were a start-up to a more precisely targeted audience that meets their goals today. But unless you change your audience to suit your goals, your networking is doomed to failure. Your outgrown audience just won’t be able to meet your business needs, because your needs aren’t in sync with their needs any more.

Make the shift by thinking about the qualities your new best target audience would have—their goals, their visions, and their problem/ pain/fear. What will get them past the ego/budget wall? Now start to think about where those new audience members are already congregating. What kind of events are they going to? What clubs or associations do they belong to? What social media sites would attract them? What Websites do they visit frequently, where they might see a banner ad? How often do they search for the products and services you provide online, where they might see sponsored search results? Are they getting their information online or through traditional media? Do you know which media they are reading? (Once you know what online magazines and sites they read, you can target your PR to target those outlets.) Now is a good time to update your goals/target audiences with what you’ve just learned.

SWOT the Competition

When you first started your company, if you’re like a lot of small companies, solo professionals, and home-based businesses, you focused on what you did best that people would pay for, and you may not have thought much about the competition. Now’s a good time.

Think about the other companies you’ve encountered who provide products or services similar to yours. They could be local, regional, or national. The scope is determined by where your prospects are looking to find solutions more than it is by whether or not you consider yourself to be a regional or national company.

Here are some things to consider:

~ How many other companies provide a similar service locally?

~ How far will my prospects drive to obtain what I sell?

~ Can my prospects get what they need online or over the phone? (If so, you’re competing regionally and nationally.)

~ What’s different about my product/service/delivery than what my competitors offer? What’s very similar?

~ How are the companies I admire providing the types of products/services I’d like to provide a few years from now?

~ How are other companies offering value and convenience?

~ How do my materials or Website compare in professionalism to competitors?

~ What’s special about the things I offer or the way I do business to make my target prospect pick me over someone else?

Now that you’ve put your thinking cap on, it’s time to make some notes. Take a piece of paper and divide it into four equal boxes. Mark the boxes “Strengths,” “Weaknesses,” “Opportunities” and “Threats.” Now fill in the boxes from what you’ve just learned.

As you focus your networking message, you’ll want to emphasize your unique strengths (including your Transformational Value) and go after opportunities (including your new best customers or overlooked pockets of customers who need what you have to sell). At the same time, you will need to be aware of your weaknesses and watch out for threats.

Remember when I told you that everyone has a different definition for success? It’s true about weaknesses and threats, too. One “weakness” of your business may be that competitors sell at a lower price. But if your price is justified by superior craftsmanship or materials, you could turn that weakness into a strength that becomes a threat to your competitor’s lower-quality product.

Threats, also, are a matter of perspective. If you are a personal trainer, you might think that every other personal trainer in town is a threat. However, the truth is that many of those trainers aren’t going after your target customer because they’re chasing a different target that fits their different goals. For example, if you specialize in helping women stay active during and after pregnancy, and another trainer specializes in training busy women executives, you might turn that “threat” into a great two-way referral source as you refer clients back and forth to each other as the clients go on maternity leave and return to the workplace.