Welcome to More than a Few Words a marketing conversation for business owners. Today we are talking with sales coach Matt Nettleton aboutfinding our ideal client.
What we talked about:
Welcome to More than a Few Words a marketing podcast for small business owners. My name is Lorraine Ball and I help small businesses become big businesses. And today I’m talking with my sales coach Matt Nettleton .
Matt, there’s so many things that we could talk about in three minutes. But I’d like to talk about the difference between the average customer and the ideal customer, because this is something I’m working on right now.
One of the things that most small businesses really don’t understand is that there are really two different customers that they’re talking to. One is a customer who’s kind of what they work with. It’s how they make their money. It’s how they pay their bills. As a small business owner, you got to make payroll, and there are a lot of customers you do business with for nothing other than to make payroll.
The other type of customers, their ideal client, the client that helps them grow, that helps them expand their business in the right direction that builds a revenue stream that they can move forward with. That’s our ideal client. Understanding the difference between an acceptable client and an ideal client really steers your marketing plan steals your sales plan. It controls the way you build your and grow your business.
So if I’m a small business owner, and I’m trying to make that transition from my average customer to my ideal customer, what should I do first?
Well, first thing you have to do is figure out what your ideal customer looks like demographically stuff you can measure. It might be revenue, employee Account, geographic location, it could be an industry and si si code type of deal. What you have to figure out is, what do they look like from the outside? The second thing that you have to figure out is what psychographic qualifications Do you want them to have, so that you can you can step back and say, I know what they are. Now I need to know what they think. Do they outsource marketing? Do they have a long term relationship? Do they switch marketing agencies every six months when they can’t pay their marketing bill today?
How do I change how I sell to get more ideal instead of more average?
Well, first, it’s not when you find that, what do I change it? What do I change in order to find it? And so start to start to think about what you’re asking your clients for. Early in the sales process. You know, for a lot of marketing companies, for a lot of companies, what they asked for is, Can we sit down so I can quote your business? It’s the worst thing that you could possibly ever ask for. Because every business owners gonna say, yeah, sure, go ahead, give me your data, give me your pricing, let me shop you against my current guy, you pay the place release, I’ll get the extra profits. It doesn’t make any sense. So what we try to get our clients to do is to think about what they’re asking for.
Ask for better things from their clients. And that way, they’ll have improved early steps in the process that makes the later steps easier. Okay, when I and that’s, that’s great. One other thing when I’m looking for my ideal clients, and I run into somebody who not only doesn’t My ideal, they’re not even my average. How do you gracefully back away?
You know that sometimes there’s no graceful way to do it. But you have to be able to say, to be to be an effective owner of a profitable business, I simply can’t stick my hand in the meat grinder one more time. If you’re not willing to say that to yourself, it’s certainly never going to come out of your prospects mouth. You’re never going to have a prospect and say, You know what, I’m not gonna make any money. I’m gonna suck all the time and energy out of your business. And by the way, I’m probably going to be bringing other people just like me to you.
Sometimes you just have to see the warning signs and walk away.