If you are in business or sales I am curious how that makes you feel when you read that?
I’ve been helping people with this for years now and no matter how successful examples I offer most people are never able to properly identify their ideal client and certainly are not willing to focus their energy in that direction.
Instead, I see the masses focusing on appealing to the masses. I was guilty of this for years. When I was in networking meetings and someone asked me who I was looking for, my response was normally, anyone with a yard. When I was asked what services I offered I would rattle off a list of pretty much everything possible you could do related to landscaping.
How did that work out for me? It created a lot of chaos, a lot of mistakes, a ton of wasted time and way too much stress. It was until my coach at the time took me through a process of first identifying who were truly my best clients and why and what I was really doing for them that I began to reduce the number of services I offered, the areas I serviced and under what agreements I would do the work.
This was tough for me as I used to pride myself in being the guy who when clients started with “Do you…..” I would cut them off and say “yes”. I think this stemmed from my early days of needing any work to get things going. Even when I was out of the truck myself and doing much better it was a very hard habit to break.
In my last few years in business I turned down far more work than I took on. We offered basically one package and you could take it or leave it. By doing this though we ran a much more efficient operation. We could plan better, train better, be more dependable, be more consistent, be more profitable and most important just run smoother and without nearly as much stress.
Over the last few years I have coached so many people that I wish I could have led down this path. It really frustrates to see some of them with such amazing knowledge and talent most often underutilized trying to help people they shouldn’t be helping while their clients are being serviced by someone unable to offer anything close to what they should.
A fun little litmus test I would encourage you to do is to sit down and identify your ideal client, figure out how many of them you need to achieve your goals and then look at how many are potentially available to you. If you do this you will probably discover that you don’t need anywhere close to 1% to be as successful as you want to be.
Then imagine what it would be like to only have to take care of those ideal clients under those ideal situations. Would that make you more efficient, happier, less stressed, etc.
Of course I would be more than happy to sit down and figure this out with you and come up with a strategy to implement it.
Have a great week!
99% of the people you meet are not a good client for you.
If you are in business or sales I am curious how that makes you feel when you read that?
I’ve been helping people with this for years now and no matter how successful examples I offer most people are never able to properly identify their ideal client and certainly are not willing to focus their energy in that direction.
Instead, I see the masses focusing on appealing to the masses. I was guilty of this for years. When I was in networking meetings and someone asked me who I was looking for, my response was normally, anyone with a yard. When I was asked what services I offered I would rattle off a list of pretty much everything possible you could do related to landscaping.
How did that work out for me? It created a lot of chaos, a lot of mistakes, a ton of wasted time and way too much stress. It was until my coach at the time took me through a process of first identifying who were truly my best clients and why and what I was really doing for them that I began to reduce the number of services I offered, the areas I serviced and under what agreements I would do the work.
This was tough for me as I used to pride myself in being the guy who when clients started with “Do you…..” I would cut them off and say “yes”. I think this stemmed from my early days of needing any work to get things going. Even when I was out of the truck myself and doing much better it was a very hard habit to break.
In my last few years in business I turned down far more work than I took on. We offered basically one package and you could take it or leave it. By doing this though we ran a much more efficient operation. We could plan better, train better, be more dependable, be more consistent, be more profitable and most important just run smoother and without nearly as much stress.
Over the last few years I have coached so many people that I wish I could have led down this path. It really frustrates to see some of them with such amazing knowledge and talent most often underutilized trying to help people they shouldn’t be helping while their clients are being serviced by someone unable to offer anything close to what they should.
A fun little litmus test I would encourage you to do is to sit down and identify your ideal client, figure out how many of them you need to achieve your goals and then look at how many are potentially available to you. If you do this you will probably discover that you don’t need anywhere close to 1% to be as successful as you want to be.
Then imagine what it would be like to only have to take care of those ideal clients under those ideal situations. Would that make you more efficient, happier, less stressed, etc.
Of course I would be more than happy to sit down and figure this out with you and come up with a strategy to implement it.
Have a great week!