First Rule of Sales: Don't Offer or Sell To Everybody
Want to sell more? Sell to a selective audience
If you're planning to sell to everybody, you will end up attracting nobody. Focus on getting your positioning right
Want to discover a rookie in the business world?
Ask the entrepreneur a simple question and their answer will tell you how strong is the foundation on which they and their business rests.
The question you need to ask is, “who’s your customer?”
Before you continue reading, I suggest you contemplate your answer and evaluate your answer, as you read the rest of the post.
The Everybody Trap
More often than not, a new/ amateur entrepreneur will give you a response as wide (read: vague) as possible and say, “everyone is my customer.”
The moment you hear any iteration of this answer, I’d suggest you find the nearest exit and run.
A business owner who is trying to cater to the whole market is in a self-destruction mode, and it’s just a matter of time before they (and their business) crash and burn.
This may sound too harsh, but this is the absolute reality of life and business.
When you’re serious about being in a long-term business, you don’t cater to everyone.
Based on your level of experience, expertise, confidence, efficacy of the product/ service, you find, select and cater to the right target market.
At the start (until you have 100 odd customers), you literally cherry pick your clients and create a (proverbial) tribe.
Identifying Your Tribe
Technically you should have an idea of your tribe when you start creating your business.
However, when you enter the market and connect with your customers, you will learn a lot about their behaviours, likes/ dislikes, and this information will help you narrow down and create a much-refined version of your customer profile.
Once you have the crystal-clear idea of your ideal customer profile, that's when you start carving out your niche in every aspect of your brand’s marketing, content, sales pitch, email newsletter, and grow your brand.
In the next section I’ll explain how I found the exact tribe for my business Paycheck To Profit
Carving Out Your Niche
When I started with The PROFIT Masterclass, my target market was:
01. Millennials and Gen-Z
02. Educated working professionals & business owners
03. Based in the biggest cities in India
04. Who are proficient/ comfortable with English language
05. Who wish to build a new relationship with money and get financially literate
The Paradox of Exclusivity
If you check carefully, this eliminated a very big chunk of millennials, and the gen-z population based in India. However, after having done over 500+ 1:1 consultation in the last one year, I found one more condition that has now been added in the customer profile of Paycheck To Profit, that has completely changed the way my business is functioning, flourishing and expanding.
I learned that I need to add one more condition to the customer profile that is:
- People who are inquisitive about or are believers of “the law of attraction”
Adding this layer has in effect eliminated at least 80% people (maybe more) from the total addressable market of millennials and gen-z, however this has actually made me feel liberated.
Paycheck To Profit is a personal development brand that helps customers to enhance their relationship with money, get financially literate and unlock financial abundance for their life.
However, the law of attraction is a very important aspect of the entire training process.
So, today, if someone doesn’t believe in the concept of manifestation, they will immediately feel a disconnect with the ideologies and product offering of Paycheck To Profit.
Also, if I try to force fit the product offering to suit the needs of people who are non-believers of the law of attraction, I’d only be diluting the entire product and probably give a mediocre product to my customers, which is not going to happen under my watch.
The Bottomline
So, did you see; by fine tuning the ideal customer profile, you’re actually improving the overall quality of your business by leaps and bounds.
Will Paycheck To Profit always cater only to customers who are a good fit as per the “ideal customer profile” of the brand today? (today being the operative word)
Absolutely not. As the business grows, there will be a definite need to evolve the product offering, but the way I look at the situation, that’s a decision that I’ll have to look at maybe a decade down the road.
So why bother about it today?
Hope this example has given you the perspective you needed to refine the product offering of your business, your positioning in the market where your business is operating, your content strategy, etc.
Your Thoughts!
So, what are your thoughts about what you’ve just read?
Do you agree to this thought process?
Do you agree that when you create a product that’s created with a specific customer in mind, trying to cater to a very large market (beyond the ideal customer profile of the brand) will be a detrimental decision for the business?
Let’s continue this conversation (or ask your questions about the post) in the comments below.
Keep Going Keep Growing 🚀
Have I earned your share?
Thank you for reading the full post. Since you read this till the end, it’s safe to assume you found value in the content.
Please consider sharing this post with your audience on social media. You may end up helping someone who’s struggling in their career/ business because they don’t understand the importance of building their personal brand.
I’m sure if you think hard, you will easily come with a few names who you know must read this.
Share this with them, help them and earn your blessings.
Join The ProfitClan
If you’d like to get notes like these on the subject of money mindset, the law of attraction, financial literacy, and a lot more, make sure you subscribe to The ProfitClan.
The ProfitClan is an email newsletter by Paycheck To Profit (founded by Manish Ahuja) where you’d access to daily exclusive newsletters, freebies, notifications of new podcasts episodes when they go live, access to The PROFIT Masterclass, and a lot more.
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Prompt used to create the image for the note
P.S.: Image made on Meta AI using the prompt, “Imagine a speaker from stage who's actually trying to filter out their target audience from the crowd”
"A business owner who is trying to cater to the whole market is in a self-destruction mode, and it’s just a matter of time before they (and their business) crash and burn."
I agree, this does sound too harsh at first. But I have slowly realised over the past year or so, how true this is and how this can completely change the game & trajectory of your business.
Really powerful post. Thank you