The WHO is much more important than the WHAT

Too much to do all the time, but not getting the results you want? Struggling to reach your customers? Having a hard time getting your message across? Tired of cold calls and chasing leads?

“There is always just too much to do all the time. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up!” complained a struggling young entrepreneur yesterday. In spite of the fact that he has a good business concept and a great new technology, he is going crazy and considering quitting. In spite of his superman efforts and 70 hour work weeks, his startup business is just not taking off and accelerating like it should.

As entrepreneurs we should all recognize this situation. “Too much to do” usually means that we are attempting to do too many different things, and this is most often a result of an “inability to focus”. Focusing for a startup company is most often a matter of deciding “WHO” you are going to market to and not just “WHAT” you are trying to sell.

Determining the WHO you market to is actually much more important than WHAT you sell. You can have a great product, excellent sales arguments and yet you will still fail to sell if you are chasing all the wrong people. If, however, you truly understand WHO you are marketing to, then you will experience faster success and you will end up with less to do. If you understand exactly who your best customers are, what kind of problems they have, what keeps them up at night staring at the ceiling and what they are most worried about in their own businesses, then it will be easy for you to effectively create, adapt and sell your products or services to them.

The often fatal mistake that many startup entrepreneurs make is to attempt to market to a broad group rather than a tightly focused group. In the case of the entrepreneur I talked with yesterday, he is attempting to break-into a rather large market. A big investor would love this, because the market is huge and the potential earnings are impressive, but the costs and the level of sophistication required to even get noticed in this market is substantial and overwhelming for a startup company.

We explored a different strategy… We looked at how he could attack a smaller market with a much more focused message and offering, then use the rapid success in this smaller market to prove his overall business model, thus driving a powerful wedge into the larger market. For a startup company to succeed in a large market, it requires a different strategy than that which a larger and better-funded company would use. Prove that your basic business model works in a smaller market and it will be easier to get investors to fund your scale-up to larger markets.

Carefully choosing the WHO makes it easy to succeed with the WHAT. Narrow down the WHO to a small, manageable, easy to identify group of customers and you will use less time, money and headache in closing sales. Marketing is not difficult, but it does require focus.

Do you want to figure out how to work less, yet get bigger results? We can help you to develop a better strategy for your business. Contact us and ask how we can do this.

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