By Mike Gruley
In a perfect world, every single client would be your ideal customer.
There’s also unlimited coffee and nice dogs in that perfect world, but we don’t live there.
In our world, your leadership team continually wants to attract more and more people like this perfect customer, the client who absolutely adores you and who you love right back. The goal is to fill your plate with these dream clientele. That full plate leaves less room for customers who might help pay the bills, but who cause stress, anxiety, and distraction along the way.
If I were sitting down with your leadership team to help you find your ideal audience, these are the exact steps we would take to help you live in that perfect world (nice dogs not included).
- Evaluate and survey the dream customers that you currently have. Identify precisely what it is about your business that they like, and what makes you unique and different in their eyes. Repeat until a pattern appears.
- Select the top three most common differentiators that your ideal customers think make you great. Let’s say…you’re fast, you have outstanding customer service, and you offer a great loyalty program!
- Combine these three qualities, and there you have it: These are your Three Uniques™. The key to the Three Uniques is the combination of them. Your competitors might be fast, and they might even be fast and have outstanding customer service, but a competitor who’s fast, has outstanding customer service, and offers a great loyalty program just like you? Finding someone who also offers all three will be rare (if not nonexistent).
- Once your leadership team has identified these Three Uniques, make them the common thread running throughout all your marketing and sales efforts. Then, you’re always guaranteed to be communicating a message that resonates with precisely the people you want to attract.
- Stay in your lane and only focus on doing work in the specific niche where your Three Uniques thrive. Resist the temptation to cater to anyone besides your ideal customer.
“Easier said than done, Mike!”
For some companies, this is scary. You may have scaled your business and achieved enormous success by offering as many services as you can to as many clients as you can find, whether or not you’re the best person for the job.
However, this kind of growth will hit an inevitable ceiling. You just cannot be all things to all people. It’s like going to the doctor: Every doctor has gone to medical school, but if I went to the knee doctor and said, “I’m having trouble breathing,” the knee doctor would refer me to a lung specialist. Could the knee doctor technically fix my lungs? Maybe he could do a decent job, but what he really loves is fixing knees, and what the lung doctor really loves is fixing lungs!
Greatness comes from working in your sweet spot. Once you’ve found your favorite customers, the ones who bring you joy in doing your business, you will thrive by building an audience filled with as many of those kinds of people as possible.
In my perfect world, I’m sitting down with leadership teams passionate about taking their businesses to the next level, so feel free to reach out any time for a free consultation or just to chat– no strings attached.
Are you ready for something bigger, brighter, and better?