If you’re like any of the entrepreneurs I know, you could work with a lot of different types of clients. I’m sure you could help all sorts of people – and maybe in a bunch of different ways.
However, if you try to do this when you’re starting out, or if you only want to be a solo practitioner, you will exhaust yourself. And you probably won’t be very successful.
You’ve probably heard this elsewhere, but I will vouch for it being true: You will have a much easier time and make more money if you narrow your niche. (Some people call it a target market, and I don’t want to argue the difference.)
Let’s just say there’s a group of people you would like to get in front of and they have some characteristics in common, which will inform your messaging and how you market to them. They have some kind of problem you can solve, or a need or desire you can address.
So, what is the thing you need to know? You need to know where they congregate, have conversations, or interact online with each other.
Why do you need to know this? Because that’s where you need to go to get in front of a group of them.
You can make a good income selling high-ticket coaching to specific individuals, but if you need to sell more of your services or packages, getting in front of a group is more likely to help you achieve your goals.
Pamela Slim brought the concept of “watering holes” to my attention. These could be events, meetups, meetings, associations, chambers, blogs, social media groups, etc.
Did that just get you thinking?
If you consistently show up in these places, these people will know you are there to serve them, and your sales conversations will be so much easier. (Thank you Matthew Kimberly for that Book Yourself Solid system reminder.)
Let me walk you through a conversation I had with someone recently. She was changing her business model from selling packages of sessions to a higher-priced (and much more valuable) combination of coaching and various healing modalities to achieve a specific outcome.
Because I live to talk about business strategy, I was joyfully walking her through questions about what pain her ideal clients were having and what she could help them achieve. We circled around a few things and finally got a little clearer about her process and the outcome she could reasonably promise.
Where we got stuck was who these ideal clients were. So many different levels of professionals or executives or athletes could benefit from what she was offering. She completely lit up when she talked about working with athletes, but she isn’t currently going to the places they hang out, so that wasn’t the place to start. She can branch out to serve them later if she wants.
However, she was attending – and loving – several women’s circles and some executive women’s meetups. Bingo! These were watering holes filled with ideal clients, and she was already known and liked in these places. We just needed to tweak the way she was talking about what she did so they would know she understood their issues and could help them.
That was the easy part.
