How to Capture 70-100% of Your Target Market
If you don’t plant the seeds, you will never see the harvest.
Josh Turner here.
As CEO here at LinkedSelling, it’s my job to serve our clients and those on my team. I want everyone to see this year as the greatest year of their professional and personal life.
But doing that doesn’t magically happen. It starts with intention. Anything you achieve this year, begins with intention.
I began this year with the intention to help put a strategy in place that helps business owners to consistently stay in front of their best prospects, reaching 70-100% of their target market.
When you reflect on what matters for your business, I think you will be hard pressed to find something that could be a higher priority than long term growth.
Ask yourself, what are you doing to generate leads in your business? We’ve all at one time or another felt that strain of “feeding the beast.” Of keeping enough new prospects and leads coming in, to keep your client base and backlog not just stable…but growing.
You need a long term strategy to develop real relationships with your most high-value prospects and clients. You have to find a way to stay in front of them over time. To make the repeated touches. To reach all of your potential target market consistently, not just the 3% who are “in the market / ready to buy” now.
Consistency
The biggest reason most entrepreneurs will only grow 10% this year?
A lack of CONSISTENCY.
Most entrepreneurs, or their sales teams, give up on a prospect after only 2-3 touches. They give up too quickly.
It baffles me that this is so common even though research has confirmed that those who stay in touch and get to follow up #8 or 9, have a 90% chance of winning the business.
Let that sink in: NINETY PERCENT.
There have been countless studies about how many “touches” or contacts it takes to turn a prospect into a client. And they all pretty much tell the same story. Those who follow up more often, are much more likely to get the business. Some say 6 touch points is best, other say 8, and I’ve even seen research that goes as high as 20.
Regardless, one thing that we can all agree on is that it’s certainly not 2 or 3. It takes regular, consistent contact and follow up to turn cold leads and prospects into clients.
Yet 79% are giving up between 2 and 3 contacts. 89% give up at just 4 contacts.
And if you don’t believe me, take a look at this study that Microsoft conducted a while back.
This research shows that if you have the discipline to stick it out to the 8th contact, you are most likely to be the only person still making contact with the prospect.
And if you are the only person still making contact with a prospect, can you take a guess on who they are going to think of when the need for your product or services come up?
And here’s the best part… by the 9th contact, at the point when the prospect is ready to buy, you have a 90% chance of being called.
Giving up on a prospect too early is the best way to throw away money. Now, I don’t know about you…but i’m not in the business of throwing away money.
This is a common problem with the 88% of businesses out there that struggle to maintain consistent cash flow.
Most of the 88% rely primarily on referrals and word of mouth. But what about the 12% of business who are not seeing cashflow problems? They get plenty of referrals too, but the reason they are growing at a faster rate, achieving higher levels of profitability, and are consistently cash flow positive, is that they ALSO have powerful marketing SYSTEMS in place. They know that referrals alone is not enough.
Taking this all into context, this becomes the important question: What kind of systems do the 12% have?
Systems that do 2 things:
- Consistently make the contacts and keep their business front-and-center in a way that provides value for their prospects.
- Consistently grow their prospect database so that potential clients are being seeded (reached out to and warmed up) regularly. All with a focused goal of moving them through your sales pipeline.
But what if you don’t do these 2 things?
The answer to this is more eloquently put in a quote that I heard a while back…
“If you’ve failed to plant the seed, you’ll never get the harvest.”
If you do not properly warm up and seed your prospects, you will fail 90% of the time.
How to Capture 70-100% of Your Target Market (almost nobody does this)
The number one fallacy I see sales and marketing coaches teach is that you should only sell to people who are ready to buy right now…
…everyone else is a waste of time.
Unfortunately this is common practice.
Most business owners use the shotgun approach. Or the “spray-and-pray” as some like to call it.
Simply put, they try to hit as many prospects as possible until they find one ready to buy. But it doesn’t take long to realize that only focusing on your hottest prospects alienates 97% of your target market.
Here volume is key. If your marketing approach is focused around going for the quick, easy wins… your only chance is with the 3% of your target market who is ready to purchase now (the green tip of the pyramid).
The rest of the market is largely going to tune you out. So your lead volume has to be INSANE if you expect to get in front of enough prospects to make 3% work financially.
So what can you do to reach the rest of the pyramid? For starters, you may not want to reach the entire pyramid. The bottom 30% who “know they aren’t interested” are unlikely to become a client soon. At least not for quite some time…although, when you use the strategy I’m going to share with you next week, if/when they change their mind you will be positioned phenomenally.
The remaining 70%…those are the people who you want to build relationships with. That you want to position yourself in front of, for the long haul. So that when their situation or awareness changes, you will be right there, ready and waiting.
Is it really possible to achieve this? Not for businesses that are trying to sell to anyone with a pulse. There are just too many prospects out there, to effectively make it work. (unless you have massive, big company advertising budgets) That’s why so many businesses resort to the lowest common denominator… shotgun marketing.
But for you, a business with a clear niche focus, this is more possible today than ever.
When you bring a shotgun approach to your marketing and sales, you turn off 97% of the market. Instead, think about what can happen when you use a Sniper Rifle.
Using The Sniper Rifle Strategy (aka The Right Way)
You’ve got your sight aimed far into the distance.
You’re aiming for the long term wins.
The ones that are months, or potentially years into the future.
And you’re prepared, ready, and waiting for when they will come to fruition.
You’ve planted the seeds, and when the harvest comes in…you’ll be there.
Yet the beauty of this strategy is that often, short term wins will come into your sight. Because you’ve got your aim pointed into the future, these short term wins will be in your sights as well. And when you spot them, you will be there. Ready to take advantage.
This is the beauty of long-term marketing strategies. You capture not only the long-term wins, but the short term as well. You aim at the biggest viable segment of your target market, which at the same time captures the smaller % of your market that is ready and looking to buy now.
But you can’t aim with a shotgun. Remember, to do this effectively it takes a sniper rifle approach.
Even knowing this, most people still don’t have the 2 necessary things that it takes to effectively implement this strategy.
Commitment and Courage
Short term strategies require neither, and that’s why the potential gains are so much smaller.
Anybody can spend a few thousand bucks to test out some cold email vendor or try some pay-per-click. And sure, you might pick up a small win or two…but for the most part, those are bottom feeder tactics. They don’t do anything to help you develop relationships with high-value prospects. It’s the exact opposite of the long-term approach you need to be using to attract the whales.
Utilizing a long term strategy requires Commitment to the strategy, and then the Courage to see it through. This doesn’t just apply to marketing. Think back to when you started your business.
Starting your business was a long term investment, not a short term gambit. When you first started, it took Commitment to draw the line in the sand and say “I’m doing this.” You likely even made that Commitment public, by telling some of your peers, friends, and family.
But just Commitment is not enough. It also takes Courage. Courage is what gets you from that initial stage of Commitment, where you decide to move forward, through to the other side where success lies. It is in this gap that entrepreneurs earn their stripes. In this space between Commitment and success, it takes Courage to see things through.
Dan Sullivan, Founder and CEO of Strategic Coach summed it up nicely when he said:
“As I’ve spent the better part of my life working with entrepreneurs, I’ve come to realize that, fundamentally, the only obstacle that can keep an entrepreneur from moving forward in any area of life is a lack of courage.
You don’t move forward because you don’t feel confident about achieving the result they’re looking for, but, in fact, the confidence doesn’t come until you’ve earned it by going through courage first.
This is the reality that most entrepreneurs face throughout their careers. In many cases, you have to take action despite not feeling certain, not feeling things are right, and certainly not feeling confident.”
If you don’t plant the seeds, the tree will never materialize.
Most people are inherently hard wired to limit their potential. And thus limit the power of their marketing. Why do we sabotage ourselves like this? It boils down to one thing. Human beings completely OVERESTIMATE what they can achieve in 1 year, and ridiculously UNDERESTIMATE what they can achieve in 10 years.
Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, articulated this idea exceptionally, and how it can create massive competitive advantage.
In a letter to Amazon shareholders from 1997 when the company went public, he wrote a manifesto of sorts about the benefits and approaches to long term thinking.
The main point of the letter, that we can’t realize our potential as people or as companies unless we plan for the long term. Every subsequent year Bezos has ended shareholder letters by attaching the original 1997 essay with a reminder of the importance of thinking long term. And every year, he is proven right. Since then, Amazon has revolutionized the way we buy everything, and is one of the largest companies in the world.
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people,” Bezos told Wired in 2011. “But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that.”
We talked about “planting seeds” earlier.
In business and life, the things we want always come from planting seeds. Whether it’s relationships or marketing investments, the proverbial tree was once nothing but a seed.
So, What’s Next?
Our intention is to help you put a process in place to bring thousands of new prospects through your pipeline, and line you up with those who are interested in what you do. Let’s go plant some seeds!
How do we do that?
Great question!
After years of helping clients all over the world get more sales appointments with their absolute BEST prospects, we’ve noticed some trends that we fully believe will be HUGE for your business moving forward.
This is something that you simply CANNOT ignore. To help you out, I’ve create a short video that goes over everything that you need to know about a strategy that established businesses are investing in to generate their BIGGEST clients ever. We’re talking life changing clients.
If you want to check that out, click here.
