Specialise, Specialise, Specialise!

Clients are often surprised at how quickly they manage to turn around their sales when we work together. Its all very simple really – I get them to specialise. So many small business owners make sales and marketing harder than necessary by following a flawed belief that if they cast their net wide they are more likely to catch something. Sadly the reverse is true. The way forward for business owners is to narrow their focus and specialise, specialise, specialise!

The only reliable strategy for a small business is a niche strategy. Finding a narrow market niche will reduce competition and make selling easier. You do not need to niche the whole of your business. Once you win your clients you can cross-sell other services but to win them in the first place will be so much easier by focusing on your area of maximum credibility.

The hardest thing in specialising is to work out what to focus on and what to discard for now. It takes courage to specialise but from a financial point of view it is the safer option. Everything becomes easier as your message will be less diluted and therefore much more likely to resonate with your target audience. People will start to remember what you do and find it easier to refer business to you.

I recently bumped into a business owner who had been on my Lead Generation Masterclass. At the time he had 5 business areas he was trying to promote and he was reluctant to give any of them up. It was a bit like putting your hand in a jar and not being able to pull it out because you are grabbing on to too much. It’s much more effective taking things out of the jar one at a time. Anyway, after leaving the Masterclass this guy finally realised the futility of his situation and focused on one main area and I am pleased to say he had chosen one of the stronger business areas which is now thriving.

The key to finding the ideal niche for you is to get the balance between your target audience, your expertise and area of maximum credibility. Break down your target audience into smaller and smaller sub-sets until you are able to start identifying specific problems each sub-set has. If you do not understand the problems of a particular sub-set then either you have not broken it down in enough detail or you do not understand your market.

When working with people I have never had someone where we failed to end up with an ideal niche where they had plenty of credibility. It sometimes takes a bit of digging but there is always something tangible and exciting. If there is one tip I can give you that will move your sales on in leaps and bounds it would be to take half a day away from your business and devote it to reviewing how specialised you currently are and what you could do to be even more specialised.

Richard White