Process Focus: Finding Your Needleshop, Not a Haystack

• September 28, 2017

Process focus is all about giving you a system, strategy or scenario that can lead you through understanding a key area of your business, helping you get more of what it is that you want. 

I’m pretty sure one thing you really want is more new business. If you want new business, start at the beginning. I’m sure many of you spend a lot of time, effort and energy on marketing your business. 

However, there’s a key difference between sales and marketing. Marketing is all about getting bees around the honey pot. Your business is the honey.

The difference with sales is that we get to choose our customers. Provided we go looking. The art of great salesmanship is like fishing. It’s knowing what fish you’re looking for, where to find them and what bait to use. That way, when you go fishing in the right place at the right time with the right bait, you catch the right fish. That’s what Process Focus is all about this month. It’s about getting what you focus on.

We communicate it to you in so many ways. The brain is processing so many pieces of information. If you’re looking for anybody and everybody at the same time, you’ll find nobody. If you get specific on what it is you’re looking for, you’re far more likely to spot opportunity. A simple test on this, might be anytime in your life where you’ve looked at buying a new car. When you’ve looked at buying a new car, what’s often happened, is you’ve decided what it is that you’re buying. And in the period of time between you deciding and collecting the said vehicle, you can’t help but see tons of those vehicles everywhere you look on the road. I promise you that it wasn’t the strategic marketing campaign from the company you were looking to buy from. They were there already. It’s just that you’ve set a part of your brain to be able to identify, spot and look for them. This is exactly what we need to do to find more of the right kind of customers. So please take time to consider exactly who your target customer is. How many of them are you looking for?

Consider how many new customers you’d like to acquire in the next 12 months. Maybe break that down to how many new customers you’d like to have per month. And then define exactly what they look like because then you can go looking for them. Some of the things that you might want to consider are:

Where are they located? 

If you have an account management or a servicing responsibility, look for those customers in a simple geographic region. That way getting face-to-face to them adds value to them, then being able to access you easily adds value to them. Could you have enough of the right kind of customers purely located around the simple geographic region that you can service correctly?

How big are they? 

Are you targeting single person micro businesses? Are you targeting Fortune 500 companies? You might even be appointing your business where you’re looking to make a step change, to change the type of customer that you’re looking for.

What industry are they in?

Getting industry focused can really help you find what you are looking for.

Who exactly is the decision maker within that type of business? It might be one person. It might be more than one person. But really define who that is because actually, what you’re not looking for is an organization or a type of organization. You’re looking for an organization in a certain location of a certain size, and a certain person within that organization, because without that person you’ll never get the decision.

The more focused you get and the more you define your target market then you might realize that you have more than one target market. But the more you define it, the easier it is to find it. Coupled with the fact that once you know exactly who it is that you’re looking for, you can share it with others more easily, and they can help you find more of the right kind of people.