Best Consulting Practices

The Target Market of your Target Market

One of my most consistent themes on this blog is the value of defining your target market. Concentrating on pursuit of your ideal types of clients, rather than hoping to appeal to everyone under the sun, makes you more efficient, allows you to charge more appropriate fees, consolidates your status as an expert in your field, and affords opportunities for recycling services and marketing content for maximum return on the effort you put into them.

Focusing on a target market helps you explore your clients' needs in depth, leveraging similarities across clients to develop a deeper understanding of, basically, why they need you.

Now, take that "why" one level deeper.

Target Market²

Is Your Web Designer On Your Side?

You may have a variety of "helpers" to whom you delegate key tasks in your consulting business, not only to save time, but to supplement skills you may lack. Having someone build and maintain your web site is among the most common of these, but writers and administrative help can also be valuable.

And I strongly encourage you to look for ways to delegate tasks that others could perform more efficiently, so you can concentrate on the parts of your business to which you bring, and from which you extract, the most value.

But delegating tasks is not the same as abdicating responsibility for core decisions about your business and how it interacts with your prospects and clients.

The Question: "Why?"

Target Market Logic: More NOT, Less AND, Please!

In my work helping training consultants with marketing/selling content and activities, their target markets are an essential element for efficient use of their resources, for high return on their invested time and money. When they do not know whom they are talking to, what their ideal client looks like, their marketing messages are more vague, their delivery channels more diffuse, and their results much less satisfying.

So I probe about target markets a lot. And I always get a bit antsy when their responses include a bad word, repeated again and again:

"AND"

"AND" = Fear

We'll talk about one fairly narrowly defined type of client for a while, and then the consultant will say, "And I think we could also appeal to Y, as well as X." Keep the conversation going another fifteen minutes, and somehow Z will be pulled into the target market as well.

Filter, Don't Funnel, Your Prospects

You may be using contact management software, and if so, it probably has a feature that lets you track your "sales funnel." Or you may be reading a lot of books and blogs on marketing, and you're probably encountering the "marketing funnel" again and again. It is one of the most persistent analogies out there to explain the marketing/selling process.

Too bad it's wrong.

Time for a Reminder

I come back to this topic now and again, because this ubiquitous model of marketing and selling actually obscures what you should be trying to do with your consulting business. A funnel will do nothing to help you extract your target market, your best potential customers, from a world of strangers who start out knowing nothing about you.

Here's the difference between a sound marketing/sales process and a funnel:

The Most Important Brand

Some consultants think of "branding" as a huge, sophisticated topic, something that takes enormous time and resources to develop. But we all have a brand, whether it is one we have cultivated, or one that we have fallen into.

Your brand is simply what comes to mind immediately when someone sees your name or hears the name of your company.

And the most important brand is the one that lives in your own mind, the traits you immediately think of when you think about your business.

The Brand Inside Your Own Head

When you think about your business, can you immediately conjure up things like:

Why We Chase the Bird in the Bush

If it were not a natural human tendency to go after an unlikely gain rather than attend to what we already have, we wouldn't have a proverb about "two birds in the bush" in the first place!

Even given those leanings, training consultants are often particularly susceptible to the Siren charms of the concealed avian prey. That's why we must be ever alert to this temptation, and why we need to understand how running your own training business can make you even more obsessed with the distant feathered opportunity.

There are really two things, well, two-and-a-half, that typically drive you to focus on the bird in the bush:

1. Fear
2. Laziness

Marketing and Your Percentage

Perhaps one of the reasons so many training consultants are reluctant to work on marketing activities is because those activities only produce results, in the form of clients (or even interest), part of the time. They try one strategy and quickly abandon it when it doesn't magically fill their sales pipelines, and then they try another briefly. They never get good at marketing, and they never give their strategies the time they need to produce results.

Most of the problem here is in your expectations, and in your interpretation of the results you do achieve. These misunderstandings tend to fall into two camps:

1. Setting the bar for "good outcomes" too high, and
2. Failing to recognize when your results are actually quite good.

Batting 1,000