Be Specific The more targeted you are, the easier for people to “click” with what you do, and immediately tell if (a) you’re relevant or (b) someone they know is relevant: Special Orange Unicorn Pens Let’s talk pens. Orange ones. Imagine you manufacture pens of all colors, customized to what a customer wants. And you decide to specialize on a growth opportunity. “We’re going to stop selling all colors of pens, including ‘design your own color’, because the market’s full of pen makers. We’re picking one thing to be the best at, to be known for. We are only gonna sell orange pens, special ones that draw unicorns. And we’re only selling them to those companies who need orange unicorns drawn on their sales proposals in order to close big deals. Because we’ve seen that’s where the growth is going to be, and we can be the best in taking advantage of it.” It’s easy to feel the loss of all those customers you can’t sell to anymore. It’s harder – until you see it working ­ to feel the success of focusing just on selling special orange unicorn pens. Be willing to lose the people who want all colors of pens, because ultimately you’ll sell more pens, at higher prices, to the right people – the ones who value those special orange ones. 5 ASPECTS OF YOUR NICHE 1.) Popular Pain: So what if you do custom application development, analytics, mobile­ enablement or sales training? Those aren’t pains; they are solutions. What main pain do you solve? Missed product launch deadlines, inaccurate forecasts, high customer attrition, lead generation struggles, low conversion rates from demo to proposal? Those are pains. And the pain has to be common enough: You want to specialize in a specific pain you solve, but not get so narrow that you can’t find anyone that has it. Within the niche you’re targeting, what pain can you solve that’s common enough to allow you a fair shot of finding customers? You know that a pain is common when you see that people are willing to pay money to solve it, repeatedly. 2.) Tangible Results: Where can you show concrete or detailed results? How can you answer the question “What do I get?” Example: “Peace of mind or a better night’s sleep” How do you make that tangible? “Grow leads 217%” or “Shorten month­end closing to 12 hours” are much more concrete. If you struggle with hard numbers, you can use visual examples or detailed customer stories and testimonials. 3.) Believable Solution: It’s easy to make claims of “more revenue, lower costs, blah blah.” Buyers hear this every day. Why should they believe you and your claims? There’s two sides to this: (a) They have to believe you can deliver, and (b) they have to believe it’ll work for them, including their own ability and capacity to do it. Detailed case studies of similar companies are