As part of the exercises in Book Yourself Solid, I have been challenged lately to define my target market. In the past I have struggled with this for a variety of reasons. I’m sharing my struggles here because I imagine others have had similar woes, and might be interested in eavesdropping on my explorations.
One thing that consistently foxes me is having the discipline to narrow my service offerings so that I can focus on sending out a clean, consistent and understandable message. Since I have skills in a lot of different areas, I am hesitant to sell myself short, or miss out on a potentially interesting and/or lucrative opportunity, by defining my services too narrowly.
Another tricky bit is that my ideal clients (business owners who wish to define and work towards specific goals and involve their teams in improving their organization) aren’t necessarily clustered in one particular industry, or even a few. Saying that these kinds of people are only in small business is also a misnomer, but through experience I’ve learned that I have certain skills that apply to big organizations like government or corporate, but my true passionate nature comes out when I’m working with entrepreneurs. According to Book Yourself Solid, I should just focus on the work that makes me “light up” otherwise I’m selling out and selling myself short. This means I end up trying to define a target market based on psychological characteristics as opposed to industry, business size or other easily researchable characteristics.
The Law of Attraction would have me focus my attention on my ideal clients and they will come to me through the mysteries of the universe. I’d love to believe that, but I also happen to be a pragmatist (daughter of an engineer and an accountant, can it get more concrete-thinking than that?) and I want to be able to define specific strategies that I can take action on, proactively speaking. I’m not the sort of person to sit around dreaming and wait for my Ideal Client In Shining Armor to show up.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my most recent round of trying to answer this question. I’ll share more insights and musings as they occur.
Tags: target market
