The single most important decision you’ ll ever make in business is this: WHO should my customer be?
Every decision you make, from what you name your company to the people you hire, rises and falls on the answer to that question. Yet most MSPs still don’ t have a high-resolution definition of who their ideal, sweet-spot customer is, how many of them are in their chosen demographic segments( if they’ ve even identified that yet), OR how to communicate with them in such a way that makes selling easy( or at least easier).
Candidly, not much is published on this topic. I have over 500 books and programs on marketing in my office alone, not to mention the library downstairs, yet those tomes contain very little on how to select and research a target market. It’ s actually kind of astonishing to me, given that selecting who you want as a customer is THE starting point of any business, product, service, or marketing campaign.
Part of this, I think, is because the work that goes into selecting and researching a good target market is tedious and nonscientific, meaning you could do a lot of work researching a particular market segment, only to find out it’ s not lucrative or matched for you. There is also no " one " perfect market, because a market can’ t be " perfect " until we identify what the product or service is that we’ re trying to sell. And if we’ re doing marketing the right way, we need to identify a market with a need FIRST before really designing a solution to fill the need. A bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.
Furthermore, defining that target market, understanding it, and building it requires long-term commitment with no short-term payoff. People lose interest quickly.
When I started my business back in 2001, I took nearly a year to decide upon MSPs( at the time, VARs) as my target audience. I chose small IT shops because I was small. I stuck with U. S.-based firms because that provided me plenty of blue ocean to work with without having the added complexity of language, culture, and time-zone differences. I also had a very good, very strong JV partner in CompTIA that launched me and my services to this industry, and I was having a lot of success in working with the handful of VAR clients I had secured. ALL of this combined made my decision relatively easy.
But once that decision was made, I was very, very far from“ done.” The year 2002 was a big one for learning the industry. Although I didn’ t have a lot of money, I made certain I went to a number of industry events as an attendee so I could talk to people, both the MSPs owners and the vendors, to understand the nuances of the industry. The biggest learning curve for me was, by far, understanding the mountain of technical jargon and acronyms this industry LOVES.
At one industry event— System Builder Summit— I was standing having drinks at the end of the day with a group of people I had casually met that day. In conversation, I made the“ fatal” mistake of labeling one of the guys a VAR. He promptly and harshly chastised me, saying,“ If you ever want to make it in THIS industry, you better understand the difference between a VAR and a system builder. I am NOT a VAR but a system builder.” Rude? Yes. Socially inappropriate? Of course. But it was a lesson I value and will never forget.
If you truly want to dominate a market and outsell and outperform your competition, you have to KNOW how that market speaks and thinks. You have to understand the trends happening, who the key players are, what everyone is talking about“ now,” and who they HATE( a common enemy is one of the most powerful assets in persuading a group of people to your side).
You also have to understand the language, how they market and sell their services, how they get paid, and, of course, what THEY believe to be true about their business and the industry as a whole. One slip of the tongue or mistake in a statement will instantly reveal you’ re“ not one of them” and cause them to dismiss everything else you’ re saying.
Every once in a while, I get a speaker who decides they want to research my audience so they can speak directly to them and demonstrate their interest. VERY often, they miss the mark and only reveal how unbelievably ignorant they are as well as alienate the audience. One speaker kept referring
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