Show notes
Getting to your ideal prospects involves identifying what our ideal prospect looks like in terms of the type of customer we’re looking for, the type of industry they’re in, the number of people in their organization if we're selling B2B. All these considerations that are going to add up to the ideal prospect, because until we know who it is we're going to go after, we have absolutely no idea where to go to find them.
David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of getting to your ideal prospects. Welcome back, Jay.
Jay: Hey, thank you so much. Another great topic. We could call this one the Holy Grail of Sales.
How much time does everybody spend talking to people who would never be their client in the first place? What would you do with all that extra time?
David: It is an amazing amount of time. When we work with clients, that is one of the biggest ways that they get back time that is otherwise spent. Very often, when people are considering the idea of working with us to help them grow their sales and profits, it's like, “well, am I going to have time to do this?”
And nine times out of 10, they don't have time not to do it. Because they're wasting, in many cases, so much time with poor, unqualified prospects. And simply by taking a few specific actions, you can pretty much eliminate a lot of that right up front, save yourself enormous amounts of time, and better still, being able to then interact with the types of clients you actually want to do business with
Jay: But I'm a new company.
I need money to pay my bills. I need to try and close everybody. Isn't that what you would hear?
David: In the early stages, everybody says that, and after they've been in business for a while, they try to figure out, now how do I undo what I've done? How do I untie this knot that I've tied for myself over the past however, many months or years?
But yeah, in the early stages, we just want to take anyone who's willing to do business with us. But eventually, when our true selves kick in -- when we find ourselves in a conversation with the wrong client, somebody that we took on a while before, and we recognize, wow, this was a mistake -- that's when you start thinking, Okay, well, maybe what I need to do going forward is to not just take anyone.
I need to identify who are these ideal prospects. How can I identify and initiate contact with the right people up front so that I'm not wasting a lot of time with the wrong people down the line.
Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I have a business partner and he's this sage old business partner. He's built several businesses on his own over the years and I didn't know he was even doing it, but he has this list of people who he doesn't want to do business with anymore. He calls it the naughty list.
And, somebody came around and they were repurchasing our services. He just, with no emotion said, “nah, I don't want to do that.”
And I'm like, what are you talking…? I didn't even remember the customer. And he's like, “no, they're on the naughty list. They were a pain. They didn't provide what we needed soon enough and they harassed us on our pricing. The answer is no.”
And so he's got this Santa Claus naughty list, and I was like, “but they want to give us money.” And I've just come around to his way of thinking. I am not emotional about it anymore. They're on the list. Forget it.
David: It's a lump of coal for you, baby. That's how it works. Yeah. I mean, it is a strong argument for the fact that you don't need more prospects, you need the right prospects.
You don't need more customers necessarily, you need more of the right customers. Because life is too short to do anything else in my view.
Jay: Yeah. Let's say that you spend 10 hours a day working with customers are doing sales for potential customers, and five of those hours are spent on people who are not the right fit.
What if you could take those five hours and apply it to finding customers who are a good fit. Or even just providing a better product to the other five customers. Both of those are a win. The first option is, is a complete loss.
David: Yeah, and when you do that, when you actually save those five hours and channel that time toward better, higher quality prospects and clients, not only does it improve your bottom line, it also improves your quality of life, right?
I mean, in this podcast, we talk a lot about marketing and sales, but all of this also pertains directly to your quality of life. Your quality of life gets better when you're interacting with ideal clients versus just any client.
Jay: Oh, such a great point. There are few things worse than running around like a chicken with your head cut off for customers that you don't like to work with.
That is a nightmare. And when you think about why you wanted to get involved, why did you become an entrepreneur?
Why did you get involved in this process? Did you envision yourself being worked every day by people that you didn't want to work with.
I don't think that's what you envisioned. So how do you get back to that ideal?
David: Yeah, because a lot of the words that I hear from entrepreneurs in the way they want to build their business involves the word freedom, right? It's about the freedom to be able to do what you want to do in your business, to be able to make your own rules, set your own pricing, decide what types of clients you want to interact with.
And many entrepreneurs end up harming their own freedom by accepting people that they shouldn't accept. So, to answer your question, you know, how do you get around that? I think it starts with identifying what truly defines a high quality prospect for you? What defines an ideal client for you?
Because until you make the call about the type of business that you want to interact with, the type of people that you want to sell to, in terms of their ability and willingness to communicate. I mean, that's a big one. Prospects who ghost you? Do you really want to deal with people like that?
Particularly when it comes time to getting paid, right? So we have to make these calls. At least in my view, we're better off making these calls up front. Setting the criteria of what's acceptable for us and what's ideal for us and trying to stick to that as much as possible.
Now are we going to get it right 100 percent of the time?
No, we're not. But if we at least go into the sales experience, the prospecting experience with the idea of attracting and converting ideal clients, we're going to be a lot more likely to be able to pull it off.
Jay: Yeah, it's so important and you also kind of alluded to something there and that is training the customer.
Before they even sign up, letting them know what the expectations are. We do a lot of this now. We're like, okay, here's what will happen. And in order to make this work, here's what our expectation is going to be.
Then once they sign up, we do it again. We say, okay, here are the next three steps. After three weeks, we do it again.
And this protects us, right? But it's also a constant reminder to them that we have expectations. And this just comes to my mind talking about my seasoned partner. Let's, let's call him that way.
He fired off an email to somebody who we were so upset at. This person was unbelievable. And my partner fired off an email and he said, look, I don't want to do business with you anymore unless you agree to these five conditions.
You will not do this, you will do this. You won't do this. And I'm like, I've never seen anything like that before. The customer apologized, and they've been an ideal customer ever since.
And I'm like, there were one of two choices. We kiss them goodbye, or we give them the opportunity to play on our terms.
That's just genius. Just genius. I just loved it.
David: It is. It's amazing. And fortunately, that particular client had it within them to be able to adapt, to recognize, oh okay, I probably shouldn't have done that.
And to be able to admit it and to be able to change the behavior. Not everyone's going to be like that.
So we have to be open enough with our clients in our communication to be able to find out where they fall along that continuum between being totally obnoxious or being educable.
You know, you talked about training them, being able to be trained. And if they are able to be trained to be able to interact with you in a way that works for you and your coworkers…
One of the things that I had in our business was when we had people who were inappropriate or unprofessional with my coworkers. That was basically the kiss of death, because we're not going to put up with that.
The people in our organization have been with us for a really long time. We know how they are. We know how they act.
Now, if you've got a brand new person talking to them and they're a wild card, you can't be as sure. But when you're very confident about the people that you work with and there's an issue, you can generally take the side of the person you work with over the side of the prospect in most cases, if you know the person you're working with better.
Jay: Yeah, exactly. We had exactly the same thing. Somebody made one of our cherished employees cry, and I was about to climb through the phone. That's a deal breaker. I don't care how much money you pay us. I don't care. Your staff has to believe that you have their back and that there is some loyalty there.
And so, I don't think you ever want to choose good money over an employee, right? But I just really encourage people to think about why you got involved in the first place. And what type of customer and experience is going to give you that?
Is it quality of life that you wanted? Is it money? I'm sure financial freedom was part of that. But so often what we talk about, and I know that you do,