Show notes
Is your business invisible? Many businesses and professional practices struggle, not because they aren't good at their chosen profession, but because they're essentially invisible to their target market. They may be great at what they do, but they're not yet great at attracting, qualifying and converting enough high quality prospects into clients. So the problem isn't competence, it's entrepreneurial invisibility.
David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast today co-host Chris Templeton, and I will be discussing the fact that many businesses are essentially invisible to their ideal target markets. Welcome, Chris.
Chris: Hi David. Entrepreneurial invisibility. I have never heard it phrased that way, but it makes a whole a lot of sense. You know, in the movies invisibility is like this superpower, but it's not really an advantage in business, is it?
David: Not so much. No. When you're suffering from entrepreneurial invisibility, it means that the people who could most and best take advantage of what you offer, just don't even know you're there. They don't even know you're alive.
So in Harry Potter, if you've got an invisibility cloak, it's an advantage because you can sort of sneak around and find out what's going on and people don't know you're there. But if you're in a market and you've got an invisibility cloak on and people don't know you're there, it just means they're going to buy from someone else.
Chris: But isn't it kind of an overstatement? I mean, most businesses really aren't that invisible are they?
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David: I don't think it's an overstatement at all. Actually, I have seen over the years that many businesses are invisible to the people who matter most to them. Now, if they've got a client base, then obviously they're not invisible to those people; but if there are people in their market who could conceivably buy from them who don't know who they are, don't know what they do, have never been approached, I've never heard about them, doesn't recognize their authority in the marketplace… Then yeah, they are essentially invisible to those people.
Most businesses that I talk to, they feel like they want to be able to attract more clients, they want to be able to bring in new prospects, they want to be able to convert more of the people they're already talking to. And a lot of that frustration stems from the fact that people are not seeing them, they're not seeing them for what they are. They're not seeing them for what they can do. And once again, if they can't see you, you're invisible.
Chris: Well then, the only solution is a website. Right, David?
David: We’re going to go back to that? Talking in the last three podcasts on how websites are not the cure for everything!
Chris: Not the cure for everything! So you know, what do you think it is that is so common? Cause it is common in business, isn't it? This invisibility and this, I want to say it's almost a resistance to doing the things that create the visibility that we all want as business owners.
David: Yeah, well a lot of people just don't even really think about it. I mean they don't think about the fact that they are invisible to the people that they really need to be visible to. That's probably not perfect English, but you get the point.
Chris: Yeah.
David: There are a lot of people in their market who just don't know who they are, and they've never really thought about fixing that situation. And one of the reasons that I titled this the way that I did, is that I want people to recognize that if you are in fact invisible to the people who could buy from you, then you're at a distinct disadvantage because they just have no opportunity to make that happen.
So recognizing that it's the case, there are people who could buy from you but they can't because they don't know who you are. That's certainly the first step. And then adapting your approach, changing your approach so that you can take off the invisibility cloak and start being visible to the people who need to know you're there.
Chris: So what does that look like? I mean, what do you think that we can do to help businesses to get to that place?
David: Well, we're going to be hitting very specific action steps as we get toward the end of the podcast where we will give them a roadmap for that. But I mean the short version of it is that they're going to need to start thinking in terms of: who they need to approach, how they need to approach them, what they need to say, how they're going to say it, and how they're going to communicate it.
So becoming visible to your prospects and clients, it's going to also involve identifying who those people are. And so, I mean, there are a number of steps to it, but we will get to all of that.
Chris: So, do you think that if I'm a business owner who's invisible to my clients, is it fair to say that most competitors are somewhat invisible to theirs?
David: Yeah, some are. Maybe not all. Some are going to be visible to different segments of the market. So when you run into a situation where you approach a new prospect and they say, “I already have someone I'm dealing with.” In that situation, you were invisible to them previously, the person that they're interacting with was visible to them because they're interacting with them.
And what you'll find is that if you're going into a market and you're running into the same competitor over and over and over again and people are saying, I do business with this particular company or this particular person, then that person has visibility in the market that you don't have.
If you're going around from business to business, or person to person and you're finding out that there are lots of different people that they're doing business with. No, I'm doing business with this person or I'm doing business with that person. Then there are lots of different people who are visible in the marketplace and so what you want to ask yourself is: How do I become visible to the most important people, the people that I determined are most important in this market? How do I create that visibility and how do I maintain it?
Chris: And it goes back to that idea of; am I asking the solution-oriented question? If I'm asking, "Why am I not more visible?", that's probably not the way we want to go cause it's so much more problem-oriented. But when you say, "How do I become more visible?" Now I'm opening myself up to the thinking that I need in order to begin to solve that. Isn't that true?
David: Yes. And also who do I need to be visible to? Who are the people that I need to create that visibility with? So when you start asking those types of questions and when you start putting together processes and systems that are designed to make you more visible to the people who can spend money with you, then of course it's going to start to happen.
Chris: So when you look at this, is your sense that what a business just to do is spend a lot of money to be visible to the very best prospects?
David: Not necessarily. And I would say in most cases the answer is no. Many businesses probably spend too much money creating not enough awareness and remaining invisible to too many people. John Wanamaker had a famous quote. He said, “I am convinced that half of my advertising is wasted. Trouble is I don't know which half.” And most of us in business have dealt with some version of that or other.
In fact, I would argue that John Wanamaker was an optimist because in a lot of cases, if you're spending money on advertising, 90% of it could be wasted or 95% could be wasted. If you put something out and it reaches a hundred people and three people respond, that means 97% of it was wasted. But you're doing it for the 3% that responded. And so we need to look at all of that and say, you know, "What am I doing? How am I doing it? Who am I approaching? What am I approaching them with?" And it all starts there.
Chris: And you know, in today's day and age, it's so easy to measure these things, to have a landing page for each specific ad, where you can see what your dollars are versus what your impressions are. The people that actually filled out a form or whatever the next step in the sales process was. I think a lot of businesses just don't even understand how easy these things are to do.
David: Right, and how it does make it more cost-effective? When you're talking about the expense of this thing, it's really less expensive when you do it the right way essentially. And within each market, there's always a subset of the market. There's a subset of people who are worth more than the others in the market, and I generally refer to this as a sub market in our Total Market Domination course within every single market, whether it's a geographic market, whether it's an industrial market, a niche, whatever it is.
Within each market there is a subset or a submarket, it is going to be the most profitable and it's less expensive when you're able to target fewer people who have a higher ability to spend money with you than it is if you're trying to reach everybody, and that's a big mistake that people make. When you get good at identifying, targeting, qualifying, and converting those people, that subset of the very best prospects, it is really cost-effective because you're no longer wasting time on low-dollar, poor-quality prospects.
Chris: And I just, you know, I go back to this whole idea of people being stuck,