The Power of Narrowing Your Focus: Finding Your Perfect Customers
Narrow Your Focus to Find Your Ideal Customer
Every company, product manager, sales leader, and CEO should be thinking about their target market. Who would make their best customers? I believe that the parameters used to define target markets are too broad and vague and that efforts to significantly narrow their focus would be tremendously beneficial.
But we often push back against using a more targeted approach when attempting to identify our target markets. Why do we resist? There are two reasons. First, we’re afraid that if we narrow our focus, we will eliminate the prospect of selling to others. It’s not so. If you have a coffee shop that focuses on commuters, are you eliminating the non-commuting coffee lover who simply wants to stop in for a good cup? Of course not. Catering specifically to a target market doesn’t mean you’re excluding others from buying your product or service.
The other reason that we struggle to narrow our focus is that we just don’t know how to focus, or who to focus on. We are afraid to commit. The process of refining your focus until you can find your perfect customers is a difficult process, but a valuable process that yields insight and strategic leverage.
The risks of refining your focus and defining your ideal market are overstated. When you define the lane in which you want to swim, you aren’t closing the pool to those who want to swim one lane over. If you’re trying to sell ice cream to parents after baseball or soccer practice, you aren’t closing the door on those coming home from music lessons. Why is it so beneficial to narrow your focus? Because you initially build your business with your very best customers. These customers value what you do, will work with you and give you feedback, will tell others about you, and may even pay you more.
Furthermore, and more operationally, you can keenly focus your activities, assets, branding, etc. toward those target customers. Returning to the coffee shop, if you focus on all customers, then you might as well say “we have coffee.” But if you are focused on commuter consumers, then building everything you do around consistency and speed, along with loyalty, makes a lot of sense.
In the end, it is hard to convince people to narrow their markets. However, once they do it, they find new insights, actions, and focus. I suggest you give it a shot.