Ever have a problem with people asking your for advice or for a service from you (that you do… or are trying to do as a business) but not wanting to pay for it? Usually it is friends, acquaintances, relatives, or some such… people who don’t think of themselves as customers. If you are just starting in business, this may be a high proportion of the people you deal with.
And soon, you wonder about your own worth… maybe your information, service, product (whatever you offer) isn’t really worth paying for… since they don’t seem to value it. (I will talk about dealing with the “freebie grabbers” at another time… but don’t feel bad about them, everyone deals with them… just ask the doctor at a cocktail party. “Doc, I keep having this pain right here. What do you think it is?”)
And, maybe, you wonder where the paying customers are. But you don’t feel right chasing customers down and trying to coerce them to buy from you. Good for you… nobody wants to be chased down.
You can get the customers to come to you… but first you have to attract them. And you have to have a clear, consistent message about what service/product they are getting. (And for some of you whose business is largely a “connector business”, if they are/become aware that you are outsourcing the work, they must know what value you add… and still think it is a good value to have you doing it for them.)
Getting customers (and potential customers) to value you and your work/contributions/service/product is inherent in every business. You, yourself, don’t spend money on products or services that you don’t think provide value (your money’s worth.) Even so, you are not a potential customer to every low-end or high-end provider. You make choices about what to spend your money on… and so does everyone else. However, you do have an ideal client. And once you identify that ideal client, you direct all your marketing efforts to reaching that client. But until you have the ideal client in mind, you can’t effectively reach him/her. And until you know what business you are in or want to be in, any attempt to come up with an ideal client will muddled and confused.
(One possible exception is if you somehow already have an ideal client in mind and you work backwards from that to create your business by providing the service or product that the ideal client wants. This is backwards to the normal process but highly intuitive people might be able to work it this way… their intuition telling them what business they need to be in but not being able to reason out what the business should be from the normal process.)
If you need help figuring out what business you are in or who your ideal client is, you might pop over the the website (www.careerandbusinessmentor.com) check out Working with the Mentor. I’ve helped others and you deserve success, too.
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