Transcription
Fast growth businesses are exceptional at finding the right clients. Clients who throw money at problems, not time at problems. Clients who are absolutely delighted when you can solve their problem, even when you charge top prices for it.
So, how do we find the right clients? The absolute perfect clients are people who want to throw money at problems, not time at problems. Now, I have seen so many businesses that go after the wrong client. I've seen businesses that are targeting students who are broke. I've seen businesses that are targeting small businesses and startups that have no money and no budget. And those businesses are notoriously hard to get off the ground because, by definition, they're deliberately targeting someone who doesn't have a budget. They don't have money to spend.
And in many cases, even if you target someone who's got money, but they've also got a lot of time on their hands, they can be bad clients as well because they want to get like hands-on and they want to fiddle with things and change things, and that's not ideal either. So, client selection is a huge part of growth. Fast-growing companies are very good at defining the perfect client: who's got money to spend, who's going to meddle, who's going to be a delightful client to work with. And if you can get this right, your business is going to grow, and you're going to enjoy the process.
So, let's talk about how to find the right clients. So, the perfect client has got three things that we want to check in on. Number one is that they have budget. They've got money. There's money to spend. They either have a budget in mind, or they have so much disposable income that they can find the budget if they find something that solves their problem. Number two is they have a dissatisfaction. There's an unmet need. There's a problem that they're frustrated by. There's something that is less than perfect in the world, and they want to fix that. They want to address it. And number three, they're time-poor. People who have got too much time on their hands, they're going to be difficult clients because they want to take up lots of your time or your team's time. They want to meddle with things, and that's not ideal either.
So, we're looking for people who've got a problem to solve. They've got money to throw at the problem, and they're not going to get involved. They just want to outsource it to your business. They want a solution delivered for them.
So, let's explore all three of these. So, let's start with money. Uh, with every audience that you could build, there's going to be this dichotomy of a niche market versus the mass market. Now, the mass market, we'll call that 90% of the people in the audience, of people paying attention to this thing. And we'll call the niche market the top 10%. Now, our research has discovered that the top 10% of any audience has 60% of the budget to spend, and the bottom 90% of the audience has 40% of the budget to spend. So, 90 people out of 100 share in 40% of the total budget. 10 people out of 100 have 60% of the total budget. Which means this top 10%, they've got massively higher budgets. Your business needs a filtering mechanism. You need to be able to filter whether someone is in the top 10% or the bottom 90%.
Now, I like to call this a niche market, and I like to call this the mass market. So, the mass market, they shop around on price. They're looking for the most they can get for the least amount of money. The niche market, they shop on passion. They want to join a community. They want to understand that you connect based on passion. They want to work with the supplier who shares their passion, right? So, niche market shops on passion, mass market shops on price. You want to go to the top 10% affluent niche. That is the right one for your business to serve.
Now, really, really big businesses, the multi-billion dollar corporations, they exist to serve mass markets. That's what they're really good at. Big companies are great at serving mass markets, and small businesses are really good at niche markets because small businesses have that shared passion. Big businesses are not great at passion, but they're really good at distribution. So, leave the big businesses to the mass market, and as a smaller business, go after the passionate, affluent niche market.
So, let me give you a little example. Imagine a local gym. A massive gym chain that is like everywhere, all across the country. They're probably going to have a cheap gym membership that's maybe $39 a month. Whereas a, uh, niche little boxing gym or niche little CrossFit gym might do something special. Might be more community-driven, might be more education and training-driven, might have something really passionate and special going on inside that gym, and they're probably going to have a membership of $200 a month. So, a small, local, passion-based gym is going to probably be much more expensive than a national, generic gym that's rolled out everywhere. So, the message here is, don't be trying to compete with big companies on price. Go after the people who care about passion more than price.
Now, the key is that you need some way of filtering between these two things. Now, what I like to use is a self-assessment. So, when customers come and do any business with any of my companies, we get them to fill in an assessment, and inside the assessment, there is a qualifying question. And the qualifying question tells me, do they care more about price, or do they care more about passion? Are they mostly motivated by getting the cheapest deal, or are they mostly motivated by getting something that is unique to their situation? So, in my on assessments, we use score app, we use quizzes, we always have a qualifying question that tells us which side of the fence are they? Part of the mass market, or are they part of the niche market? And that qualified question is the difference between whether we talk to them as a sales lead, or whether we put them on a nurture campaign as a marketing lead.
Okay, so let's talk about the next thing, which is the problem that people have that they need to solve. So, every single customer has something in their head called the situational model. The situational model is how they describe their current reality, and how they describe their desired reality, and what they describe as their obstacles or criteria that sit in the middle. So, the reason that people are frustrated is because their current reality does not match their desired reality, and there are obstacles and criteria that are stopping them from getting what they want. Every time they try and get over to the desired reality, they bang into one of their obstacles, and that makes them more and more unhappy with their current reality. And the longer this happens, and the more often they bang into obstacles, the more frustrated they are, the more pain they experience.
So, one of the things that we want to do, if we want to connect with these people, is we want to be able to have something called an empathetic rant. An empathetic rant is a way of describing what it's like to be this frustrated. What does it feel like to be in their shoes? This is where you totally connect with the pain, or the frustration, or the annoyance of what it feels like to be caught in this dilemma here. Now, the way that you get an empathetic rant is by doing an activity that we do on our entrepreneur accelerator called the 99 Problems activity. And 99 Problems is where you describe what it is that you do, and then you work out what are 99 problems that people would experience if they didn't have your solution. So, you think about what it is your business offers, and then you say, for people who don't yet have that solution, what are 99 things that might happen across the course of a month that people would experience? And these could be tiny little things, right? I often describe them as paper cuts. Lots and lots of little paper cuts.
So, for example, if you have a health-related business and you help people to lose weight and look great, the 99 problems might be, you know, putting on a pair of jeans that used to fit you really well, and now they don't fit so well, and that's one of those little problems. Or 99 problems might be that you see yourself in a photo and you think, "H, I really don't look the way I want to look in that particular photo." So, these are little problems, and you want to make a document list, right? All the little problems that you're going to have. And you say, "Okay, 99 Problems. These are the problems that people experience if they don't have my solution. This is what people have prior to buying from me."
So, once you get the 99 problems, you can summarize that into a bit of an empathetic rant. An empathetic rant is where you say, "Hey, I know what it feels like to be frustrated. I bet you feel this. I bet you feel this. I bet you feel this." If you can correctly describe and define the pain and the frustration, people automatically believe that you must have a great solution to that.
So, now that you've done this, you're going to propose a solution. And the solution, we call this solution a path of least resistance. So, path of least resistance is rather than figuring this all out yourself, and rather than doing this yourself, you're just going to buy this solution from a company, and the company is now going to take over and solve the problem. So, your problem is now my problem. I've got a path of least resistance. That's my product and my service, and you can buy the product and service, and that path of least resistance will get you from your current reality to your desired reality without hitting any of these obstacles.
Now, the people that are going to see the most value in this are people who say, "I am already busy, and I don't have enough time. I want to outsource this to you. I want to buy a product or a service so that I can protect the value of my time, and you can just do this all for me. I don't want to figure it out myself. I don't want to invent my own solution. I want someone who's an expert in this to have come up with something that I can just buy."
Now, who are the types of people who have no time? Well, they're typically going to be people who are maybe executives, right? So, they're like leaders. They've got lots of not enough time and lots of money. It might be entrepreneurs. Those are people who are running their own businesses, they're self-employed, they have employees themselves. They want to stay focused on the thing that is the high-value thing for them, and they want to outsource anything that is not their high-value activity. You might have people who are parents, and you say, "Okay, if you're a parent and you've got young children, you've probably got not a lot of time available." It could be people who travel a lot because, you know, so much of their time is taken up with commute or with a travel experience.
So, you want to make a list of all the people who are the types of people who are time-poor. Right? These are people who can't afford to just throw time at the problem. They want to throw money at the problem rather than time at the problem, and they just want that path of least resistance that's done for them. Because people who are not time-poor often want to throw time at learning and meddling and getting involved and all of those sorts of things. So, the way to solve that is deliberately target people who are busy. They've got other things. They've got other focuses. Their time is better spent on those things as opposed to trying to figure it all out themselves.
So, what we're looking for: you've got money because you're in the top 10% and you're passionate about a particular outcome. You've got a problem that you want to solve. Current reality doesn't match desired reality. You're looking for a path of least resistance, and you're time-poor because of all of these particular reasons.
Now, you as the entrepreneur, the more that you understand these dynamics, the more you understand why someone would spend money versus time, the more you understand what is their situational model and what's your path of least resistance, the more that you can do an empathetic rant based upon the 99 problems that people are experienced, the more that you can connect with people about how busy they are and how they just want the problem solved, then your product or service is going to increase in perceived value based upon the situation that they're in versus just purely and simply the basis of the product or service that you offer.
So, once you've got all of that mapped out, then you know who your perfect client is. Let me tell you how we applied this at ScoreApp. ScoreApp is our software company. It's software that helps you to market your business using quizzes and assessments, and we have focused on a particular market of self-employed people who have six and early seven-figure service businesses. So, these are typically people who are like coaches, consultants, they might be health and wellness practitioners, they might be professional service providers. They typically have a service-based business. They need to build trust with their clients. They need to find compatibility with their clients, and a quiz or self-assessment is the way to do that. But the reason that we've targeted people who have six and early seven-figure revenue is because ScoreApp is only $49 a month. So, it's totally affordable, and relative to their current revenues, it only has to work once per month in order to be amazing value.
So, for the passionate niche, our passionate niche are these entrepreneurs, these founders, these self-employed people who have a six and seven-figure business that they want to grow. So, that's the money side of things. The time-poor piece of the equation is that if you run your own business, you've got your employees, you're trying to focus on looking after your own clients. One of the biggest frustrations is the idea of setting up marketing campaigns. You don't want to be spending a lot of time on setting up marketing campaigns and learning how to do it. You want to just outsource that to experts. You want templates that are already 99% done. So, the time-poor nature of being a self-employed entrepreneur or founder means that you just want something that's like super easy to set up, super easy to launch.
So, then when we look at founders who typically buy ScoreApp, their current reality is that they've got a great business, but they go through a bit of feast and famine. So, they focus on their clients, and they're looking after their existing clients. They take the eye off the ball with potential clients and generating leads and running marketing campaigns, and then that causes like lumpy cash flow. So, they go from having like a great set of clients to then having to go out and find new clients, and it kind of makes their business frustrating to grow. And we know that what they really want is consistent flow. If they have consistent leads, like 100 leads a month coming in, and they can see the data, which leads they should be talking to, they can qualify their clients, that means that it's going to be a lot easier to have consistent cash flow.
We've done the 99 Problems activity. We know that people get frustrated when they talk to the wrong person. Like, for example, one of the 99 Problems is, you get on a one-hour Zoom call with a potential client, and you discover that like, in the first five minutes, this is the wrong client. This is a waste of my time. I've just wasted an hour by booking this person into the diary. That's called unqualified leads. We can solve that particular problem. So, we've done the activity of figuring out what are the 99 problems that we can solve with our solution.
So, the path of least resistance, we constructed something that is AI-driven, that's template-driven, that takes 30 or 40 minutes to set up, and then it works for months on end, right? So, we've made sure that we've communicated all of that value. So, we've got a passionate niche who are time-poor. We've got a solution that's $49 a month, and that it solves this path of least resistance from current reality to desired reality.
So, ScoreApp is one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK because we put the thought in to figure out who is the perfect client and what is the relationship to money, time, and problems. And by doing that work, it made it a lot easier for us to scale the business by finding those perfect clients for ScoreApp.
Now, by the way, if you haven't tried ScoreApp, ScoreApp is super powerful for you as a filter to figure out the 10% versus the 90%. ScoreApp is super powerful for you as a founder, as an entrepreneur, for you to be able to save time, to make money, right, and to get your marketing campaign sorted out. So, why don't you give it a try? Why don't you actually get one of the free trials? Have a look at some of the templates if you haven't done so already. I think you'll find it really, really powerful. And also, why don't you do this activity? Why don't you see if you can figure out who your perfect client is by looking at them through the lens of money, time, and problems?
So, if you want to try out ScoreApp, check out scoreapp.com. There will be a special link somewhere around this video. And also, if you want to start getting some more guidance around how to grow your business, come and join me for one of my live workshops. In the live workshop, we spend 90 minutes talking about growth, talking about differentiation, how to stand out in today's marketplace, how to scale up using technology, how to make a bigger dent in the universe. All of that gets covered on my 90-minute workshops. So, if you're interested in growth, come along to my 90-minute workshop. If you're interested in getting better clients, get a free trial at ScoreApp. There will be a link somewhere around to both of those opportunities around this video.
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