Client Magnets Official Blog

Posts Tagged ‘finding your niche’

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Think of two boys in a garden. One of them is frantically chasing after birds; the other just stands still holding out birdseed in his hand and waits. Instinctively, most of us recognise that the latter will be more successful. Yet most sales techniques involve some form of ‘chasing’ with the net result that prospective clients are scared away.
You can be ‘chasing’ without necessarily being pushy with prospective clients. You are chasing any time you are driven by fear, and in truth that’s the energy behind most marketing today.
So why are so many people still chasing?
As I’ve been reflecting on this, it occurred to me that the reason we chase is because we don’t really trust.
We don’t trust that there is a ready-made market of people who need our unique gifts and talents. (If only we could pause long enough to notice them!)
We don’t trust that we HAVE unique gifts and talents. We are afraid that we are nothing special so we have to work really, really hard competing and chasing and fighting for our ‘share’.
We don’t trust our clients. We don’t trust that they will recognise the unique talents that we have to offer and be drawn to us naturally.
We don’t trust that there is a niche that is perfect for us. We think we have to carve one out, or wait for a moment of revelation that reveals ‘our true purpose’ and shows us a clear path forward.
We don’t trust that the business will just come if we stop working so hard. We are afraid that people would forget about us, and that no one would really want us if we stopped ‘hustling’.
We don’t trust that the world is fair. We don’t trust that things would or could come to us that easily. So we work hard to redress the balance.
But most of all, we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t trust that we could be that magnetic and attractive.

What if you could be?

What if you already ARE that magnetic and attractive?

What, if you had, as your birthright, a ‘natural monopoly’?

A space in the world that could ONLY be filled by you?

And what if your clients intuitively knew that too, and the people you were truly meant to be working with, would find their way to you no matter what you did?

Would you chase then?

(Probably, because you wouldn’t trust that there were enough of these clients to keep you in the style to which you’d like to become accustomed!)

But what if there WERE? Would you still chase?

Or would you pause, take a deep breath, and marvel at just how wonderful things are.

‘Do what you love and the money will follow’ cries the title of a best selling book by Marsha Sinetar. I beg to differ slightly. Over the years I’ve met hundreds of people who are doing what they love, but the money is definitely not following. Apologies Marsha, but I would put it this way: ‘Do what you love, communicate this effectively to the people in the world who most need it and are motivated to pay for it, and the money will follow’. The fact is you can do what you love and be well rewarded for it, but you need to match up your own skills and talents with those people in the world who most need what you have to offer. It’s not enough to do what you love and simply hope that the right people will get to hear about you. As Julian Gresser puts it in his book, Piloting Through Change, ‘We earn what we want by connecting our gifts to the concerns of others’.
The fact is, when you match up your skills and talents with the people in the world who really need you, there isn’t a lot of selling or convincing to be done. So aligning what you have to offer with those people in the world who most need it is a crucial element of becoming a Client Magnet. The key word here is alignment. What we need to do is match your skills and talents to groups who are easily identified, who are already explicitly aware of an immediate need, want or problem, and are highly motivated to find a solution.

If you are failing to magnetically attract new clients towards you, it could be because you are failing to speak directly to your targeted client. Even before this, you may have failed to identify your target client. Of all the important steps you can take to become a Client Magnet, one of the first has to be to define the people in the world who need your help and with whom you want to work. This isn’t an optional step. It is a must do. Over and over again I see ‘would be’ magnets diluting their marketing by trying to be all things to all people.

Think you’ve already done this? If you already have a steady stream of clients queuing at your door waiting patiently for your services then you MIGHT be able to skip this step, but if not, the message is that you need to get even more specific.

Start by thinking about the people in the world who are already struggling with a problem or issue that you can help them solve. For example, I created the Client Magnet newsletter having met lots of consultants who were frustrated with the amount of time and energy it was taking to find clients. I knew I had ideas and techniques that could make a difference, and so my business was born out of a desire to serve a group of people with whom I had empathy, and who were facing problems that I knew I could help them solve.