What if you could spend less time quoting people who are “just kicking tyres” and more time talking to customers who are genuinely ready to buy?
If you’re constantly quoting prospects who never seem to convert, the problem may start before your sales process even begins.
In this episode, you’ll learn how getting specific about your ideal customer profile can help you target people who are more likely to say yes, reduce wasted quoting time, and create a sales approach that speaks directly to the customers you want to serve.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to define your ideal customer profile using factors such as demographics, location, income, life stage, spending capacity, and specific needs.
- Why getting more specific about your target market can still leave you with far more potential customers than you actually need.
- How knowing exactly who you want to serve can influence your marketing, sales messaging, quoting process, testimonials, product range, sales territory, and customer experience.
Play this episode to learn how to identify and target the customers most likely to say yes, so you can quote fewer tyre-kickers and close more of the right deals.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
There is a simple way to quote less tyre kickers and help you close more sales.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
In this episode, we are going to unpack how you can quote less people who are simply kicking tyres, who are simply trying to understand what’s out there and more people who want to work with you from the outset to help you close more deals. Absolutely, one of the most common questions that I’m asked by sales businesses or sales leaders is how do I stop dealing with people who are just kicking tyres, who are not really interested in my products and are there to waste my time? And invariably I have a very, very simple response to these businesses that isn’t difficult for them to implement and it goes along the lines of start to target more people who you know are more likely to say yes to you before you even start.
And what I mean by that is get really, really clear on the types of customers that you know are more likely to say yes than no. And what that’s called is your ideal customer profile, if we use very technical sales language. But for me, it’s actually just get clear on the people who you should be targeting, ages, demographics, where they live, their income, number of people in their family, periods that they’re at in their lives, what they’re prepared to spend.
There’s a few criteria there. It’s very easy to say but sometimes a little bit difficult to implement. So what we’d like to go through today is just to give you some perspective around market sizes and how you can target your customers more specifically and certainly with more focus than you have in the past.
When I say the sentence target customers who are most likely to deal with you and get really, really specific on who you want to serve, I often get the response from sales leaders or sales people that says, hey, my market’s not big enough for me to do this. I’m simply worried that if I get too specific on who I’m going to target that I won’t have a market that’s big enough. I love this as a question because I very rarely work with a business whose market isn’t big enough.
Let me give you some examples. Let’s just say you are a carpenter based in Queensland and you want to target males aged 30 to 40 who own their own home and are looking to do a $250,000 or more renovation in the next 12 months. That’s getting really specific.
Males who own homes, we’re now excluding targeting females. We’re cutting out half the market already. Yes, I understand homes are often owned by men and women, but we are targeting only males who want to talk to us about renovations, only males who are in Queensland, only males between 30 and 40, so we’re automatically down to about 10 to 15% of the population, and those who only live in Queensland.
I ran that query using an AI tool, used ChatGPT. That came up with 6,000 leads per year, 6,000 potential people that you could target per year. Now, most carpenters who are doing renovations of that size, we’re talking about them needing 10 to 15 jobs, 10 to 15 jobs, which is 0.2% of that target market, 0.2%. I remember a great piece of advice I got was if you can’t find a market where your business can succeed by only acquiring 1% of your target in a year, then you’re going too narrow.
Now, in this instance, we’re 0.2%, so we are one-fifth of that. Take another example. If you are in Victoria and you are a carpet retailer and you are wanting to target people who have retired, who have no children at home, who live in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and have a home worth $1 million or more, getting pretty specific, they’re retired, they have no kids, they live in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and their home has to be worth more than $1 million.
There are 145,000 of those homes based out of Melbourne. How often do people replace carpet? If you run a 10-year lens across carpet, I think that would be fair, that gives you 14,500 people per year to target. Now, if you’re a carpet business that needs to be doing two jobs a week, running homes this size, they’re going to be big jobs, two jobs per week, that’s 100 jobs per year and you’ve got 14,500 people, that’s 0.7% of that market that you need to target.
The point I’m trying to highlight here is that by getting detailed in most target markets, you are still leaving yourself with plenty of people for you to deal with and for most businesses more than what you need. The encouragement is to never be afraid of getting specific on who you want to target but make sure you do because when you get clear, when you know that you’re a carpet laying business who works really well with retirees because you go through a process that lands so clearly with them, you have carpet styles that are so commonly chosen by them, that you have testimonials from dozens or even hundreds of similar type customers in similar areas, that you have great installers in the east, that when you know you can put together a package that is going to get you more yeses than dealing, for example, in the northern suburbs with young families in homes that are a lower value, for example, when you know that you’re more likely to land the deals in the east with retirees. By targeting those, you are going to close more deals.
You are going to have faster deal cycles. You are going to get more yeses, which means you’re going to need to get out to less people or in the inverse, you will be able to get out to more people to grow your business. So by getting really clear on who you’re targeting, you can then feed in all parts of your business to be engaging with them.
You can adjust your social media content and everything you’re creating, your advertisements, your sales literature, your quoting process, your testimonials, your case studies, your product range, your sales area, how you cold call, the installers that you work with, the suppliers even that you’re engaged with, your payment terms, the language you use. So many things can get adjusted to be more specific in appealing to that target market that you’re going for. If you’re the carpenter in Queensland and you’re wanting to target men versus women, straight away that changes how you present.
It changes how you quote on site. It changes the language that you use when you’re talking about your renovation. So instead of going out to everyone and trying to make promises to a broad range of people, you make those promises to a specific.
And the result is you get less people who are not intentionally kicking tyres, but you get less people who won’t land with what you’re trying to sell to them. And you get more people who relate exactly to what you’re putting in front of them. So it’s a very straightforward concept.
Get out and target your ideal customers, but you need to be really clear on who they are before you can do it. And so my encouragement, and I have a handout, it’s a one page that will help you determine who your ICP are. Get in touch with us.
We’re not hard to find. LinkedIn or Instagram are your best ways to do it, right? But make contact and we’ll get you that ICP out and it will help you start on that journey. This is often though just one step in trying to get you to close more deals, right? There are so many really basic changes that salespeople or business leaders who are struggling to grow their business can make to move the dial really quickly and really quickly grow your sales by that 20 to 30 percent mark.
And often what will result from that is less frustration, less stress, happier salespeople, more engagement at home, and all the wonderful things that come with being a successful salesperson or successful trade business leader. If you’re one of those people that know you need to grow your sales, we have an amazing workshop. It’s kicking off in a few weeks time.
I’m partnering with someone who’s brilliant at what they do, but it’s going to be invite only for the first cohort, so you need to make sure you register. Jump onto the show notes. It takes 30 seconds.
There’s no commitment. We’ll let you know once the programme’s launched. But between now and then, please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.