A lot of people just think broadly in terms of expanding their market, without asking themselves a really important question, which is why? Why do you need to expand your market? Am I not doing things well enough in my existing market that I haven’t been able to mine that as effectively as I could?
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David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing Expanding Your Market. Welcome back, Jay.
Jay: Hey, thank you, David. Once again, I’m excited for this conversation. I know we always kind of learn from each other. We’re in a process in our business where we’re trying to expand from the inside, from our current customer base.
Like right now we have a great Google Ads program, but we don’t have an organic program, right? So that’s one area that we’re looking at right now. How do we get those organic leads? So we’re right in this process right now.
David: That’s really interesting because there are so many different ways we can talk about expanding.
I mean, the first thing you mentioned, just expanding inside your own customer or prospect base, right? You could just look at your Excel spreadsheet of all these people say, how can I expand within the people on this sheet, right? Or you could be talking, like you mentioned about an ad campaign.
How can we expand this ad campaign to reach more of the high quality prospects that I need to reach in order to have those conversations, in order to do business together. So yeah, lots of different ways to do it. I think the appeal of a topic like expanding your market is that a lot of people tend to want to do it.
I want to have more customers. I want to have more clients. Not quite sure where that’s going to come from. That’s sort of the generic thought, I think, for a lot of people. I want more customers. How am I going to do that?
And a lot of it boils down to this. minute stuff that we’re talking about, identifying who these people are, how we’re going to reach out to them, and how we’re going to get them on board with us.
Jay: Yeah. And I think that’s something that a lot of people fall prey to, and I catch myself sometimes as well, is thinking that movement is doing something, right? I’m busy. I’m writing a check. We’re doing something and we’re just moving. But ultimately, are you getting results and are you monitoring those results and fine tuning them?
If not, you’re kind of wasting your time.
David: Yeah. Confusing movement with progress and they’re two different things. You don’t even realize you’re doing it, but you’re like, Oh, I should really do this, I should really do that.
And we’ve also talked about the fact, in previous podcasts, that many business owners suffer from entrepreneurial ADD. Where you’re working on one thing and then the whole squirrel, squirrel, squirrel! and we’re doing that. And now we’re off on something else.
I think a lot of us have to reel ourselves back in when it comes to that, because there are so many different ways to expand your market.
So many different ways to get in front of different groups of people, and so many different things we can say to those people. And there are too many variables. And I think when you’re looking to expand your market, you can’t be changing all of the variables.
You can’t say, okay, now I’m going to go after a totally different group of people with a totally different message and promote a totally different product or aspect of my product, right?
Or a different approach to describing my product, because you will have absolutely no idea at that point of what’s working and what’s not. I mean, in some cases we can do some minor tweaking of maybe one of those variables.
If we’ve got a sales presentation that has worked historically for us, for a long time, then it makes perfect sense to test out that presentation in front of a different group of people who have never heard it.
Because you have something that wins and you’re matching that up with something that has not yet won, right? So you’re seeing does this work over here as well. That goes to the basic essence of what’s referred to as split testing, where you want to test approach A against approach B. And when you’re doing that, you just have to make sure that you’re only testing small aspects of one thing.
Cause like I said before, if you’re testing two completely different things against each other, you’re not going to know the answer to much of anything.
Jay: Yeah. And we’ve talked about movement that we go through, but there’s also a sense of, I’m generating all of these leads.
Well, what if 90 percent of them are junk, right? And so we confuse that with a successful program. And it’s not. It’s actually costing you money on both ends, right? And so, coming up and honing it, and doing your A B testing, you’re not just looking at does it bring people to ask questions.
What is the close rate? What is the cost per click or whatever it is, right?
David: Yeah, it’s not about quantity. And I think people try to take a simplistic approach to this and in sales, this has been going on forever. It’s just make more calls. Right. And that’s the same thing. Okay. Run more ads, get more leads in.
But if those leads aren’t any good, then what’s the point of bringing more of them in? I’ve always believed that it’s got to be a smart process. When you’re going after prospects and clients, it has to be a smart process, meaning that you’re evaluating things along the way. You’re evaluating the target group of people that you’re approaching.
You’re evaluating what you’re saying to them and the responses you’re getting back from them. You’re evaluating things like your closing ratios, and your conversion ratios.
Of the leads that I get, how many of those are qualified in or qualified out? If I talk to 10 people, how many of them are in and how many of them are out?
And those numbers should be relatively consistent as you’re doing that. And then if you know that three out of 10 are good quality prospects for you. Then you ask yourself, okay, how can I get that to four out of 10? And that might be related to getting to a different group of people, perhaps a higher end group of people who could spend more money.
It could be related to a lot of different things, whether it’s getting to different people or whether it’s a matter of what you’re saying to those people that would get more of them qualified in. There are always things that we can do. But I think in a lot of cases, if we want to expand, which sounds like we’re going big, we really have to focus and go small.
Jay: think that’s such an excellent point. I think there’s a danger when you say, I want to expand my market, to say, well, in order to do that, I’m going to have to add products or add services to attract a different group.
And then what happens is you become the restaurant that has every type of food on the menu. And they don’t do anything well, right?
And they have this massive menu, but so what. You haven’t really expanded your marketplace at all. So I love that idea of going small, going finite could be a much better way to expand your market.
David: Right. Cause again, sort of getting back to the idea of. Expanding the market doesn’t just mean quantity.
Jay: Yes.
David: It’s not about just more people. Can you expand your market that way? You probably can, but too much waste is associated with that in a lot of cases.
Expanding your market could mean, okay, if I’m dealing with this certain particular niche, whether it’s a geographic one, whether it’s an industrial one, whatever your group of people is that you’re targeting and you want to expand beyond that.
A lot of the thinking is to just go wide. But what if you were to say instead, okay, of the group that I’m going after, what if I were to target just the top 20 to 30 percent of that group and see how that goes. And then go wide with that.
Find more people like the ones who are your most successful clients and then expand that way. Expansion does not mean ignorant expansion. It doesn’t mean just blowing things out. It means identifying. really where you want to expand and how you want to expand and with whom.
Jay: Yeah, I love that concept. I told you in our business model, we rely so much on Google ads. We don’t want to spend a single penny on some type of ad that is not going to attract the right type of customers.
We want to spend a considerable amount of marketing dollars. So like you said, expand wide, right? That you have a large net, but on a very specific type of customer.
And that actually is the secret to our success, right? I mean, it’s like having a secret recipe, you know, that restaurant owner who doesn’t want anybody to know their recipe.
That’s how I feel about this keywords, you know, situation that we come up with. That’s more important than anything else we do in business at this point.
David: Yeah, and every business has to have things like that, that are going to allow themselves to differentiate themselves from anyone and everyone else who offers similar products and services.
I’m really big on the whole secrets thing, as you know, it’s our brand. So I feel like if you don’t have secrets like that in your business, then you have nothing proprietary. You have nothing that is going to differentiate you enough for people to want to buy it.
Another thing that I think is important to consider is that a lot of people just think broadly in terms of expanding their market, without asking themselves a really important question, which is why?
Why do I need to expand my market? Am I not doing things well enough in my existing market that I haven’t been able to mine that as effectively as I could?
And in some cases, that’s what’s happening. It’s like, we’re feeling like we’re not getting the progress we need here. So maybe I need to look over there.
And sometimes that will work, but sometimes, once again, it’s a matter of really honing in on what are the things that are working best with me now and can I even expand those things within the market that I’m currently interacting with?
Jay: Yeah, you bring up such a great point. If you’re trying to expand, but you’re not doing a good job with your current product that you’re offering, you’re going to kill yourself because you may be able to expand, but your consistency, your ability to serve your customers is going to go down exponentially with that plan.
David: Right. And if you’re running off to one place and the next, you’re essentially starting over each time and you’re setting yourself up for failure because it’s hard to get established and then to be able to continue to thrive in a particular area.
So it is often very tempting to say, well, I have to get to people outside of the city that I’m currently servicing, or I want to expand and I want to open up offices in different areas.
All of that can work, but it’s overhead. In most cases, it’s overhead. And you have to determine if the problem is really that, or if the problem is with your processes that are allowing you to not generate enough to begin with.
Jay: Yeah, I have a good friend. She has established kind of a unique clothing brand. It’s a vintage clothing brand. She does it all on Facebook. And she just went and opened a local retail store. She wants to expand.
And I’m like, like you said, I’m just sitting there going, what? You want rent, right? You want, payroll? You want all of these things when you had already established this great business model?
I understand the temptation to do that. But now she’s like, how do I get out of this? She signed a lease, right? It’s like clearly she’s regretting the decision at this point.
David: Been there, done that. Years ago we had retail mail order catalog businesses and we decided to open up a retail store. It is exactly like what your friend did. And… totally different business models, total distraction, not a good choice, not a good decision. Hopefully you realize it sooner rather than later, and you can adjust quickly. But expansion, but smart expansion.
Jay: Yes, all expansion is not good expansion. And that’s why it’s nice that there are people like you who people can talk to. So how do they find out more?
David: Yeah, they can learn from all my stupid mistakes along the way. I’ve said that to so many audiences over the years. The reason I’m up on this stage is not because I’m particularly smart, it’s because I’ve made every single stupid mistake you can possibly make in business. So if I can keep you from making just one of those mistakes, it’ll be time well spent.
Jay: Our podcast is a lot about the mistakes we’ve made over the years.
David: It is, right, because it’s so easy to learn from poor example, as long as you realize that’s what you’re doing. So that’s why we do it. We share the good, the bad and the ugly, because it’s not about, wow, you know, we’re so smart. It’s about, we’ve had these experiences. We’re happy to share our experiences with you and hopefully they’ll help.
So to answer your question, TopSecrets.com/call. You can go there, schedule a call with myself or my team. We’d love to have the conversation with you. If you’re thinking about expanding your market or expanding your business, getting to more or different people, let’s have the conversation.
We’ll look at who you’re targeting now, maybe who you could or should be targeting, where you are now versus where you need to be in terms of visibility and sales and profits, because if you’re not visible, if they can’t see you, they can’t buy from you.
If you’re not generating sales with them, then being visible isn’t helping you.
And if it’s not profitable, then there’s no point in making the sales and being visible. So we really like to hone in on the most important aspects of what will allow you to really grow your sales and profits, in a thoughtful manner.
Jay: Absolutely. David, as always, it’s a pleasure.
David: Thank you, Jay.
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