Most salespeople are scared to death to repel anyone, but Top Producers aren’t because they’ve found that by doing so they increase their value.  You simply can’t be everything to everyone and expect to earn a decent living let alone become a Top Producer.  It just doesn’t work that way.

Even though you may understand that concept you’re still stuck because you can’t figure out who you want to attract as your target market.  In part that’s because you’re still thinking you have to try to snag anything that comes your way, but it may also be the result of just not feeling strongly enough about any one group to know who to go after.  Here’s something that might help you out.

Uncover who you want to attract by defining who you want to repel.  Every service professional has a few clients that were simply a mistake.  You need to figure out why taking those clients was a mistake and then fire them.  Here are 3 questions to ask yourself to uncover why they were a mistake:

1. What beliefs and values do these clients hold?
2. What personal qualities or characteristics do they have?
3. What aren’t they willing to do?

List your 10 favorite clients and answer those same questions about them.  Use this information to qualify any potential prospect in your marketing communications.  Use your marketing communications to filter out what you don’t want more of, and help the people you do want more of to self-select themselves as a match for you.

Oddly enough you like people who are more like you than people who aren’t.  The same is true for your prospects.  They want to work with people who are like them, and they will automatically feel more comfortable with you because of the similarities between you.  So start filtering out the folks you don’t want and filter in the ones you do.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.