Aligning your process with your prospects — Kelford Labs Daily

If our process is, in so many ways, our position, then that means our process must be aligned with our prospects.

Specifically, it should be aligned with what they value most about our type of work, service, or products.

If we’re investing heavily in areas that our best prospects don’t care about, for instance, we’re making an unnecessary trade off. Which might be keeping us from making a more valuable one.

Think about it this way: Let’s say that, as a marketer, I insisted that detailed, thorough documentation and deliverables were key to my process. Maybe I thought that every project should end with a massive report for the client to review and hang on to.

And what if I found out that my clients weren’t actually reading the documents, weren’t actually valuing them?

I might try to convince myself—as sunk costs can do—that I should keep it up, because it’s important to me and I think my clients should want the documents.

But the problem is that if they don’t value the areas where I’m expending effort, I am, by definition, expending too little effort in the areas where they do care.

I’m making the wrong trade off.

If my ideal clients instead value one-on-one counsel, ad hoc support, and standardized frameworks, then the time I’m spending on customized reporting is taking me away from that.

My process isn’t aligned with my prospects.

I’m not saying that if your prospects don’t value what you offer that the problem is necessarily you—you might just want to focus on different customers.

But if the customers we want, that we know we can help value something in particular, it’s vital to align our process toward that.

And it’s equally vital to ensure we’re not wasting time, energy, or resources on part of our process that they don’t value or care about.

Years ago, we recognized that long-winded, detailed documentation is rarely read, and even more rarely implemented. So, instead, we adjusted our process to be more hands-on, for hands-on entrepreneurs who want to do the work and see it working.

That gave us more time to focus on where our clients see the most value—in the active, customized counsel and the repeatable frameworks—and less time where they didn’t.

The key to aligning our process to our prospects comes down to asking ourselves a simple, but challenging question:

“Where am I spending time, energy, or resources that my best clients don’t notice or value? And what could I be doing instead?”