Are your ideal customers actually real? — Kelford Labs Weekly
Focus on what you have.
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Your ideal customers might not be real customers.
Here’s what I mean:
When you launch a new business, service, or product, you have an idea of the customers you’d like to attract in your head.
Maybe they’re just like you, or maybe they’re your competitor’s customers, or maybe they’re a persona you just made up.
In any case, in all these cases, those aren’t your ideal customers.
Why?
Because they're not customers. They’re ideas, figments, fantasies.
We don’t have ideal customers until we have customers at all, until we’ve signed the deal or sold the product.
To find our ideal customers, we start with the ones we have now, and we get intensely curious about how those customers experience our value.
And then we adjust our position and our promotions to attract customers similar to them, moving one step closer to an even better customer.
You don’t just jump across the field of opportunity and land in a better place.
You make your way through the field of opportunity by taking the customers you can get and using those experiences to target and acquire more and better customers.
You let yourself be led to the customers you seek by following your curiosity about the customers you have.
So, let’s ditch the ideal.
And focus on the real.
This is just a taste of some of the takes you’ll hear in my upcoming LinkedIn Live with Alison Knott on February 5th.
Join us to ask your burning questions about finding your ideal customers for your B2B business.
