Serendipity and Defining the Ideal Customer

Having the discipline to define and focus on your ideal customer at the exclusion of all distractions is a skill that eludes many business owners.

We naturally want to say “everyone” can use our product or service. After all, what if we exclude someone and they want what we have?

Marketing to “everyone” is very expensive and the message usually becomes so vague it doesn’t really catch anyone’s attention.

You need a story that resonates to a group of people, your ideal customer. So you need to be clear who that is.

Defining Our Ideal Customer

We started out with the idea Manifast was for any small or mid-sized business or any coach or adviser serving that market.

But that is not a very tight definition.

Les McKeown defines the stages of a business in “Predictable Success” as:

• Start-up – Focus is on proving product or service has a market,
• Fun – Initial growth phase that is “fun” and free of process,
• White Water – Addition of complexity due to growth (ceases to be fun),
• Predictable Success – The right balance of process and innovation,
• Treadmill – Too much reliance on process and lack of innovation,
• Etc.

You can’t skip a step to Predictable Success. You can only minimize the time and pain passing through White Water.

Sunwapta Falls

After much thought, agonizing, and discussion with my business partners and the members of my Mastermind group (with Blast Thru Coach Dixie Gillaspie), we realized that our ideal client is:

One entering, already in, or wanting to get through "White Water" to the ideal balance of innovation and processes, or as Les calls it “Predictable Success”.

We call it "Manifasting your dream business!"

12 Years of Serendipity

An innocent question out of the blue by business owner and Coach Barbara Abramson was something like, “So what does Sunwapta mean? Why Sunwapta?”

It turns out that the name we picked over 12 years ago for our company means “Turbulent Waters” in a local aboriginal dialect. It is the name of a water fall, river and glacier.

So it turns out our product helps our ideal client get through “turbulent waters”.

And we set that course 12 years ago.

It took 12 years to learn what we needed to learn and develop the skills and abilities AND the product to make it happen.

Who is your ideal client? How did you come to that conclusion? Please leave a comment.

Comments

[Christie M Ellis]

Great post Doug! You are so right, we tend to want to think broad to make everyone happy. The cool thing is when you focus on who your ideal customer is then anyone outside of that sphere, if you will, who wants what you serve, will find you anyway. I look forward to hearing all about the Manifest!

[Douglas Wagner]

Thanks Christie. Yes, that is the beauty and you get to stop trying to make "everyone" happy which is a recipe for unhappiness.

Look forward to showing the gang Manifast.

[Al Dhalla]

This is so educational as it just enriches the way you answer prospects when they ask us what Sunwapta means and where did we get the name from. This response results in a core story that is juicy and at same time leading to "why Manifast ?".

I tried it today and it worked. I will be sharing this blog a lot.

Love it !