Last week I was at a conference in Toronto for accountants, and one of the biggest takeaways was how many were looking for more qualified leads. They felt the other parts of their business were going well, but they wanted to speak with more business owners looking for accounting services.
Then right when I got back from Toronto, I was off to a conference for marketing agencies where I was a panelist and ran a breakout session. The number one complaint there? Those agency owners wanted more leads! Seemed a little ironic to me, but that was also their top-of-mind concern for their businesses.
Two very different groups (one a group of our peers, the other one of our industry verticals), and both were looking for the same thing- more business owners looking for their services.
I suspect if I did a general survey of our clients, I’d also hear something similar from most. Very few owners are in the position of having so much business knocking at their doors that they are turning people away.
So maybe the next question is: are there any business owners who are in that position? Maybe that’s just not even a thing.
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Nope, it is. I would venture to guess, though, that 99% of them you’ve never heard of (and I haven’t either) because whatever they do is very specific, and if you don’t need that service, why would you have heard of them? But if you’re in the market for exactly what they offer, and you ask around, and you hear the same few names over and over, it’s a safe bet those folks are in that position.
Therefore, it’s possible to be in a position where you are well known enough that you probably can’t take on every customer who wants to work with you, and you can pick and choose only the ones who are the best fit.
But it’s not easy. In order to get there, you need to do a few important things:
1. Be a specialist- the more specialized, the better, so you can be at the top of the list of people who do what you do. You won’t likely be at the top of a 10,000 business list, but you could be at the top of a 10 business list- but that means you have to specialize
2. You have to deliver consistent results that provide value well in excess of the cost
3. You have to make sure people know about your work, your results, and your reputation
Most businesses struggle with the first two. They are generalists and, as a result, don’t get really good at one thing and so don’t become very well known as the go-to for just that one thing. Deciding to specialize is hard, and turning away business that isn’t exactly what you are trying to specialize in is really hard, but it’s what it takes if you want to ascend to the top of one thing.
Even if you have really dialed in the specializing, then you have to climb your way up to being the very best and delivering top value to your customers so clearly better than anything else that they can’t help but tell everyone they know. This is also hard! Most businesses do a good job most of the time, but it’s not different enough that they build a real following of super fans.
Like anything else, it takes work and commitment and a real desire to get there. If you follow the steps, you can definitely get nearly any business to the point where you do, in fact, have more people wanting to work with you than you can even take. For all the rest of us, it’s something to shoot for, and if we’re not there yet, then at least we know why we don’t have all the qualified leads we could ever handle. To me, at least knowing the problem is helpful, as now I know what I need to work more on to get where I want to be!