Who Cares?

No!

You’re full of it!

Your offering doesn’t make any sense.

I can’t see why anyone would pay for that.

You want me to pay how much for your product? Are you crazy?

You can’t prove that.

Anyone who’s gone to market with any type of offering has certainly heard statements like these. If you haven’t, you’re probably doing something wrong. While it’s natural for any business executive, entrepreneur or salesperson to get frustrated when people say these things; I’ve got a question for them – who cares?

I have a friend who is an author. He’s sold quite a number of books. I know a lot of people who think his books aren’t very good. They think the ideas presented are over-simplified, that the data is based on false logic or that they don’t like the writing. Here’s what else I know, my friend doesn’t much care about their opinions. He cares about the thousands of people who have bought, enjoyed and benefited from his books. By the way, those people I know who say less than kind words about the books are still talking about writing theirs.

I have a client company that needs 15 new clients to achieve their 2007 sales goals. Those 15 clients come from a universe of about 4,000 prospects. In coaching my clients, they expressed concern over whether or not their message went into enough detail to support their value proposition. I reminded them that we are only worried about 15 people. The other 3,985 people could think our message was light and fluffy, as long as there are 15 who thought it was compelling.

Dan Sullivan, the founder of The Strategic Coach cautions his clients to “only test ideas on ‘check-writers’”. He means that the only people whose opinions matter are the ones who are in a position to buy the offering. Unless your employees, advisors, family, etc. are target clients, their opinions are not that important.

Last week, I was working with another client. We were working to develop their customer segmentation strategy. I asked him to identify the attributes that made up his Best Few™ clients. We developed his list, and as I read it back to him, he gave me the response that is the biggest roadblock to an effective messaging, marketing and/or sales approach: “Well, don’t get me wrong. I have some really good clients who don’t fit that description.”

Let me explain why that statement is a problem: My company, Imagine Business Development, works primarily with business-to-business (B2B) companies. Does that mean that we don’t work with companies that are business-to-consumer? Not at all. We have several clients who are business-to-consumer companies. Our target clients range from post-startup companies to those with about $20 million in gross profit. But we have clients that are pure startups and clients with gross profits greater than $20 million.

Here’s the point. If you look at our message, read this blog, listen to what we talk about at the office, you will notice we are obsessed with B2B companies with a value-added service focus, that are run by their owners (who happen to be smarter than most others – intelligence is an important attribute for us) and are in the post-startup to $20 million of gross profit segment. We know that market cold. We get results for them. We care about them. We don’t care that a $154 million company thinks that what we do won’t work – we’ve got plenty of companies in our sweet spot that would disagree with them.

Jim Collins said you need to be the [best in the world] at something. Because you’re the best at something doesn’t mean it is only thing you will do. But if you fail to be the best, who cares?