From Impossible To Inevitable

Chapter 3How to Nail It

Maybe you already know your best target. Perhaps your head's still exploding with options. Let's narrow it down with a step-by-step approach to prioritize your best bet(s), and how to get more from them.

Where Can You Be a Big Fish in a Small Pond?

It's better to pick a focused market that's “too small,” but where you can find and win deals, than it is to stick to defining your target market so broadly that you get lost in it. Why is this?

• It's easier to make the pond smaller than make the fish bigger: it's easier to retarget, refocus, and reframe yourself than to change your products and offerings.
• To grow past word-of-mouth marketing, you have to stand out. It's easier to stand out and win deals in a smaller pond.
• When you share too many things that you excel at (too many ponds), it's more likely to confuse prospects than impress them.

Five Aspects of Your Best Niche

Let's look at what helps determine how ripe a niche is for you.

1. Popular Pain: So what if you do custom application development, analytics, mobile-enablement, or sales training? Those aren't pains; they are solutions. What main pain do you solve? Missed product launch deadlines, inaccurate forecasts, high customer attrition, lead generation struggles, low conversion rates from demo to proposal? Those are pains.

   And the pain has to be common enough: You want to specialize in a specific pain you solve, but not get so narrow that you can't find anyone that has it. Within the niche you're ...