Welcome to Module Two, lesson two, finding your ideal customers. In this lesson, you will learn how sales prospecting is an ongoing effort to discover new ways to connect with your ideal target customers and new methods for getting in touch with them. You'll kickstart your prospecting efforts with a brainstorm of all the potential ways you could connect with potential customers and get started with the tools that you will need. So to start, where are you looking for customers? This is one of the reasons why we spent so much time in the last lesson going over the ideal target customer. We all have met those people and maybe we even are those people who say, I can serve everybody my market is everyone my product can help everybody and that's all well and good, but it's not actually really true.

So that's why I've created this little diagram here. So the total address A market or what we call the TAM, let's say for example, your customer is a doctor. So you're like, I can serve all the doctors, anyone in the medical field, that's my, that's my customer. Well, you know, that's a really wide net, you're casting and like we discussed, it gets really expensive and difficult to attract your ideal target customer there. So within the medical field, we can start thinking about it in terms of groups. Let's say you have naturopathic doctors, you have medical doctors, you have, I don't know surgeons, and you have radiologists are cardiologists something clearly this is not my field.

I don't, you know, work in that industry. So within those different groups, you need to pick and sort of hone in on one group and that is where your ideal target customer lives. That doesn't necessarily mean that you would alienate the other groups and that's why you can see at the bottom of the diagram your actual customers really spans across all the groups, but you're really really speaking to an appealing to that one group. And that's what makes you so appealing as a whole. So to start with this now that we know who our ideal target customers who your Katie is, we need to find what we call their watering holes, where do they hang out? Where are they on social media in terms of maybe what groups?

Are they joining online? Where do they interact? Where do they get their industry news? Are they like active, you know, on any blogs? Or is there any sort of groups where they really have to participate in there's a lot of industry groups that have a lot of online activity? What are those for your ideal target customer?

Are there any thought leaders or any influencers or authors or speakers that they follow? Is there anybody that they subscribe to whose email lists do they get and in some ways, going deeper Why? Do they get those people's email list? What conferences do they attend? And what events? Do they go to?

Either each year or, you know, every other year on occasion? Are there any specific podcasts they tend to listen to? What YouTube channels might they subscribe? Are there any meetup groups both locally or not locally, that are attracting your ideal target, customers start to figure this stuff out. And that's what we're going to do. So, we have a worksheet.

As part of this lesson, this worksheet is essentially a brainstorm. So again, I want you to download it and I know you're going to be tempted to skip it again. But there's actually a process that we're going to go through and this is the worksheet. And you know, the subsequent information that comes out of it is something you're going to want to probably refer back to because like we said, sales prospecting is ongoing efforts, you're always going to be looking for new ways to connect new places to find people. And so this is the start of that process that you will have actually probably do you know and carry forward in your own ways for years to come. So don't skip this process.

Because when you find yourself trying to figure out you know where you're going to go next or where you're going to look, this is a great place to go back to for new ideas. But also don't get bogged down. And when you explore, don't go, just totally rabbit holing into like one site, if you find a place that looks great, note it and move on. And we'll get into that in a little bit. Here's the brainstorm worksheet. This brainstorm is just going to get you going with a lot of ideas about places you can find your customers keep this worksheet handy.

And anytime you need to kind of refer back you need a refresh, you need something new, you can always refer back to it and the information that's going to come out of it. So to start, here's what I want you to do. get onto LinkedIn. And if you're not already on LinkedIn, as an owner for businesses, and as a person who needs to reach out to customers, you really probably should just create a profile Fill it out completely. And get active on LinkedIn. It's a great social networking site and it's really, really grown.

But so start get on LinkedIn and find a customer, one person, maybe it's an existing customer or maybe if it's somebody who you aspire to work with, but find somebody who is your ideal customer, find your Katie. Now, look at her profile. If she shows this information, which many people do, you'll see that she would be a member of some groups. What groups are those? Note those what maybe blogs or Skype is she posting articles from? Take note of what that is?

Review any of her status updates, look at information, whether she's attended any industry conferences or groups. Are there any events that she's been to that might be relevant, you might need to hop off LinkedIn and look at a couple other places to see some of this information. But there's a lot of information available online so you can learn About this person, you know, your Katie, and where she's going. Now after you've sort of combed through the information about your customer on LinkedIn and got a really good sense of what they're interested in what they care about and where they are, go over to where currently exists on LinkedIn and the right hand side navigation on desktop. And look at the people also viewed section. You'll see in there, they'll start to show others who are either their co workers, which is helpful for prospecting, or you'll show they'll show people who are in a similar role to them at other companies, particularly if they are new in their role.

So head on over to other people who they show who are in similar roles as her and repeat the same activity. You will start to notice that a lot of your ideal target customers are in the same LinkedIn groups. They're attending a lot of the same conferences. They're going to a lot of them Same groups and they're posting articles from a lot of the same places. Sometimes this is really obvious sometimes this takes a little bit of time. But the point is the activity is what really is valuable here.

So once you've compiled a really good list of places that your customers are participating and interacting and paying attention to start researching those events, and the websites and publications themselves, and categorize them into three buckets, harvest, research and pass so I like to do this when you kind of have a lot and sometimes I'll write them down individually on post. So I might notice a lot of people follow shop.org and attend the shop or conference. So I'm going to write on a post it note shop.org and you know, stick it on the wall or something like that. And then later, I will move shop that org into, you know, an area that's my harvest area or my research area, because I want to find out more about them. So we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But as you're going through this, it's helpful to even if you have space to have it up all the time, and anytime someone mentions to you because people will always say, Oh, you should check out this blog.

Oh, do you read this? Oh, do go there. Oh, your customers here. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. But it's always worth looking.

And so you can make a quick note in your phone, come home, look up what they said and say, Yep, that's interesting. I'm going to write in a post it note and put it on my area for research. So I know it's worth checking into and another time. So after you have researched the phrase, the the act of going harvest, research and past is what I call categorizing and clustering. So this is where you're going to start paying attention to where you want to focus in terms of finding further information for potential scraping, so What it means to harvest is that you found a resource that contains a lot of target companies or ideal target customer names. This is where, you know this, these can be found commonly in places like a tradeshow website where there's like a list of vendors who are going to be at the trade show and all those vendors are target customers for you, for example.

And a lot of times, you can go through that website. And you know, with some labor varying amounts, you can actually just get their information off the site. Sometimes they list their email addresses, their contact information, all of that stuff on the site, you can pop it into your spreadsheet. And over time, as you start to figure out, what's a really good resource of actual target customers for you, you can start to outsource that and have other people do it for you. But in the beginning, you need to do it yourself. So this is the data that's being harvested.

It's going to be then researched further in a different manner and cleaned. So if you categorize it as research that means this sort of information might be good, it looks Like it's promising, but it needs a little bit more vetting, you're not quite sure if these are your ideal target customers. And you definitely don't want to go through the effort of prospecting, or even go through the effort of harvesting off of that site or that resource if it's not your ideal customer. So that means it needs to be looked into a little bit further and pass means this source of information doesn't appear to have anything either available to research or maybe it's not legitimate, or maybe their traffic is too low or the information is too outdated to be very effective at all. Or another one is you just figure out that it's not speaking to your ideal customer, and it's not a good place for you to try and target any, any of your efforts at this time.

So there's a lot of tools to help you with this phrase, or with the space buzz stream is a great tool check out built with data.com discover org LinkedIn, of course and you can also purchase premium versions of LinkedIn and Especially versions targeted for sales, you can try out toofer, Hoover's zoom info rapportive Connect to fire, sales loft, and so many more, I did not even begin to scratch the surface, there are so many tools. So if you know of a new one that isn't on my radar Yeah, or that we don't cover in this course or any of the subsequent lessons, please let me know about it, you know, pop it into the LinkedIn group. I would love to find out more. And I'm sure the other participants in this course would love it too. So real quick, it's, this is a lot of work.

You're probably hearing me say this and being like, Are you kidding? I have to go through websites and find people. Yep, you do. This is how it's done. However, you don't have to do it forever. It's really important that you do it first because you need to know what works, where to find the information, why that information is good information for you and why it's also not and you need to pay attention.

Along the way to what you're doing. It's good. If you can take some notes, even just jot them down in a Google Doc somewhere, because you're documenting your process as you go. Once you figured out what you're doing, you can find ways to make it easier, you're going to find tips, you're going to find tricks, you know, one examples buzz stream has a website kind of scraper, sort of mental tool so that you can open it up and it pulls the info from the site. And it can make things really easy. You know, there's a lot of other ways you can do this.

And that's optimization, figuring out ways to just make easier shortcut, just get really creative. And then you're going to hand this off either to someone else in your office, another member of your team, or even outsource it or offshore it to somebody who specializes in internet research like this. But the point is, it's really important for you first to know where to find your ideal target customers, where they're at and and how To get their information. Another reason that you want to know where these people are, aside from sales prospecting is for future marketing purposes, this is really helpful to know where might be a good place for you to attend a conference yourself, where might be fruitful for you to sponsor? What could be a great, you know, organization for you to reach out with and propose a partnership if or if one of them calls you, is it actually worth considering?

This is all really helpful information to now in something that will only just make your efforts a lot more richer. Let's really quickly address this question. A lot of people say why don't you just buy lists, you can buy lists. This seems like so much work. Why would I just pay you know, a couple hundred couple thousand dollars need a list of people? There's a couple reasons why you don't want to start off buying lists.

The first one being data quality of purchase list tends to be poor. A lot of the times the data is very outdated. The people on that list may have incorrect contact information, they may not be in those roles at those companies any longer. And so when you do a sales prospecting campaign with a purchase list, you can expect typically, bounce backs, emails that don't go anywhere of sometimes as high as 30%. And that's quite a lot. So if you think if you're paying for 100 names, and 30 of them aren't going to work, and that's just, you know, not really that great of odds.

But also, I want you to be the initial authority on what is good, good fit and what isn't. And we discussed this earlier, starting with building a list by hand really produces a much better targeted list because you're going to know that every single person on that list is potential Katy for you. So again, you know, irrelevant leads, and this can get really expensive to purchase lists, and understanding your ideal target customer and the niche that you're successful and we'll make future lists purchasing better. So if you've done it Manually for a little bit, then you might be able to go to someone's selling list. Or you might be able to go to somebody who creates lists, outsource it or outsource ways like a lead genius or something like that and say, This is what makes a good list for me. And this is what not What does not so then they know and they can help you better.

Not really knowing what you need, will definitely produce the results that aren't what you need. So that's kind of my two cents on that. I know it's so tempting to just buy a list. I really encourage you not to do so.