This is not your typical fishing story. This particular story is about fishing for a whale and not the kind that lives in the sea. A whale is the type of client that can make a significant and positive impact to your business and on your bottom line.
The good news is that it might be easier than you think to catch a whale and here are three strategies you need to know to get yourself, and your business a whale.
1.) You can fish in a small pond. This means you would be using a direct hit list to search them out individually.
2.) You can use a wide net. In this strategy you look for them where they hang out. I like to say “where they nest.”
3.) You can use a wide net and attract them to your bait. This is lead generation.
Before you cast off, you first need to define and get a really clear picture of just what a whale is for you and your business. Who, specifically, is that type of client that will make the significant positive impact on your business’s bottom line and more profit in your pocket?
As you define your whale think of all the things that type of person/company would be like. Create a target customer intelligence report, a picture of your whale: How she thinks, where she hangs out, who she associates with and why, what vocabulary she uses. In more formal terms, demographics, psychographics, emotional background, current state of mind (her opinions), etc.
I hear you saying, “You’ve got to be kidding, all this work?” My answer is an emphatic, “YES!” Best-selling author and speaker John Maxwell says, “Everything worthwhile is up hill and too many times we expect uphill results from downhill effort.” If you want to catch a whale for you and your business, you cannot just take off in a rowboat with a jar of tartar sauce and expect one to just jump in your boat. It is work. I learned this from Dan Kennedy. Dan is known for his exceptional copywriting. His copywriting is so effective that his sales letters consistently attract and land whales for his clients.
He says the key to writing those successful letters is to get in the target customer’s head and see what he sees, hear what he hears and feel like he feels. One simple place to start is with the acronym FORD – From/Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams.
- Where are you from?
- What do you do for a living?
- When you’re not working what do you like to spend your time doing?
- What is something you’d like to do if money was no object?
Remember, too, that whales do not want to know how to do what you sell; they want to understand it and know for certain that you know how to do it or how it will specifically benefit them.
Select the strategy that you think would work best for you, your type of business and the whale you are looking to land. Then, get to work! Implement it and refine it as you go along to get you closer to catching your whale.
