Identify your niche, understand what your customers want

Rule one of selling marketing funnels is “don’t talk about marketing funnels”. The more you spend time talking about marketing automation, squeeze pages, mobile responsiveness and all the other deliverables of the marketing funnel, the more you’ll turn a customer off.

I understand why we do this. It’s because we want to help our customers understand as much as they can. Surely if they are educated, they can make an informed decision?

This is killing your marketing funnel business. Customers don’t make informed decisions. They make decisions with their gut. They want an emotional connection to you, feeling like you’ve got their best interests at heart.

And bizarrely, your desire to show off your expertise, is actually doing the opposite.

When we talk about our products and services, we are alienating our customers. We should be very clearly and plainly talking about them.

This is a framework I’ve been experimenting with. I’ve presented it to the Facebook group, WP London, and a few other groups. I’m sure you’ll see more of it in 2020.

The goal is to take our current marketing funnel offering and help us understand what we want to deliver to customers and what we love to sell. And then understand what the customer will buy from us.

It’s often said that no one buys a drill bit, they buy a hole in the wall. I would take that one step further, and say what people are really buying is hanging up their favourite picture on a wall.

Selling the hole is a good start. Letting someone show off their individuality and identity inside their own home, is even stronger. We are going to understand what your customers want to see in their life, and if your products will help them get there.

The framework is called The Butterfly Sell. It helps you identify your niche, understand what your customers want and bridges the gap between what you sell and what they’ll buy. Often called product market fit.

The acronym is WINGS. What, Interest, Niche, Goals, Sell.

We start with “what” we bring to the market. The W in WINGS. What you do is just a list of everything that you could possibly deliver to the customer, from start to finish. Make a list of all of the deliverables and features that you provide to the customer, from the moment they meet you.

This could be initial qualification meetings, consulting, landing page design, social media marketing, SEO etc. It’s just a list of everything that you could deliver to the customer.

Next let’s look at Interest. What interests you? This is where you can take your list of What you do and only write a list of things that you love to deliver and that you’re good at.

For example your list could have SEO, landing page design, email copywriting and consulting. Of everything in your What list, you now need to write a list of things you love to do, and that you are good at.

It might be that while you are good at SEO, you don’t love it. So you’ll only write that under the “good at” list, but not the “love” list.

You might love landing page design, but you don’t feel you’re particularly good at it. Whereas you might find that you love consulting and social media marketing, and you think you’re quite good at it.

The idea is that we want to end up with one or two items that are in our sweet spot. Something we’re good at, something we love to do, and something people will pay for.

Next we’ll look at our Niche. If you don’t have a niche, this is how you’ll discover one. The question you need to ask, is “who benefits the most from working with me?”

Your sweet spot will benefit some people more than others. I want you to think about the characteristics and requirements, of potential customers, that would benefit from working with you.

For example, is someone likely to have better results who already has a social media profile, and wants to take it to the next level? Or someone who has zero social media presence right now?

I’d wager, that someone with social media marketing already, would benefit more from your social media marketing and consultation, than someone who has currently zero exposure. This is not about who would get some benefit working with you, this is about who would benefit the most from working with you.

G is for Goals. The customer you’ve just described with their traits and requirements and characteristics. What are their goals? What do they want to see in their future? What does their future look like?

List out all the goals that your customers have, as well as their problems, beliefs, dreams, desires and roadblocks. The more you can list out about what your customer wants to achieve, the better you’ll have a chance at selling them.

Finally we look at Sell. Selling is where we find something we are enthusiastic about and want to tell other people about. And we need to align it to their goals. Let’s say that a business you could work with already needs to have at least 1000 followers on social media. With your consulting they’ll be able to grow that and get more from their followers.

Their goals are to spend more time at home, less time at the office and generate more repeat income.

What we “sell” is the ability for them to reach that future, and achieve those goals. We’ve now turned from a social media marketing consultancy, into something like “we work with businesses with at least 1000 followers on social media, to generate more income from their social media platforms and grow their audience, so they can work fewer hours a day”.

If you called yourself something like a Social Revenue Effectiveness Agency, all of a sudden you don’t have any competition. You’re also #1 in the market because no one else is going for #2.

When people ask you “what do you do?” You can now reply with something more exciting than social media consultant. You can instead respond with “I help businesses with at least 1000 social media followers work fewer hours per day, and grow their social media audience enough to generate them repeatable income”.

Over time as you explain what you do (and what you sell) to more people, it’ll become clearer what you do. Over time I have realised that the majority of my work is to give people confidence. I used to say that I helped people with sales, and now I’m almost positive it’s to do with sales confidence.

Which is a hell of a lot more exciting than saying “I run an online course company”.

Use WINGS to understand what it is you are selling to customers. The list of what you do and the benefits you offer on either sides (the W and S), should be the longest lists with the Interest and Goals being shorter and the Niche in the middle being the shortest period it should look a little bit like a butterfly or an egg timer on its side.

If you want 49 Niche Examples, just for funnel builders, go ahead and download our 49 Niche Examples below.

It’s 49 niche examples that funnel builders like you could go after today and start to work with. Totally free, delivered to your inbox.

Mike Killen

Mike is the world's #1 sales coach for marketing funnel builders. He helps funnel builders sell marketing funnels to their customers. He is the author of From Single To Scale; How single-person, small and micro-businesses can scale their business to profit. You can find him on Twitter @mike_killen.