It Turns Out Your Prospects Don’t Like When You Assume They’re Stupid

I’ve been traveling a lot lately.  And, while this is good for the vagabond’s soul, it’s not good for recording videos.

So instead of continuing to treat you to niche case studies (those are coming, though), I’m getting back to my roots and writing.  I’m going to classify this, like all of my other recent posts, as “business of freelancing.”  But it’s really a bit of an interlude, since it’s not a logical continuation of my last post, which was about how to conduct market research to identify niches.

For today’s post, let’s assume that you’ve either found a niche, or else are just flailing around as a generalist, and you’re doing some prospecting.  I want to talk about prospecting — specifically, one great way not to do it.

What is Prospecting?

Perhaps before we go barreling too far down the road to business acquisition anti-pattern, I should define what I mean by prospecting.

I’m not talking about going out and looking for oil or whatever, and I don’t really have a formal, official definition.  Instead, I’ll explain what this means to me so that you understand what, exactly, I’m talking about for the rest of the post.

Consider:

• Marketing is the process by which you create awareness of your offering.
• Sales is the process of maneuvering leads (ideally, ones brought about through your marketing), through your sales process and to customers.

Clever readers may notice a gap here.

What if I don’t really have any marketing to speak of, and my phone isn’t ringing with inbound business?  How do I get leads into my sales process?

The various hustling you do to address this situation, dear reader, is known as prospecting.  (Please don’t confuse this with marketing.)

A Prospecting Example

If I were in your shoes, interested in learning about business concepts, I’d want a concrete example.  So, in true Golden Rule spirit, let me offer that.

My business, Hit Subscribe, is a specific kind of marketing partner.  We help dev tools companies make engineers aware of their offerings (usually via blog posts).  These days, I’m doing 2-3 sales calls per week, and here are the ways those come about:

1. Inbound leads through word of mouth.  Current customers refer people they know, or customer contacts switch companies and bring us along for the ride.  This is an instance of marketing.
2. People reach out because they read a guest post of mine somewhere or saw a talk.  This is another instance of marketing — specifically content marketing.
3. I hang out places where our customers hang out, introduce myself, and forge relationships.  This is prospecting.

In the loosest sense, I think of marketing as strategies to facilitate passive (from your vantage point) awareness.  If Hit Subscribe impresses a customer into a referral, or someone reads a blog post I wrote and reaches out, we’re expending no specific effort to reach this person.

But prospecting is active and tailored.  You’re identifying and targeting possible customers.

And because you’re initiating the relationship, you need to exercise a lot more care in how you do this.  Which brings me to the meat of the post.

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Conducting Market Research Calls to Identify and Validate Niches

Recently in this series, I wrote about how you don’t “pick” niches.  Rather, you discover potential niches, form a niche hypothesis, and then validate them.

I also recommended two pretty dependable ways to validate (and, if needed, tune) them:

1. Creating valuable content around the niche hypothesis.
2. Conducting market research.

Today, I’d like to focus on this second concern.  Let’s do a deep dive on scheduling and conducting market research calls.

Understand the Lay of the Land

Before I go into detail, I want to establish some ground rules to help you not be awful.

When people help you with your market research, there’s extremely limited upside for them.  Basically just the opportunity to have someone interview them and express interest in their opinions.  But that’s really it.

So make no mistake.  This is a one-sided exchange and they are doing you a favor.  As such, the least you can do is walk in the safe middle between these two extreme behaviors that will make them low-key hate you:

1. You claim to want to pick their brain but, bait and switch by begging them to pay you to do something.
2. You truly want to pick their brain, but have no focus or agenda, so you turn the call into undirected career advice and therapy.

Veering toward either one of these danger zones is a veritable blueprint for how to suck.  You need to stay in the middle by having a focused agenda, but with no expectation beyond the meeting itself.

And the easiest way to do that is to recognize that either one of the danger paths involves making the conversation about you and your needs.  This conversation is, instead, about them and theirs.  If you keep that top of mind, you’ll do fine.

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What Are Your Niche Ideas? Let’s Do Some Case Studies

My last post here was about niches.  That’s an important topic to cover before I can give you meaningful content about marketing.  As I’ve said before, marketing without a niche is just you blathering about yourself into the void.

I’ve talked about niches a lot, in the past.  And I also receive a TON of reader questions about them, often in the abstract sense:

• How do I pick a niche?  (You don’t — you discover one and opt to fill it).
• What kind of niche can I fill with this skill set?
• How do I move away from being a generalist?

Those are totally valid questions.  But they’re hard for me to answer in a satisfying way, because they’re so individually specific.

This is a Topic Best Tackled Via Case Study

So let’s remedy that by making the questions specific.

I recently published a new video to my YouTube channel.  You can see that here:

Unlike my normal reader question round-ups, I dedicated the whole video to answering a single question.  And this one more or less boiled down to a question of finding a niche, but with some specifics.

This particular reader already had a side hustle generating recurring monthly revenue, so I talked at length about how valuable that is.  My suggestion for that particular case was to really dig into why this client paid and use that as the basis for trying to replicate and scale that side hustle into just a hustle.

The question setup lacked specifics around the actual arrangement, so it was still a little general.  But I think this is the conceptual basis for something that could help us finally boil the niche ocean.

Let’s Dig into Your Niche Ideas

It has now been 6 and a half years since I was someone’s employee.  I spent about half that time as a solo consultant, and the second half establishing and growing Hit Subscribe, where I’m currently the CEO of a rapidly growing (and actively hiring) business.

This field experience has probably given me the applied equivalent of an MBA.  But more importantly, it has exposed me to a shipping barge’s worth of niches and niche ideas.  And it has equipped me to do a decent job of evaluating them.

This is where you come in, if you’d like.  Send me an idea you have for a niche, and I’ll take a look at it, offer my thoughts, and give tips for how to make it work.

You can email me at erik at daedtech or submit through the ask page.

If you’re worried about giving away your big idea, that’s your prerogative, but I wouldn’t sweat that.  Ideas are cheap, and the thing standing between a current employee and a successful business is never the idea.

But, on the positive side, I’m happy to help.  And I think this could be the path to having good fodder for how to find and validate niches, and how to do some marketing as well.

So fire away with your questions about niches, if you’re so inclined.

You Don’t Pick Niches — You Discover Them

As I continue along this meandering odyssey of posts about freelancing, I’ve arrived at the point where I should talk about marketing.  After all, I just talked about sales, and then about how not to market.

But the trouble is that, until you pick some kind of niche, your marketing is essentially just platitudinous bullshit.

Marketing is really about making consumers aware of how your offering could (or couldn’t) help them.  What, then, does marketing generalist labor look like?

• I’m passionate and I believe in quality!
• I have good communication skills and I believe in under-promising and over-delivering.
• My credit score is 800!

It quickly descends into the farcical, particularly since there is only one true, accurate piece of generalist marketing: “I’m cheaper than the other people you’re talking to.”

Don’t believe me?  Consider the only two generalist arguments about hourly rates:

1. I’m the cheapest!
2. Sure, the other dude is cheaper, but I’m higher quality, which means you’ll actually pay less in the long run, which — plot twist! — actually makes me the cheapest.

So before we can talk about marketing, we need something worth marketing.  We need to get you a niche.

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