J. Timothy King’s Blog

Before Your Idea Can Take Off

What do you do when you have a great business idea, but you just can’t going on it? It’s a good idea. You believe in it. And you might be able to get off the ground, if you could find the runway.

I’ve recently been helping a friend get his business idea off the ground. He wants to sell to small companies. So I’ve been quoting a lot from Jill Konrath’s recent book Selling To Big Companies. No, I’m not on a mission to convert him. It’s just that the principles and approach Jill Konrath uses, they apply no matter what market you’re in.

This is because of Jill Konrath’s background. She’s a salesman. That makes her good at discovering which customer wants to buy, creating a value proposition to make him drool, differentiating herself from all the other sellers, making herself invaluable to him… In short, Jill Konrath as a true salesman knows what it takes to market a business.

Many of us have a misconception. We think there’s a difference between marketing, advertising, and sales. They’re not all that different. Yes, each of these departments goes about different activities, depending on their immediate goals. The marketing people are trying to determine what the customer wants. The advertising people are trying to let the customer know it’s available. The sales people are trying to get the customer to buy. They each have different short-term goals, but they all follow the same approach.

Or at least they ought to be following the same approach. For some reason, the sales people end up thinking about the customer, the advertising people think This is clever!, and the marketing people just think Cool!

In a small business, you have to do all of those jobs. And if you try to follow the traditional approach, you’ll end up being three different people.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be three different people. And you shouldn’t. Rather, you should be the first, the salesman. As Claude C. Hopkins wrote a century ago in his timeless classic Scientific Advertising:

Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Successes and failures in both lines are due to like causes. Thus every advertising question should be answered by the salesman’s standards… The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.

Now, my friend is sharp and well-read. He didn’t need me to hand-hold him through the process of starting his business. In fact, he’s started more businesses than I have. But we were looking for ideas. So I pulled out Selling To Big Companies.

The book is about selling. But Jill Konrath takes us through defining our niche and target market, and turning this into a strong value proposition. These are the first steps. And it’s important to be specific. My friend and I were having trouble defining who his target market might be, who his customers really were. But I think we just weren’t asking the right questions.

• What industry are they in?
• Do they sell products or services?
• How big are they?
• What distribution channels do they use?
• What technologies do they use?
• Who are their customers?
• Are they growing, shrinking, or stagnating?
• What are their organizational goals and values?
• What do other people think of them?
• What preconceptions do they have about you?

It’s important to be specific. And it doesn’t matter who you’re selling to. If you’re selling to small companies or even direct to consumers, you still have to go through the same exercise. You just use different questions. And it’s important to be specific. Be very specific.

It’s not enough, for example, to be a function coordinator. Rather, you put on engaging, teen-oriented events for non-profits that serve youth in Denver. In defining your niche and identifying your target market, you want to accomplish two things:

• You want to choose something that you can get behind, something that you believe in. If you believe these events don’t actually help the inner cities, you probably don’t want to coordinate them. Do something that you are morally and ethically comfortable with.
• And you want your offering to be specific enough to stick out to your customer. This is important for your preliminary marketing, too. Your customer has to be able to tell what’s different between you and all the other function coordinators in the city. And you have to be able to look at your prospective target market in order to see if it has enough money to make your business work.

(Jill Konrath doesn’t go into measuring the size and value of a prospective niche and market. But it’s a topic I may explore in the future.)

Where we’re going is to create a strong value proposition. “We improve the turn-out and fun-factor of non-profit youth events, while maintaining a healthy, socially responsible atmosphere.” Or something like that. Then we can launch our sales campaign.

We not only have found the runway but also are flying a plane that is air-worthy.