November 30, 2017

“How do I choose between two verticals?” and more...

In today’s group coaching session, a pretty clear theme developed.

Many folks were trying to niche down their marketing but were stuck deciding between two possibilities.

Things like:

Here are some of the questions we tackled today:

I started moving to tech training around building APIs, mainly in a specific tech. Now I was thinking of moving to advisory consulting in this field but with a different audience. Our previous exchange made it clear to me that the audiences (tech managers and biz people) are too different and have different needs, fears, etc. When focusing on building apis for business people, it is still horizontal? Should I add a vertical too? (timestamp: 1m 41s)

We’re having difficulty pinpointing our ideal client. We’ve done a lot of implementation work this year and want to avoid that next year. We’re considered experts in our programming language/framework, so we’re trying to find products/services we could work on for our audience - thinks like trainings, building teams style guides or libraries, Slack mentoring rooms, etc. What should we do to identify this? Email our list? Experiment with a product idea for someone we know? What’s the next step? (timestamp: 13m 8s)

Do you have any tips on making the decision between two audiences less hard? Personally, I love training and also advisory consulting but have a hard time deciding between them. The only clear thing is that I don’t want to code for someone else :-) (timestamp: 18m 12s)

We’ve helped a lot of companies this year but they seem to take our work/their product and move in a bad direction. We’ve tried hard to have conversations to get them to ask the right questions, but “business needs” pressure them to move quickly, and we see them just plow ahead into the unknown. Are these bad clients? Should we just break up with them? How do we get them to follow our strategic advice? (timestamp: 23m 28s)

Hi Im new to the group- we are a 15yr old web design and marketing management agency “generalists” and have seen the light in regards to specializing and niching we are currently looking at a few niches now so my first question is this- is there a step by step framework that exists that we can follow to effectively evaluate and research a niche? (timestamp: 31m 30s)

If you sign a client on a strategy advisory retainer (marketing in my case), but they don’t already have a formal strategy, is the best approach to advise them on building pieces sequentially or should I create a detailed roadmap/strategy up front? (timestamp: 51m 33s)

I’m looking at religious organizations for my niche as I’ve built church conference level fund accounting systems. I’ve also coached soccer and ski racing for 15 years (in a previous life). What would be a “niche” in the scope of large churches or upper level organizational units in non-profit/religious? Am I being silly trying to link religious/non-profit with membership organizations? (timestamp: 57m 9s)

Can you give me some advice on moving from implementation work to advisory consulting? (timestamp: 63m 51s)

Would you like to know the answers to these questions? Do you have questions like these that you’d like to get answered?

When you join the 37 other folks in my group coaching program, you’ll get instant access to today’s recording, all six previous recordings, and all future sessions for as long as you’re a member.

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Yours,

—J

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