We all understand the idea of a target market. Hopefully, you have a formalized understanding of what or who your target market is. But you might be better off thinking about the target and the market as two different things. 

The target is the narrow area at which you aim.

The market is the broader area you are happy to hit. 

Think of a golfer aiming at the flag (target) and happy to land on the green (market). (I don’t play enough to know if this metaphor holds for proper golfers—I aim for the green and am happy to land in bounds and out of a hazard—but I trust you get the idea.)

Aim for the Target, Hit the Market

The key idea in making this distinction between the target and the market is that you’re going to hit a larger area than you intend. The positioning language that you craft for your target will have appeal to many outside of that target, and your marketing is going to similarly reach and resonate with a broader audience. 

Why is this important?

Because the common intuition when crafting positioning (messaging) and marketing (campaigns) is to go broad. When your target is already too broad, however, your market will be far too broad. 

In his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel addresses the fallacy of this intuition…  

“It’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%.” 

The Cost of Breadth

While breadth increases relevance and reach, the tradeoffs are a watering down of your differentiation and an increase in the volume of more capable competitors. You may be reaching and relevant to more but you’re different to fewer and fighting a much larger pool of more specialized competition. 

If breadth were truly the answer then your best value proposition would be “Our solutions get results for clients.” 

“Marketing for anyone who needs marketing.” 

“Financial planning for anyone who needs financial planning.” 

A shocking number of businesses go to market with language not too different from this, the leaders terrified of putting any stake in the ground that would shrink their pool of potential clients. (Search “solutions that get results”—in quotes for an exact match—and ask yourself if you would ever hire any of these businesses.)

When your business is small, start with a smaller target. Making the distinction between your target and your market will help bring courage to this exercise of getting sufficiently small. 

Make the Target Small… in the Beginning

I have straight hair. The person who cuts it has curly hair. 

She has a busy roster of clients across the full spectrum of hair types and styles. (She has to—she lives and works in a market of less than 1,000 people.) But when she started her practice (in a much larger market) she looked for a way to differentiate herself against all the established stylists who “cut and styled hair for people with hair.”

Knowing how difficult it was to find someone who is good at cutting tightly curled hair like hers, she launched her practice with an ad proclaiming “Specializing in Curly Hair” and was quickly inundated with clients. Her happy curly-haired clients recommended her to their straight-haired friends who reasoned, “if she can cut and style curly hair then surely she can cut and style straight hair.”

The target is people with curly hair. The market is people with hair. 

A family member is a successful financial planner. Previous to starting her practice she was a paralegal in a law firm whose clients included an advocacy group of parents of children with Down Syndrome. When she launched her practice she was invited to speak to the group about their specialized financial planning needs. Some of those parents hired her. She was referred to other parent groups. She quickly built a reputation as the planner for families with special needs. Those clients referred others, including those who didn’t have special needs children. 

The target is families with special-needs children. The market is anyone who has financial planning needs. 

Then Broaden Out

Both women eventually dropped their specialization. Their businesses are similarly relationship-driven in that they grow through referrals, and their clients stick around for a long time. 

The million dollar question is when do you broaden out? When do you drop the target vs market distinction altogether or make your broader market your new target?

The market will often tell you the answer. 

Both stylist and planner were seeking to build a finite book of business, so when their practice was at capacity (in the case of the hair stylist) or growing at a pace they couldn’t comfortably exceed (the financial planner) they quit focusing on the target. 

The broader market had quickly come to them. 

But only because they had focused on a narrower target. 

At Win Without Pitching we have long specialized in “sales training for creative professionals.” For 20 years, I resisted the advice of many to broaden out to the larger market of others who also found relevance in our ideology and training. 

When the creative professionals in our public workshops started to become eclipsed by these “outliers” from the larger market, we made the broader market the new target: “sales training for expert advisors and practitioners.” 

The stylist and planner dropped their narrow targets quickly after benefiting from the rapid momentum afforded by them. We kept ours for 20 years until we could no longer ignore what the market was telling us. 

You Have Choices

The stylist and planner could have ridden their specialisms longer, farther, if they wanted to be more entrepreneurial. The stylist could have hired other stylists and opened salons in new geographic markets. The planner could have kept growing, adding other planners, perhaps launching a national practice of specialists. Both chose to remain small for their own valid reasons. 

If you’re at the beginning of your career you’ll benefit from a smaller market focus. Making the distinction between a narrow target and the broader market will help. When you find success in the niche there will be plenty of signals and opportunities to expand, giving you choices in how to grow. 

The opposite approach of starting too broad is the harder slog. Your market might be large but you’re just not meaningfully different to anyone in it. You’ll need exceptional sales skills to overcome the lack of differentiation. 

If you’re deep into your career and still struggling, it might be because you’ve given in to the temptation to chase a tiny fraction of a massive market. It might be time to reset your positioning.

Move From Vendor to Expert 

The two examples demonstrate the value of aiming at a smaller target. Properly positioning your offering this way makes your marketing decisions easier and your marketing messages more compelling. This is how good positioning leads to better lead generation which leads to better sales conversations which ultimately pay off in higher closing ratios at a higher average proposal value. It shifts the power dynamics in your favor at the very beginning of the sale. 

This interaction between you and your prospective clients via your positioning and marketing happens in The Probative Conversation. It’s the “conversation” that not only gets you noticed but proves your expertise to the client and sees you move—in their mind—from the powerless vendor position to the more lofty expert position. It’s the conversation that happens without you present, through your marketing. The Probative Conversation is the first in our Four Conversations model. Master this conversation and the subsequent conversations become easier. 

If you’d like to learn to master all of The Four Conversations of selling expertise, check out a Win Without Pitching workshop or private training for your team.