You sell a transformation, not a service, and you sell it to one specific kind of person. Most small business owners are good enough to get work. Very few are clear enough to get it reliably. The difference is almost never talent. It’s whether you can say, in one sentence, what changes for the customer and who that customer is. If you can’t, every sale is a coin flip, and you’re the one paying for the flips.
Why can’t I describe what I sell?
Because you’re describing what you do instead of what they get. A bookkeeper says “I do the books.” The client isn’t buying books. She’s buying not being surprised in April. A photographer says “headshots.” The client is buying looking like the person she wants to be hired as. It’s not the thing we sell, it’s the transformation they get when they buy it. Start there. Take your best product, the one you crush every time, and write the exact outcome in one plain sentence. Not “peace of mind.” Something you could check: “You’ll know your real profit by the 10th of every month.” If the sentence has a number, a date, or a before-and-after in it, you’re close.
Who is actually buying from me?
Not “small businesses.” Not “women entrepreneurs.” Go narrower until it feels uncomfortable, then go one more step. Who has the money, who has the problem right now, and who already believes they need help? Then split that person by stage of life or stage of business, because the owner in year one and the owner in year eight want different things from you even if they run the same kind of company. Pain in the present is the strongest reason anybody buys. Aim at the person who is in pain today, not the person who might be someday. Sell what people want to buy, not what you want to sell. When you can picture one real person, with a name and a Tuesday, you can write to her, and everybody like her will feel it.
How do I stand out when everybody does what I do?
By becoming a market of one. You don’t out-compete forty other consultants. You get so specific about the customer and the outcome that the comparison stops making sense. The bookkeeper for construction companies isn’t competing with the bookkeeper for restaurants. The headshot photographer for people going through a career change isn’t competing with the family portrait studio. Specific beats better, because specific is easier to remember and easier to refer. Your negotiator, the voice in your head that wants to fit in, will fight this. Your gut knows it’s right. Then say it until you’re sick of it, because the day you’re tired of your message is roughly the day your market starts hearing it.
How do I test it without betting the business?
Say it and play it. Put the sentence in front of ten real people and watch their faces. Change your email signature, your LinkedIn headline, and the first line you say at a networking event, and see who leans in. If you want to open a coffee shop, don’t start with a coffee shop. Start with a table at the farmer’s market and see if anybody cares. Offers work the same way. Sell the narrow version to five people before you build the website for it. The market will tell you what it wants to buy faster than any plan will.
Questions owners ask
What’s the difference between a service and a transformation?
A service is what you do. A transformation is what changes for the customer after you do it. People pay for the second one.
Isn’t narrowing my audience going to cost me customers?
It costs you the customers you were never going to close reliably anyway. It makes you the obvious choice for the ones you can.
How narrow is too narrow?
If there aren’t enough of them to pay your bills, too narrow. Most owners never get anywhere close to that line.
This is the first of six questions nobody taught you to answer. Owners work it together every Thursday at the Idea Slam inside the Small Business Owners Community, $9 a month, owners only. If you want to hear what the group sounds like first, watch the show.