Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Dear erikucha_s,

You don't have a profile of the target audience?

Wrong, dear heart. They—because there are two of them—they are right under your nose.

Your target audiences are family owned businesses and the professionals that can advise them.

That's TWO audiences.

To connect advisors to receptive groups you must first SELECT each of them: advisors and recipients. You must pre-qualify each group and you must address each group with THEIR best interests at heart.

You must align the core experiences (on the parts of potential advisors) with the core desires of the small business owners.

Why? Simply because:

No alignment, no connection.

No connection, no audience bond.

No audience bond, no transfer of value.

Value is the glue that holds all of this together.

No value, no workee!

To create all of this you need to find people that qualify in terms of their expertise and in terms of the solutions they're looking for from your current audience profiles.

Every performer needs an audience. Every audience needs someone to listen to, learn from, be entertained by, and to applaud.

To make your list of qualifiers AND to maximize its potential to generate useful results, consider the following.

For your advisors:

Define, seek out, and list groups that have the most members with the right amount of experience and the highest numbers of relevant connections PER group (from your list of categories: finance, accounting, insurance, coaching, lawyers) on LinkedIn.

Plot all of this information out in a spreadsheet and send SPECIFIC messages to SPECIFIC people within those groups and ask for their help to identify the top FIVE people WITHIN THEIR GROUP that THEY think would make the best advisors (even if it means that their names wind up on your list).

The names that keep bobbing to the surfaces of each of your subgroups then become your primary points of acquisition. They become the core group of advisors.

For your advisees:

Use LinkedIn and Chamber of Commerce details to identify family owned businesses with annual gross revenues of "X", with a history of serving niche "Y", and a record of "Z" number of years (you'll have to come up with your own variables here I'm afraid).

Also chip into this mix the growth potential that each business would like to see over the next 3 to 5 years if there were no encumbrances to hold them back.

THIS IS CRITICAL.

Here, it is vitally important that the glass is thought of
as overflowing with possibility.

The glass is NOT half full.
The glass is NOT half empty.
The glass is NOT dashed across the floor in a puddle and in a billion shards.

It overflows.

With possibility.

Got that?

The sky is not falling in, nor is it just "blue", it is SERENELY AZURE!

The horizon is NOT a million miles away, it is so close that objects along it can ALMOST be picked up with one's fingers at arm's length. ALMOST. But not quite. There must be some degree of challenge. The prize cannot be had TOO easily. There must be some reach involved, some effort.

Fantasy land?

NO!

Neural engineering to sow seeds of success.

No credit crunches, no gaps in their markets, no issues with manufacturing, no issues with unions, salaries, workforces, materials costs or supply, no lack of investment monies, NO FEAR OF FAILURE.

In short, an environment of near ZERO PROBLEMS.

What would they want to see, feel, realize and build on their visible timeline if there was nothing to prevent them from doing so?

The vision here must be one of TOTAL EMPOWERMENT.

And those empowering details must come from the advisors that you've so lovingly chosen.

The plan I've just mapped out for you WILL WORK LIKE CLOCKWORK—on the condition that you implement it.
Pick holes in it at your peril.

Time is against you and the plan I've just given you is worth millions of dollars in sales.

Whaddayawaitingfor?

Gary Bloomer
Princeton, NJ, USA

You are most welcome.