Boost Your Bottom Line: Finding Your Ideal Customer

Hello and welcome to the show. It's a wonderful rainy day in Abuja. And so let's get down to today's episode. So we're going to pick off where we left off. Oh yeah. So how to increase your sales conversion rate? So if I remember correctly, I think yesterday, I defined what sales is for the purpose of this episode. And then we looked at the idea behind conversion, the idea behind conversions, and that's basically how you move the deal forward, complex sales forward by taking things one step at a time.

If this is your first time listening to the show and you're unfamiliar with what a conversion is, just go ahead. After you're done listening to this, listen to yesterday's episode and you get caught up to speed. Then before we continue on to give some well deserved shout outs to 44545 people who left me messages on the Spotify app. So it turns out that on Spotify at the end of each episode there's a default question. Some of you answer the questions.

Basically, you guys have have been giving me feedback, but because I'm not aware of all the bells and whistles on Spotify, in case you haven't figured out, I'm not a very I'm technical guy. I use computers and phones and everything for whatever it is that I need to do, but I'm not super technical. So I'm only just discovering some new features of Spotify. And then this message thing, this feedback thing is part of it.

So if you're done listening to the episode, you got a bunch of value from it or you disagree with something that I said, you don't even have to wait until the end of the episode to get my contact details and shoot me a message. You can do so right in your Spotify app. You can say what it is you loved, what it is that you hated, or whatever. Luckily, for now, I haven't gotten any messages saying that there was anything that I put up that people hated.

So a shout out to Esther Ayodele, who in her comments said that I sound like Woozy and she's the second or third person who is mentioning this Woozy fellow. So I have to go on, check the interwebs and see who Woozy is and why I keep getting this comparison between both of us. I think I've seen a photo of him or a video of him somewhere. I didn't pay attention to the content, but yeah, so far there are some similarities because we're both bald with both black.

We're both big guys. It'll be nice to see what any similarities they are in content as well. Oh, by the way, he's South African. I am not. Just in case, you know, for those of you who are not Nigerian, I do think my name Tavi Shima Ayede, you know, you think it's exotic or something because there are some people who I think I'm from South Africa. Some people think my name is Japanese. I've heard what else, you know, different places.

Any bottom line Esta IO daily. Thank you very much for the comment. I hope I keep giving value to you over here on the podcast and it will be nice for you to pop in again on a future episode to leave whatever comments that you'd like to. Then there is DD didn't leave a real name and she said she was happy that I was. I was speaking about women. And I'm glad to get that kind of comment because like I pointed out that even though over 70% of the listenership of the show is dudes, guys, men, I would like more women to listen to the show so deeply share the podcast.

That particular episode in particular, because I think that was the episode where I think was the episode where I spoke about being authentically you and, you know, being a girl boss and all that. So please share the episode to other women in business or who are trying to navigate difficult careers or difficult leadership situations because that was what that podcast episode was about. So share it to other women, let them get some Nuggets from it as well, and let's see how we can grow the listenership base of the podcast and yet more women on board.

Then there was some T, or is it Sun T with a capital letter T who said that he found the podcast to be educating. Thank you very much for that. It's nice to know the particular episodes that you guys find valuable and the topics that resonate with you guys. And then there was Daffy. That's DAFE, who found, OK, I can't remember the podcast title, found it valuable. That's the episode title. And I think what struck him was that my emphasis on after sales retention, that it's not about how much money you make, that,

you know, in traditional sales theory, it's not about how much money you put in your pocket now. It's also about how much value you can inject into the equation over the long term so that you can also derive more financial returns. In other words, if you take a million now, you put it in your pocket and your profit margin on that is, I don't know, 400K? That's cool. But the real magic is going to be if you can get that person who spent a meal with you now to spend another meal with you every two or three years down the line.

And that's where the real magic happens. OK, let me make it. Let me make it more relatable, OK Bread. Yes, because after all, that was my first example on the podcast in my the bread fellow that I ran into in Carnival. So you sell a loaf of bread right now in Abuja, loaf of bread currently between 1005 and maybe 2000. So if you make one sale and somebody buys a loaf of bread for 2000 naira and let's say your profit on that is 400

bucks, you pocket the 400 bucks. That's cool. That's a good sale. But the real magic happens if you get that person to buy the bread today and the person buys next week and the person buys 52 weeks of the year. So that way instead of making a profit margin of 400 bucks now and that was it, you end up having a lifetime customer value of 400 * 52. So whatever it is, you math people, you know, run the math and, and that's the figure.

So that's a lifetime customer, lifetime value of someone. But of course that's just for one year and then you spread it out over a couple of years. Of course, if the person gets married, if he or she gets married and then they have kids, the number of loafs of bread that they have to buy and go up. And that's that's pretty much what after sales retention is about. If you do business with 100 people, it's not going to be good.

If you do business with 100 people and then next year fifty of them go and buy from someone else, you're only doing business with 50. You're hemorrhaging people. There's a problem with your after sales retention. The attrition is too high. You're going to be losing money because you're spending too much time and money trying to replace people who are disappearing. And then for all the people who disappear, when somebody buys a loaf of bread from you today and doesn't come back next week, you think, yeah, there's no loss,

But actually it is a loss because if the person stayed with you and bought for the whole year, just like I said, your profit margin is not going to be 400 naira. It's going to be 400 naira multiplied by 52 weeks of the year. So shout out to Esther IO, daily D, Som T and Daffy, thank you very much for the comments on the show. I'm sorry that it took me so long. I think one of you left the comments about 3 or maybe four months ago.

And that's because, like I said, I'm still learning all the bells and whistles and all the features on the Spotify app. So if any of you leave comments and I don't respond immediately, that's the reason why because I'm still getting familiar with this. Oh, by the way, one added benefit of listening to this podcast on Spotify is because Spotify now has an auto generate transcript. So if I'm saying stuff and I'm talking too fast or I say stuff without spelling, and I

mentioned some resources, all you have to do is when you're listening to the podcast, there's an auto generate feature or there's a transcript tab. If you're listening on a mobile device, you just tap that and you can see exactly what it is that I'm saying at any given point in time. In fact, if you're one of those people who is using the transcribe feature right now, you should be seeing the words flowing on your screen as you're listening to this audio of me talking.

So give it a try. You're only going to be able to send me messages on Spotify. You will also have the auto generate transcript. I tried to see if I could copy and paste but I couldn't figure out a way. If you can, then the good thing is you'll be able to copy the transcript and then you have juicy content that you can refer to later on from me and the good folks at Spotify free of charge. So with the shout outs out of the way, let's head to how you can increase your sales conversion rate.

It just occurred to me that I defined conversion but I didn't define conversion rate. Well, apologies about the noise from the background. Like I said, today's a rainy day over here in Abuja. It's been raining since about 656 AM and still raining now and I can't complain although I have laundry that is not dry yet. But aside apart from that, it's nice cool weather, so I can't complain. So I think in tomorrow's episode, I'll define what a conversion rate is.

We'll just run over the math about how you figure out what your conversion rate is. But for now, if you want your conversion rate to go up, we are going to look at a couple of things that you need to do. And since we've already done 10 minutes so far of the episode, I think I'll just head straight to it. And I'm only going to tackle one thing right now. And I think tomorrow we'll figure out how to calculate the sales conversion rate.

And then we'll do one more thing and then run through another two or three ideas two or three days down the line and then we'll bring this question to a close. So if you want your sales conversion rate to go up, if you want the likelihood that when you talk to XYZ number of people that a couple of them will take the next step in closing the deal, in moving the business relationship forward. Then the most obvious thing that you have to do is you have to make sure that you are targeting the right audience and targeting the right people in the 1st place.

Because if you're targeting the right people, these are the people who are most likely to convert. I think in an older podcast episode where I spoke about ICP ideal customer profile, your ideal customer audience, your ideal customer avatar, your, your favorite customer, whatever it is, ideal customer, whatever it is you want to call it. The example that I gave was for someone who sells shoes and who sells female shoes.

And the example that I gave was if you sell female shoes, you better off, I mean, best believe that you have to be targeting women of a certain age of a certain class living in a certain part of the city. And that is where you should be spending most of your time. I don't sell shoes by the way, but that's just my guess that if you sell working shoes, you're better off, Let's say you're based in Abuja, you're better off targeting women of working age in Abuja, in Central business district.

That's just my guess. So if you were to start spending time with men, would that be a waste of time? It might be. It would make the job a whole lot harder because the primary audience is females. So the more time that you can spend going after the females, then that would be the best thing to do. If you're going after a man trying to get him to buy shoes, then you had better be sure that he has a wife or he has a daughter or he has a girlfriend who is within that demographic that you're targeting.

And in that case, the guy is going to buy the shoes for his loved one. And the extreme example that I gave was if you're now talking to a man who has no wife because he's a widower, who has no daughter because he only had sons and who has no mom, OK, Or maybe his mom is retired and who has no female friends, then if all you do is sell female shoes, then you're wasting time spending all your time with that fellow. So we need to start off trying to target the right people from the 1st place because that increases the likelihood that they're going to convert.

So for someone who sells shoes to working class women in Abuja, the more time you spend with women of working age, let's say 25 to 35, who work in the central business district in Abuja, the more time you spend with that demographic, the likelihood that your conversion rates, the normal people who take the next step is going to go up. If you sell female shoes, the more time that you spend with men, you'll find that the conversion rate is going to go down because it's not a very tight fit when it comes to the right audience.

So the right audience are the people who are most likely to convert. If you want your conversion rate to go up, make sure that you spend the most time with those people from the get go. Start from the beginning, chasing those people, pursuing those people. Make sure spend the most time with them and your conversion rate goes up. So who is your ideal audience? There's a different way of thinking about it. First of all, you want people who want what you have, who need what you have, and who can afford what you have.

If people want want it, they need it, they like it, they love it, but they can't afford it, then that's not your ideal audience. Or maybe you want to sell cheaper. But if you've been listening to the show, you know I'm not a fan of all those sorts of things. I really think if there's a problem, the last thing you should tweak is the money is the price. I'll do a podcast episode about why that's the case, but just take it from me right now in faith that the last thing you should tweak should be the money.

Tweak all kinds of things, tweak your copy, tweak your messaging, maybe even try a new audience. Tweak every single thing first before you start saying let me take my price down from 2005 to 1008. Maybe that's going to give me some more some more sales. So we have to start off thinking about people who want, who need, who can afford. I will try to go after them. It would also help. So excuse me. It would also help if we.

Where was I? Yeah. So it would help if we also pay attention to people who we enjoy working with and people who have not too much friction in the process. Because there are times that we have people who want what we have, need what we have, and they can afford what is that we offer. But those people are just the pain in the behind to work with. And I will tell you from my own personal experience, stay away from these people.

If you run into two or three of them in a year, they can wreak havoc on your confidence. I'm speaking from first hand experience. I've had a nasty experience like that. The exchange was terrible. I felt like breaking the girls the the lady. I felt like breaking her husband's head because he was being an idiot. And after everything, I went to the wedding planner because I like to let my people know what's up. If you send a job through, if you refer a job to me, I'll do my best.

But whether things go well or not, I always like to go back to the first source to let me know what's up. Like, thank you very much for hooking me up with this business. This is how things turned out. What do you think we could have done better, you know, blah, blah, blah, Because I want to keep that relationship nice and smooth. So I show up to the wedding planner and it turns out that she was in the middle of planning, you know, her own thing.

So a bunch of other vendors were there and we all happened to work on this wedding. And yeah, so I started off like, hey, babe, sorry. You know, this bride, you know, like this, like this issue that we had, I just like, don't worry, don't sweat it. Like she quarried with all of us. And then everybody started giving their own horror stories. And then I felt I still didn't feel 100% good because I don't like it when you.

I don't like it when I tried to run something and anything doesn't click, it doesn't work. So, but still, it just made me realize that I was sane after all, because she ended up, the bride ended up fighting with every single person. So it wasn't just the photographer me that she fought with. She fought with the makeup artist, she fought with the planner, she fought with a bunch of the ushers, she fought with the caterer, she fought with everybody.

So yes, there are some of those clients that you will meet who will pay you well. If you tell them my charge is 1.2, they'll give you that 1.2. But then dealing with that will be an absolute nightmare. I don't think these sorts of people should be. You should regard these sorts of people as your ideal customer segment, your ideal audience, your ideal avatar. I don't think you should put these people there because the money that they bring is OK, but then there's that downside.

The downside is a knock on your confidence. And the downside also is, what's that word? What's that word? I can't remember the word anyway. But The thing is, those people take a whole, they take a lot of your time. So trying to service them means you're going to be spending a lot of time doing damage control and things of that nature. And sorry, I had to move because the rain is getting worse and I'm not sure how much of that is bleeding in through the microphones.

So those sorts of people, even though they have all the money in the world, I don't think you should make them as part of your ideal audience, your ideal customers. But I have met some people who say what they do is everything. This person is going to be a problematic case. Then they triple the money so that at least the money will be worth the worth the worth their while at the end of the day. So maybe you can try that strategy.

So if typically what you charge is 250K for whatever it is you offer, you're having a chat with this person, you think this person is going to be a difficult client, Then instead of telling the person 250, just tell the person 7:50 so that if he or she is going to be an idiot about the whole thing, at least you would have had an extra 500 K to soothe your soothe your sorrows. So people who want and who need and who can afford.

We also have to make sure that there's no people who enjoy working with and there's no friction in the working relationship, customers that have good margins because for people that we work with that have poor margins, it's also the same problem because the money is not worth the hassle. Your motivation is going to go down in some cases, your attention to detail because not most people can't work diligently, can't strive diligently on something for long periods of time if they are not being adequately compensated.

So these are the sorts of things that you should look at to make sure that you are targeting the right audience. So how do you find this kind of people? The primary way that I recommend because since I work with people who are SM ES, I'm working with people who already have some sort of trading history. You know, you've been in business a couple of months or been in business a year. So you have trading history that you can look at.

You have WhatsApp messages you can look at, you have invoices that you can look at. You have CRM entries that you can look at. You have things that you can look up to, say I dealt with. 50 people last year out of the 5025 were men. For the men who are between the ages of this and this, the women were between the ages of that and that or well, OK, maybe it doesn't have to be that academic. You know that breaking down the demographic to be that academic.

But The thing is, by the time you look at your WhatsApp messages, you'll be able to get the sense that, oh, OK, it looks like in the last year I've been doing business with certain kinds of people. I've been dealing with guys that are like this or ladies that are like that, or people who work in this kind of organization or people who believe these kind of things or like these certain kinds of things. So looking at your trading history is a good way to figure out who is part of your ICP,

your ideal audience, the right people that you're supposed to be running after. Then customer feedback is also a good way to figure out who your ideal audience is. And I can testify to that because in my business consulting activities, I didn't even know who my ICP was until one day somebody told me like, oh, you're really good with this SME thing, blah, blah, blah, and on and on and on. And the thing just stuck in my head because the person said specifically SM ES.

And that was the beginning of me realizing that, OK, actually the best time, the most fruitful time that I spend with folks, consulting for folks, those people happen to be SM ES small and medium scale. So even though I want to help people who are just fresh and starting out, it turns out that my air of specialty, the most fun, I have, the most fruitful engagements, not just for me as a consultant, but for the other person, turns out to be the people who are in the SME space,

not necessarily people who are fresh and just starting. But of course, I have a soft spot for you guys, those of you who you haven't even figured out what it is you want to do yet. So I give my contact details at the end of every episode, reach out, shoot me a message. You know, if I have some downtime and I can help, I can help explore a couple of ideas with you guys. So having conversations with the customers that you already have,

getting feedback from them about what you do best, what you could have done better, things you ought to improve, things like that will give you ideas about who your ideal audience is. And then of course, you can sit down, you can brainstorm, do some ideation, use chargeability. You know, you type in, I am a Carpenter starting out my carpentry practice in the lorry. I specialized in modern, Modern furniture of the UK style, blah,

blah, blah. I'm thinking of starting into going into the business and finding people within the social and so income range. Who do you think I should be running after? Yeah. And then you send. ChatGPT is going to give you a couple of suggestions. Some of the things that you put out will make no sense. Ignore the things that don't make sense. But then you're going to say a couple of things that make sense, the ones that make sense.

Take it, apply it, run with it. If it works out well, then you now know, OK, I guess this class of people should be my ICP after all. Because you might be thinking that. OK, I'm entering into this carpentry business. It's usually women who pay attention to styling and decor in the house. So I should be chasing women who work in the corporate space, maybe Zenith Bank, and you start chasing them. But then you might find out that your best customers might be politicians, maybe local government chairman who have plenty of money and blah blah,

blah. The point I'm trying to make is that you never know. You might think it might be female banking executives that will be where your daily bread will come from. But then when you enter into the field, you find out that your daily bread actually is coming from local government chairman and traditional chiefs. So just ideate, brainstorm, go out into the market, get some feedback, take those lessons learnt and then you have all the information that you need to chase after people and only people who are your ideal customer, ideal customer base,

your ideal customer audience. And like I said, if you start off chasing the right people from the beginning, the chances are that you're going to get sweet conversions in the process and more money at the end. The chances of that goes up. So that's all for today. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140 and the country code is +234. For those of you who are not Nigerian, then connect with me on LinkedIn.

My name is Tavish Hema Ayede, I'm the host of the show. You can confirm the spelling of my name from the link where you're currently listening to this episode, and you'll also be able to see my e-mail address. For those of you who are e-mail junkies, you only prefer to reach out to people through e-mail. So thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys tomorrow where we should discuss how to calculate the sales conversion rate and then we'll see if we can delve into two or three other tips about how to boost your conversions.