The Problem With One Stop Shops
Trying to be everything to everyone rarely works in home services. When your company offers pest control, lawn care, crawl space restoration, and mold removal all at once, you might think you're maximizing opportunities—but you could be creating confusion and mistrust instead. Here's why narrowing your focus matters and how to identify who you should really be serving.
The Problem with Being a "Fusion" Company
We all know those companies—the "fusion" companies that try to be multiple things. They try to do lawn care, pest control, crawl space restoration, mold removal, and a variety of other things. For some companies, it works (Impressive! It's not easy to be good at so many different things!) Generally speaking, this is how being a fusion company can create confusion and mistrust between your customers and staff:
Two Major Challenges:
- Customers: While it's convenient that your company is a one-stop shop for all their home maintenance needs, customers are wary of companies that offer so many different services because they know an upsell is coming. They also know that you have your hand in a million different pots, so how can they trust you to be an expert in the service they are requesting?
- Staff: By trying to appeal to so many markets, your sales and marketing team has its work cut out for it. Trying to do too much makes it hard for your sales and marketing team to create effective, relevant messaging efficiently.
The best way to avoid these issues is to define your ideal customer clearly. In Donnie Shelton's book, Grow! IMS, he states, "Before spending a single dime on marketing, take the time to critically think through who you want to sell to and what you want to sell them. Doing this will make all your future decisions about the direction of your company and your marketing more straightforward."
4 Steps to Establish Your Ideal Customer
So, how do you establish your ideal customer?
- Analyze Your Market: It doesn't make sense to offer pest control packages starting at $200 a month when your location has a median income of $35,000. It's essential to be realistic when you're determining your target market. If your services rely heavily on location and income, consider how many people are in your service area and how many of them can afford your services.
- Analyze Demographics: When you think about your ideal customer, what are their age, gender, marital status, income, and education level?
- Analyze Psychographics: What does your ideal customer like to do for fun? What do they value? What are they interested in?
- Create a Buyer's Persona: Creating a buyer's persona is a great way to dive deeper into your target market. It puts the information you've already collected and your existing customer information into a semi-fictional character. By creating 3-4 fictional buyers, you can start to think more in depth about your customers—like what are some common hesitations they have about your service, or what are some of their goals, or what motivates them? (Get your free Buyer's Persona Template from our eBook, "How Do Customers Buy Pest Control?")
The Benefits of Understanding Your Ideal Customer
Taking this data into consideration will help you create appropriate pricing, marketing materials, and sales calls, and ultimately make you more relatable and memorable to your potential customers.
Understanding your ideal customer will help you understand how and why your customers purchase your product or service. Our new eBook, "How Do Customers Buy Pest Control?" takes you inside the mind of a pest control customer and walks you through every step of their purchasing decisions.
Ready to define your ideal customer? Download our free eBook today to access our Buyer's Persona Template and insights into how pest control customers make purchasing decisions.
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