“Tell Me About Your Dog!”

Wisdom Walks 2

Sample

I recently learned from Grant Leboff of Sticky Marketing, that we need to understand not only the demographics but also the psychographics and habits of our preferred clients. From reviewing my top members and mentoring clients, I realise that they all like to come for a Wisdom Walk for their 1:1 sessions with me. And they all have a dog! Mine is called Oliver; he is a Staffy. So, tell me about yours!

Full Body Blog

How to get noticed is a problem, especially on LinkedIn these days. At a recent meeting with Glenn Watkins group we had speaker, Grant Leboff, who is a Digital Marketing expert. Grant speaks globally on the subject of Marketing and how to build your brand presence.

The first key step is in segmentation, deciding which slice of the cake we are going to invest in and focus our efforts upon. Grant advocates going after the Smallest Viable Market which can deliver our growth targets and economic needs. This is very important to ensure that we don’t dilute our limited resources by going after a huge market that we cannot impress.

Having decided on this, there are then 3 levels to consider:

  • Demographics (Firmographics for companies)
  • Psychographics
  • Behavioural

As an Executive Coach, I am looking for Business leaders who are within my geographic area of East Anglia – this narrows it down a little. However, as I want diversity within my leadership group: age, gender and ethnicity and I cannot have any direct supplier/customer relationships within the membership, this leaves me quite a broad swathe of companies and people to approach.

I am able to look for sectors which may not yet be present in my membership. I don’t have any members in the Legal or Financial professional services at present, or in the Tech or Property sector, so these are areas I can pursue. So that is as far as the demographics may take me.

Now here is the interesting bit: what are the Psychographic Commonalities amongst my top 20% of members and clients? What do they have in common as preferences?

Having given this some thought, I came to realise that the interactions that I really enjoy – a pleasure which seems to be shared by my most progressive members, is going for a walk together as a way of doing our monthly 1:1 sessions. I have come to call these my Wisdom Walks since I turned 60!

However, there is yet another layer as we look to the next level – the Behavioural Characteristics of my clients. What I realise is that many of them are also really keen dog owners and enthusiasts. This is something I have in common with them, as our family favourite is Oliver: a 7 year old Staffy who loves the sofa more than walking but is my best early morning companion on my river walk along the Wensum. So, what I have concluded is that the best way for me to reach out to find new members and clients is to ask the question: “Tell me about your dog?”

In this way I am more likely to connect with like-minded individuals. Maybe this is too simple but it is already helping me to connect effectively with more people! I will report on the results over time.

So if you are reading this and wondering whether Leadership Coaching is right for you, the best thing to do is to reach out to me and tell me about your dog and we can go from there!

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