Joe Troyer 0:35
So next up is your ideal prospects. How many of you guys I'm curious, have really thought through and said, Here's who I'm doing business with and who's here's who I'm not. And I mean, past just like a niche. I mean, first first step is a niche. Okay, first step is a niche. And for me, if you would ask me years ago, like what do I think about when it comes to niche qualification? Or? Or what do I like in a niche?
For me, I would say that I don't want to chase people. I've always said that. So like, for me, I'm not such a fan of of like white collar types of verticals, I'd rather go after blue collar. I would still say that today. But I would push that even further and say, whoever it is that I'm working with, I have to like, right, I have to like the general type of person that we're gonna sell. And that needs to be the criteria.
If I think the guy's the biggest asshole ever, right? Like the rule is don't onboard him. And I don't want to do business with him, right? Like, I would 100% have a no asshole policy. And I almost just said hassle pay, but what else can can we deem necessary? Right? So we can say that they're at least a $1 million business. And depending on the vertical that you're going after, understand that a million is kind of a very blanketed statement.
That's kind of bullshit. Right? Like, think about like a florist doing a million dollars. And what that would take versus a roofing company doing a million dollars, obviously, the average ticket is night and day different. Like, if you're a roofing company, and you're not doing a million dollars, like something's wrong.
Like you just started the business yesterday. Okay, so a million dollars could be a good thing to talk about. But I think that you'll find in your specific niche, I think that you'll find better criteria. So if you're going after, like, let's say you're going after insurance agents, you're going to want to make sure that they have at least you know, five agents or if you're going after a dentist, you know, it's a practice that has at least three dentists, right?
If you're going after a roofing company, they have at least you know, two crews, and they have at least 10 sales guys. Okay. And the other criteria that I would make in that circumstance is that they're not storm chasing, right? Storm chasers aren't set up to take inbound phone calls, and then convert them into paid customers, okay, their business is set up to a storm happens, they get on the road, they don't care how far they have to drive, it could be a day drive, it could be five days drive, and then they go canvass the entire neighborhoods that were messed up by the store, like door to door, that's their business model.
Okay, so obviously, that's not going to work with our services and what we can offer somebody, so we want to come up with our criteria. So it could be a million dollar business, it could be X amount of technicians, it could be what else X amount of dentists, okay, it could be that they have a marketing director or somebody that runs their marketing. Okay, that could be important to you.
Okay, so we want to build out this ideal prospect pool. And the reason that I say this is because as we keep building and stacking and layering different components in here, in my experience, if you're not very, very careful, you'll end up prospecting at the end to people that you never would want to do business with, because it just fit your criteria.
And long term, I don't think that there's anything more important than happiness when it comes to entrepreneurship or just life in general. I think that's the most important thing, right? Like, if you hate waking up and going into the office every day or working every day, what do you think your results are gonna be? Like? Like, you might be able to deal with it for a certain amount of time, but then you're gonna just frickin hate life. Yeah. So, like, at the end of the day.
Joe Troyer 4:36
One thing that I like to talk about when it comes to ideal prospects is that like, I don't want to be the Savior. And what I mean by that is that they're not relying on our relationship, meaning business owner or owners and I in my agency, to pull them out of a horrible situation, or they're going to have huge ramifications inside their business. How many of you guys I'm curious, that's taken on a deal like that, how did that turn out?
Long term? I'm curious. Did that work out in your favor? Or did it blow up in your face? Every single time I've ever done that guys is blown up in my face every single time. I'm not going to be the Savior. Right? At the end of the day, it's way too much stress, way too much stress. It's horrible. Trust me when I say you really don't want that feeling. Alright, so not the savior. And I would also put in here, some type of characteristics that they're spending money on advertising, okay.
And it sounds silly, right? But if they have no expectations in terms of advertising, and they have no advertising that's working, how are you as a marketer supposed to make it better and do your job? Right? Like your job is not to help them figure out what's lacking? When they get a meeting with a prospect and they go pitch their services, if they don't have that figured out. And you just pour gas on the marketing and get them more phone calls and get them more meetings?
Is that going to result in them getting more business and being able to see a return on investment from what you help them with? Of course not. Right, so let's not be naive, if they don't have a practice of turning a prospect into a customer and have that proven specifically with cold traffic run the other way. So even pass spent the money on advertising, I would say converting cold traffic. Alright, fantastic. Good stuff.
