I recently held a Traffic Sales & Profit workshop in Atlanta, GA.  As we came close to the conclusion of the event, I asked an attendee to join me onstage.

She was struggling with clarity around some pieces of her business, just like many entrepreneurs do, so I started with a question.

The question I asked was, “who is your customer?”

What I’ve found to be the biggest roadblock, for most entrepreneurs having trouble with sales, is they don’t know who they are selling to.

Another problem is that they don’t know what they don’t know. 

And often times, if they don’t have someone further along the cycle than them, who can pull it out of them, they just repeat the same cycle until they eventually quit.

So over the next few minutes, I asked her questions like, who do you serve?

Who currently buys from you?

Who is your best customer?

What I found out in roughly 5 minutes of probing was that her best customers were multilevel marketing professionals who were stuck and needed help reaching the next level.

The problem was that her business, her lead magnets and her products didn’t speak directly to this person.

Next, her concern shifted to being able to serve mompreneurs, who she said were also her customers.

This was my advice to her and to you:

You need to be clear about who you’re speaking to.

The clearer you are, the better you will be at attracting the people who really need what you have to offer.

When you know exactly who you’re talking to, you can also do a better of job of tailoring your products and services to that person.

“When you’re trying to serve everyone, you’re really not serving anyone. Your business needs clarity!”

To those of you who have multiple desires and audiences that you’d like to pursue, that may be fine in the future.   But starting out, you need to focus on one thing at a time. Crush that one thing, then scale, grow and expand from there.

So let’s get started! If you don’t know how to figure out who your core customer is, here’s what you can do no matter what level you’re starting at:

1) Send a survey out to your current customer base. Ask them demographic data, interests and other questions specific to the product or service that you offer. SurveyMonkey is a good tool for this.

2) Ask your customers or potential customers why they purchased or why they didn’t purchase from you.

3) Examine your analytics (I love Google Analytics) to discover more about who the people are that visit your website.

4) Use Facebook Audience Insights. You can upload your email list into Facebook to create a custom audience. Then examine that audience to see all types of information including things like whether they own a home or rent, type of cars they drive, whether they use cash or credit and other great data.

5) Lastly and most importantly, if you’re already selling, figure out who your top customers are; the one’s who spend the most and most frequently. Research everything about them, then try to figure out how to get more customers just like them.