How To Choose The Right Market For Your Business

Now, have you heard of the term whale?

​It comes from the gambling industry in Vegas, where they mostly talk about hunting for whales. There’s a good book about that as well, called “A Whale Hunt in the Desert”. It’s a nonfiction book by a very famous casino host, who is in charge of handling whales and recruiting whales for casinos before they all became corporate.

Today, there is still whale management, but it’s not like it was before. I’m telling you all of this now because we’re going to talk about some of their principles: how to hunt, find, choose, and attract whales.

So, the first preliminary question to think about is to define what a whale is for you. It'll be a different definition for everyone – even between you and me.

Because, even if there are two dentists sitting side by side in a room, they might very well define what a whale is to them differently. It’s not just about the monetary value of the customer; it’s more about the kind of customer you want to deal with or not, though monetary value is still important.

Generally speaking, Vegas’ definition is that a whale is someone worth somewhere between five times and fifty times their average customer. That will count them as a whale, and obviously, they prefer those who are fifty times worth more than those who are worth five times more.

I, for example, am not a great influencer for the people I do business with locally because I hide out at home. I’m a hermit, and my friends are mostly distanced and all over the country.

So, for the local property and casualty insurance guy who has me as a client, I’m not very useful to him in this category because I’m not a good source of referrals. If he was setting out to get somebody, he might as well try and get someone he could multiply.

And so, the first thing to understand about all this is very few business people ever give this any thought.

For most people, their approach to customers is anybody they can get.

Furthermore, they make no differential adjustments once they get a buyer for the first time – they don’t have five questions to ask them to get data that’ll tell them this is a potential whale. Even people that collect data, like when you go to a really nice restaurant for the first time, and you’re asked for your information to get put on a list.

That’s great and all, no one is going to sit and consider which ones are the whales, or which customers are going to be more valuable than others. The information is right there, and yet people hardly ever bother to take those customer names and Google them, or to search them up on Facebook and see what you might be able to determine in helping you find a whale.

So the first thing is to start thinking in these terms. That there is a differential customer value, and not all customers are the same. Some are more valuable to you than others, and it’s important for you to have a definition of what makes a really valuable customer for you.

For example, we know that in businesses that sell to the parent for use by the child, that automatically means that a household with three kids is more valuable than a household with just one.

All three of those kids are going to have the same problem and all three of them are going to need the same product at some point during their lives. And so one of the things we want to know every time we get a new customer is how many kids they’ve got because we’ll spend more money communicating with the ones that have three or more.

Now, hardly anyone goes through this process besides true core direct marketers. So I’ll take you through a few examples of how people in different businesses might determine a whale.

For financial advisors, it’s often the amount of investable assets they have, and that is not necessarily predicted by current income because someone could have stopped their income earning years but have a great deal of net worth.

It’s a conservative mentality for most advisors because most advisors do conservative things with a 55 to 75-year-old person’s money. And so they want them to have a conservative mentality, which is revealed in one way when they have a paid-off house.

So, you’ve got to think it through in your business category.

Who might be the whales, what might be a whale for you, and what criteria do you want to establish for the whale you want to now deliberately catch.

Just as an example, I’ll tell you mine. For my clients – not Magnetic Marketing members, but clients, I need someone who will invest upwards of $75,000 on a project.

That in itself rules out a whole lot of people, and it’s not just because they’re cheapskates. It’s just that the size and scope of their opportunity don’t warrant spending that kind of money. They’re not wrong at all, but they’re wrong for me.

My best client is someone with a sufficient size, scope, and growth potential of their opportunity.

So, one way or another, they can give me the compensation I want, and there’s a likelihood of a continued relationship. They have to be reasonably intelligent and capable. They have to be respectful, well-behaved, and low-maintenance.

A high-maintenance client is no good for me, so they have to show evidence that they can be trained to be high maintenance with everyone else if they want to, but be low maintenance with Dan. Otherwise, it’s not going to work. They have to be a leader or a leader in the making in a field so they’re useful to me in catching another whale.

I don’t necessarily need a multiplier effect anymore, but I’d like to have a duplication effect. I’d like the probability that one will give me another one.

A whale for us is someone who, in their lifetime with us, can and will spend $100,000 or more. We (jokingly) call that the $100,000 club and there are behavioral characteristics of those people. They own and operate one or more businesses that are good vehicles to apply our methods. For us, preferably, they’re an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur in the making.

One is small pond fishing; that’s where you make a hit list and you go after them. Second is wide net fishing, where you create an environment where whales rise up out of the water, knock all the minnows out of the way, and swim to you.

The last is wide net fishing with lead generation rather than place strategy, in which whale bait is advertised and they come to you. Those are the only three ways that you’re going to get whales, and we’ll talk about each one.

1. Small Pond Fishing

​Small pond fishing is where you build, by some means, a direct hit list. It might have fifty people on it, it might have five hundred people, or it might have five thousand – but what matters is that you have literally hand-picked them. They are a whale if you can get them.

If you’re familiar with David Ogolvy, then you probably know the story of how he made a list of his 100 dream clients. Then, he made a great priority out of trying everything he knew how to do to bring himself the attention of those 100 clients.

He knew exactly who he wanted to get, and he got at least 38 of them. And so, that’s a hit list.

​2. Net Fishing

The second way is net fishing with place strategy.

The important thing to know about whales is that they are often in environments where they don’t necessarily belong, but it’s the only ocean they found. It’s okay if there are thousands of minnows and only two whales – as long as we don’t kill ourselves fighting the whales, then we’re in a place where they can find us.

I used to be in the cassette business a lifetime ago, producing for speakers. We produced products for probably two-thirds of the speakers in the country, so we would go to the trade show, the National Speakers Association show, wherein there would be hundreds of minnows.

Good customers for someone else, but not for us. We were looking for a different guy, and, in the very first year, they were there.

A guy came up to our booth, gave us his American Express card, and said, “Write up an order for everything you sell.”

His name was Dr. Peter Fernandez, a practice management guy in the chiropractic industry, and he was a whale. He wound up being a terrific client for us, and for me personally. I don’t know if I could have gotten him had I done anything differently.

And so, if you remember from my “NO B.S Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs” book (which you can find by clicking on the link), there are three wealth magnets and they are this: be somebody, be somewhere, and do something so that a whale can find you.

​3. Fishing With Lead Generation

Lastly, the third way we can get them is wide net fishing with lead generation.

Here, we advertise whale bait – and this is where pretty much everyone, regardless of the business they’re in, becomes an info marketer. It is a mistake not to.

However, for an approach like this to work you need to take a little step instead of a bridge too far. You don’t want your ad to come off too strong, like if you’re asking your whales to immediately take a bunch of steps to get to your product.

You want to have a second offer that essentially says if you’re not ready for that, but this got your attention and you’re curious, here’s how you can check us out without commitment – you can get our free CD, our free DVD, look at a free webinar, get a free report, a book, and so on.

Sometimes you’d be better off making an entire ad about that, and it’s easy-to-get whale bait rather than moving people to them. They ought to have at least two reasons to respond, not one.

Most, but not all whale bait is information. It allows someone to get information without having to engage a salesperson.

Now, if you’re interested in more about how to choose and capture the right market for your business then please consider joining us at the Diamond Membership, where you’ll receive direct access to the top 1% of online business owners and marketers making things happen, weekly webinars, Q&As, and the like.