Ep 137: Stop Chasing Bad Leads and Start Building a Business You Love | Guest Host: Sweta Govani

Ever feel like you're stuck in an endless cycle of sales calls, custom proposals, and clients who just aren't quite right for your business? This powerful episode tackles the question every service provider eventually faces: "How do I figure out who's the perfect customer for my business?"

Sweta Govani shares her journey from exhausting sales processes to a streamlined business where clients often purchase without a single call. The secret? Identifying the exact right customer segment for your unique skills and offers. Through her "Dream Project Method," Sweta reveals how one small $1,500 project became the foundation for her entire business model—and how you can use the same approach to transform yours.

At the heart of this strategy is a three-part framework for articulating your niche: defining who you serve and what problems you solve, clarifying your solution and how it works, and establishing why clients should choose you over their status quo. But the most powerful insight comes from Sweta's approach to discovering your ideal customer by analyzing past projects where you operated in your "zone of genius and happiness."

This isn't about randomly "niching down" or following someone else's blueprint. It's about building a business that genuinely excites you while attracting clients who value your specific expertise. Whether you're just starting out or looking to pivot an established business, this episode provides concrete steps to move from "anyone with a wallet" to "exactly the right people who light me up."

Ready to stop chasing bad-fit leads and start building a business on your terms? Listen now, and discover how getting specific about your ideal customer can be the most liberating business decision you'll ever make. Connect with Sweta on LinkedIn to continue the conversation!

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Chapters

• 1:34 Welcome to Tiny Marketing
• 1:57 Episode Format Change Explanation
• 3:26 Introduction to Finding Your Right Customer
• 6:07 Sweta's Business Journey
• 8:10 From Time-for-Money to Productized Offers
• 14:57 The Three-Part Niche Framework
• 19:07 The Dream Project Method
• 24:00 Mapping Out Your Ideal Customer
• 27:20 Closing Thoughts and Invitation

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:47

Welcome to Tiny Marketing. This is Sarah Noelle Block, and this is a podcast that helps B2B service businesses do more with less. Learn lean, actionable, organic marketing strategies you can implement today. No fluff, just powerful growth tactics that work. Ready to scale smarter? Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with Tiny Marketing.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Hello, beauties, it is Sarah Noelle Block, the host of the tiny marketing show, and this is episode 137. It's going to look a little bit different today because on Monday I interviewed my guest expert of the week, sweta Govani, and the recording went awry. We were completely unsynced where we were talking over each other. So we ended up having a phone conversation where she told me all about her take on how to decide who the perfect, right fit customer is for your business when you're just starting out or you're pivoting. So I loved everything she had to say and I had a little special request and it's nothing I've ever asked any other expert to do on this show and I said this is just too brilliant.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Would you mind doing a solo episode for tiny marketing and I'll share your insights, you record it on your own and we'll drop it on the show. So that's what we're doing today. So this is a solo episode by Sweta Govani and I think you're going to love it, so please let me know what you think of this format, which is a little bit different. On Spotify or directly on Buzzsprout, you can leave comments, so I'd love to hear from you, or you can always just reply to my emails. Love you, enjoy.

Speaker 2: 2:39

Hello, all right. So today we are going to talk about how can I, as a solopreneur, figure out who the right customer is for my business? This is one of the most common questions that I get from my peers who are starting businesses a few years behind me, or maybe they're actually already a couple of years into their business and they're kind of figuring out okay, I've been servicing a lot of different clients, what do I do now? How do I really figure out the right fit customer for my business? So that's what we're going to talk about. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story. I started my own business three years ago and I've transitioned from honestly getting really bad fit referrals, nonstop proposals, contracts, sales calls to getting to a point where I have a product ladder, multiple different offers. I'm mostly selling honestly just through my LinkedIn content and through the DMs or emails, and I'm at a point where, if I do a sales call, it's going to be because there's very specific questions that someone has and we're just making a go-no-go decision really quickly. And that has been transformative for my business but also, frankly, for my life, because didn't we all get into business so that we can actually have the luxury of using our time the way that we'd like, and so this has been a total game changer for me and I'm excited to share with you all the feedback that I used in order to land here, and hopefully this will help those of you who are a few steps behind me and really figuring out who the right customer is for your audience, for your business.

Speaker 2: 4:20

So let me tell you a little bit about myself. My business is called Happy Paying Customers, and that's really honestly quite descriptive. This is what I do. I help founders who are at the earliest stages of their business really validate and do with their business by actually getting paying customers so that they can figure out if they are building the right business and then get on the right path to a million or other meaningful milestone that they are looking to achieve revenue-wise, and then, of course, doing it on their terms for the life perspective. And I specifically partner with founders who are self-identifying themselves as underestimated. That's something that I self-identify as I get really excited about supporting others who are underestimated and are building serious multimillion dollar businesses. So this is who I am.

Speaker 2: 5:21

My name is Swetha Gavani and just a couple of things about me I'll share about my track record so you know a little bit about my background is that I started my business after 15 years doing marketing. So that's really what my background is in mostly for early stage tech startups, and I've helped many, many of the businesses that I have worked with across. Many of them generate more than $82 million in revenue. This number's changed a little bit, but now I'm at about 85, 86 or so founders that I've worked with in my business in one way or another through one of my offers to really work on all the things that I talked about at the earliest stages of figuring out their business, and I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go, as just an example for you all to follow along on. And my favorite thing to do in my free time is to travel, and so this is from one of the recent trips with my hubby to Austria, and this is just some of the founders that I have worked with.

Speaker 2: 6:24

So, like I said, you know, big thing for me was when I started my business, I was introducing myself and really honestly focusing. What I thought was focused enough was as a marketing consultant for early stage tech startups and I really honestly, you know, started to promote myself and put myself out there, I kept getting all these reactions like, oh, that's interesting. And in practice I would get referrals from well-meaning people that were not quite a good fit for my business. And when I started to go through the sales process, I was sitting there creating custom proposals all the time and I was going through kind of that normal consulting sales process. You go through where you have a call, you try to scope it out, you send them a proposal and then you follow up and then some percentage of them close. But really you're spending so much time in that sales process. I was just burnt out by that.

Speaker 2: 7:24

It's not why I started my business. I don't have a sales background. I don't really enjoy doing sales even though I do sales as more of a problem-solving type of angle and I'm really trying to be as helpful in those sales calls rather than being salesy. Even then it just felt like my business. There was no predictability. I didn't know which of those proposals were really going to close. I was just getting exhausted by it. So if that resonates with you, then you're asking the right question. So much of the answer for that really came from me, from really figuring out who's the right customer that I should even be focusing on. And again, like I said, what that resulted in for me was being able to close really great fit deals from just one sales call or no sales call at all, and this number is actually from a while ago. I think my ratio has flipped a lot. I just haven't had time to run the numbers, so I kept this ratio from a while ago. It's honestly. Now I'm getting more and more deals closed without even ever having to jump on calls, and for me personally, that's a win. That might not be your why. Your why might be something else, and that's really important. It's important for you to figure that out, but what I'm about to share should hopefully work for you, no matter what.

Speaker 2: 8:41

Another one of my whys and I'll share this with you all this is a framework. I did not create this. This is a resource that was created by Nathan Berry, who is the creator, founder, of ConvertKit, which is now Kit. It's the email platform that you might be familiar with has now more features than just email. It has now more features than just email, but this is sort of this ladder of wealth that he had created, and the concept behind this is, for me personally, what really resonated was I was really caught.

Speaker 2: 9:21

You know, one of the things that I was looking for was how do I go from consulting really feeling like it's just a part-time job to really turning it into a real business. That was really a big motivation for me, is I really wanted to think about how can I start turning this into a real business? And the latter of all you know what he really talks about is you start off with, you know, kind of trading time for money and that's where you have a salary job. And honestly, that's kind of what consulting felt like for me when I got started. He says the next step is you own your own services business. Personally, I still feel like, depending on how you structure it, it still kind of feels like you're trading time for money, and that just didn't work for me. And there are other. There are ways to transition it so that it doesn't feel that way, but I still think it felt that way for the way that I was headed.

Speaker 2: 11:05

I was doing kind of hourly contracts, project-based scopes, and then it gets to a point where you can start productizing your offers and for me that was a big unlock. I felt like if I could get really clear on who it is that I'm solving what problem for that, picking that right customer segment I could start productizing my offers. So they kind of went hand in hand, if I'm being honest. And so that's where I actually transitioned away from doing kind of fractional CMO services, for example, to moving into something that I call the go to market booster, which is basically my high touch kind of coaching, strategic advisory service, where it's a flat rate subscription that founders sign up for and we're meeting once a week or once every other week and it's just still kind of sounds like trading time for money, except that it's not because it's dramatically more and the founders are not really keeping tabs of hours and it's just a much better offer.

Speaker 2: 12:07

But what's even better that this allowed me to do was to create other offers as well. So that's my flagship kind of high touch, high ticket offer. But then I also have other offers that are definitely not time for money, where I have a membership community that I'm helping, you know, this kind of specific type of founders that I work with. And then I also have courses that I'm starting to release as well. I just released one officially that I'm starting to promote, that had been soft launching for a while, so I already have people who bought it and have great reviews from that, and then I'm transitioning now over to other types that are also going to be for other audiences as well.

Speaker 2: 12:51

And so, when you really think about what enabled me to do that, it honestly just came down to how do I pick that first right, customer segment, right. So I wanted to share with you all a specific kind of framework that I use that really helped me, right? So one of the big things here is one of the big things that was really helpful for me was thinking about three main aspects of articulating your niche. Now, niche is a term that honestly gets a bad rap. Everybody thinks niching means niching down. I don't mean that by niche. I just mean someone else should be able to understand very clearly what your business is and when they should be thinking about you. What are the situations in which they should be referring business to you? Or, if it's your target audience, they should be able to see themselves and be thinking, oh, my God, you're reading my mind, yes, yes, yes, this is for me right.

Speaker 2: 13:51

So that's what I mean by articulating your niche and there are kind of three main components. That honestly kind of applies to every business in the world, but we'll talk about specifically for a consulting business how I think about it, right? So one is who. So the who is whom do you solve what problem for? Second is the what, which is what is your solution for that problem and how does it work. And then the third is why you? So why should they pick you over their status quo? And if you listen carefully, there's actually six components to it. Each of these components actually has two components. So under who, you have the whom, which is actually the target audience that you're going after. The second is the problem that you're solving for them, the what is kind of thinking about okay, well, what is your solution for them and how does it really work, right? So those are the two parts, the what and the how, and then the why. You has two components again, which is what is kind of your key differentiator, why are they picking you? But that differentiator doesn't really mean anything on its own if you're not able to articulate what their status quo is right. So what is it that they're currently using, what have they already tried and why is your solution better than them and, if you think about it, this is something that can apply to any business in the world.

Speaker 2: 15:10

But I'll kind of tell you some of the ways that I thought about it. For my business that was really helpful and I kind of think about it. Wait, if you're, depending on where you are in your journey, I would say there are kind of three main steps that you can follow, but the way that you apply them would vary. So one would be you discover your niche right. So you're kind of really thinking about what is that niche that would be a good fit for you, and I'll give you some prompts to think about.

Speaker 2: 15:30

Then the second is you kind of try to articulate it, you put it down on paper and then the third step, which I love, which I think most people skip, is microtesting it, figuring out ways in which you can microtest it. We don't have enough time today to do all of it. So for micro-testing, what I'll just leave it with and say is you're finding really small ways that you can actually test it. So if you have outreach that you're doing as your main channel, then that might be one way where you can micro test it, by depending on, by kind of tweaking whom you reach out to or what you say to them, right? Or if you're doing, you know, hanging out in different communities, maybe you have a different offer that you put up, put in front of them, or you try to change the way that you present something at a presentation that you already have coming up right. You're kind of doing these little things to figure out how, whether you're on the right path, right. So discovering your niche, I would say, for me, has a couple of components and one thing I would say overall that it comes down to and if you're watching the video you'll see a list of questions that I have here, but I'll just kind of name a couple of things that I think are important Ultimately, it comes down to we're building a business, we're entrepreneurs because we want to actually build a business.

Speaker 2: 16:44

We don't want to do a nine to five, we want to do it on our own terms. So I like to think of it as anything else in the world. We should always start off with what are my parameters, what is the type of business that I'm trying to build and what does that actually look like? What is my vision for success for my own business. This could be the number of hours that you're working per week. This could be the type of work that you're doing during those hours. This could be, you know, the type of business that you're building.

Speaker 2: 17:12

You know, like I said, for me this is where I think it's important. You know, for me it was really important to not have a business where I'm just trading time for money. That might not be a big deal for you, right? You might not mind doing custom proposals. You might be in an industry where that is the norm and you have to do that, right? So there are different ways to think about it, but for me, those are the things that matter. So, really, what matters to you may not be the same that matters to me, and that's fine. We can have different things that we care about, but it's important to give yourself time to think about what are all the things that you care about. And, of course, we have to kind of think about the fact that when we're building our business, we may have to do things a little bit differently. I, of course, had to do that as well. When I got started, I took on some clients that maybe weren't a great fit, because, frankly, I don't even know they weren't a great fit. Or I took on projects that ended up being absolute no-goes for me now that maybe I didn't know, or maybe you know what, to be honest, I needed to do, what I needed to do when I started my business. So think about kind of what your ultimate vision is and then what you might be able to kind of tolerate for now, if you have to.

Speaker 2: 18:17

The second part and this is one of my favorite ways to kind of figure out the right customer segment to go after is to try to pick one specific dream project and I say one. You could do maybe three, but I really would encourage you to think of your dream dream project. Now, if you're just getting started, this could be the dream project that you had at a you know last company that you worked at. It could be actually the project that you had at your first job out of college and you kind of pivoted a bunch along the way, but you still think fondly of that project. It could be, you know, maybe a project that you didn't even get paid for. Maybe you did something pro bono, maybe, you know maybe, a project that you didn't even get paid for Maybe you did something pro bono. Maybe you know, and nobody knows, that it's about you being able to articulate that dream project and really thinking about okay, what was going on with that project that was really rewarding for me. What about? It felt like it was truly in my zone of genius and happiness, right? Why did I really find joy in that? What were some positive reactions that I received about that project kind of surprised me. A really good hint I would say for this is you might have received compliments, and you must have. You might have thought I can't believe they think this is something good. It came so naturally to me, right? That's a really good sign.

Speaker 2: 19:36

What was the exact work that you did? What were the parts that you loved? What were the parts that you would avoid if you could right, and then start digging into whom did you work on those projects for right? Who was the main point of contact? What was the problem you were solving? So if you go back to that kind of formula, you're kind of using this as a way to think back to that. Who part right? This is the what. Right this is the what. The project is the what. But you kind of use this from your own personal experience to figure out the who.

Speaker 2: 20:11

So in my case, by the time I did this exercise full disclosure I already have a few customers and I sat down and there was one project that stood out to me. I absolutely adored working with that founder. She was awesome, had a great attitude, really was new to marketing, scared of it, was a product manager, so really, really smart, and there were just all these characteristics about her that started standing out to me. There were all these problem statements that started standing out to me. I would literally be on a call with her just casually giving her tips, and I could see her light up right, she was learning, she was applying it, she knew how to get it done. I could just see the transformation and honestly, it was a tiny project. I think I made maybe $1,000, $1,500, something like that. I've actually forgotten now because it's at the beginning of my business. That became the seed for my entire business. I was helping her validate her idea and I was helping her figure out her early customers. That's literally the entire premise for my business today.

Speaker 2: 21:22

I promise it can be so powerful when you really think about that one little project that maybe you didn't even make a lot of money through, but that you feel was truly in your zone of genius and happiness. This is my favorite way to figure out who to focus on and how to really find that early customers or if you've actually, like me, already have customers find what you really want to design more of your business around so that you can have a business that, honestly, is feeling very, very fulfilling to you. So this is what I'll leave you with. The best advice I have for you is try to pick that one project and try to really think about how can I replicate this, how can I get many more of this type of project for this type of customer? That would be the best way to think about it. And, if you wanted some tips on kind of how to think about it, a couple of things that you can start mapping out.

Speaker 2: 22:13

When you think about the, who would be thinking about things like what is the maturity of their business? What stage are they at? You could think about their revenue, the number of employees they have, whether they've raised around recently. You could think about the categories. So are they building certain types of businesses? Do they have certain types of mission? Do they have certain types of kind of values that align with you. What about certain types of business models? What about a specific, you know, niche, specific characteristics, like do they have certain types of certifications? Do they have certain types of go-to-market motions? Do they, you know, tend to be in a specific subsector within your industry?

Speaker 2: 22:53

Right, start to really think about these really tangible ways that you can think about the type of business and the problem statement that that business would be facing and really think about separately, who's going to be that point of contact that you'll be working with, who actually personally has the skin in the game to solve that problem? Right, we're not talking about really kind of philosophical issues, right? We're talking about a real person with real problems that they're trying to solve, because solving that is going to make their life better, it's going to make their business better. Right, it's going to really be the person who's going to have a reason to hire you and work with you. So that might be things like demographics. That might be because the demographics might be in my case, right was because that's what I care about, it's aligned with my mission. But demographics may not matter to you and that's okay. It might be their title or their seniority level. It could be because the title and seniority actually is tied to the problem you're trying to solve and they're the person who's in charge of solving that problem, right? It could be that they're part of a specific team or business unit that generally tends to face this type of problems, right?

Speaker 2: 24:07

So really think kind of holistically about the type of company and the right person that you will be solving it for. A lot of times, I see people think of one or the other and it just doesn't work. You need both. We need real humans at a business and you need to get specific about that, and you need to have a real type of business that you're focusing on.

Speaker 2: 24:29

Now this is part of a much larger framework that I use to think about it, with the what and the why and then microtesting. We don't have time to get into it, but I hope that this is helpful for you in really starting to think about, for the type of projects that you want to be building your business around, that you want to be doing many, many more of who are the right type of people for that type of work. So really think about all of this holistically together and try to make all those puzzle pieces fit so you can build a business where you're operating in your zone of genius and happiness and making meaningful money doing that. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just mention this presentation, this talk, so that I know to accept and I'll be happy to help if I can.

Speaker 1: 25:36

You love all things, tiny marketing, so that I know to accept and I'll see you over in the club.