from an article by Jerry McLaughlin
What do a hospital operating room, a Top Chef kitchen, and a base camp at Mt. Everest have in common? Each workplace is filled with highly specialized tools that are designed to do one thing, and do it well.
Of course, most people have no need of most tools. Take ice axes, for example. I’m sure a well-made mountaineering ice axe is easy to carry, comfortable to hold, and indispensable on an icefall. But I’ve never found myself in a circumstance that could be improved by my deft employment of such a product.
So I don’t need an ice-axe-manufacturer’s offering, and most people don’t need yours. The lesson here is simple: It is not productive to educate someone about your tool if that person is unlikely to find herself in a situation where your offering could be of greater benefit to her than any available alternatives. Such misdirected efforts waste your time and hers. You can’t afford such distraction if you are serious about building your profits.
Instead, honestly ask yourself: “Who is the person and what is the circumstance in which my offering will solve the problem better than any alternative?” To win sales and profits, given any particular consumer need, your offering must provide the singular, superior solution to that need.
If you sell scissors, for example, you have a lot of competition. But if you distill your offering to just lefty scissors, all of a sudden you have a lot less competition—and your product is a lot more appealing to a certain set of people.
Focusing like this shrinks the available market. Only about 1 in every 10 people is left-handed. But the smaller market for lefty scissors is easier to identify, easier to market to, easier to win, and more profitable.
And yet, it’s a peculiarity of human nature that businesspeople cannot bring themselves to focus only on the lefties. We are wired to avoid loss more strongly than we are to pursue gain. And so we resist letting go of the vast potential market we can see in order to capture the smaller market we could dominate. But a better approach is to figure out who can benefit more from your offering than they can from any available alternative, and to narrow your offering to make it compelling to a clearly defined market subset.
