Do I need to niche down, or do I just need to say it better?
Niching down comes first and better wording comes second, because the words have nothing to attach to until you've picked the client. When a consultant can't land her message after weeks of trying, the client list underneath it is almost always the reason.
The tell is that the message stays true and stays empty. That happens when it has to cover four kinds of client at once, and a sentence built to fit all four fits none of them.
Three questions sort out which problem you have:
- Can you name the one client type you want more of, in a sentence, without hedging?
- Do the last five people who hired you have anything in common beyond needing help?
- When you describe your work, do people ask a follow-up question, or do they change the subject?
And a warning about the answer you're most likely to give me, because none of these is a niche:
- Women business owners is not a niche.
- Nonprofits are not a niche.
- Leaders are not a niche.
A leader of two people and a leader of two hundred have different problems and different budgets, so pick which one you mean. Choosing an ideal client gets specific.
Why does being a generalist make me harder to hire?
Being a generalist makes you harder to hire because the person deciding has to work out where you fit before they can consider you, and almost nobody does that work on your behalf. They're busy. A description they can't place gets set aside, and being set aside looks identical to being rejected from where you're standing.
What the research on spanning categories found
Greta Hsu studied 949 US films released between 2000 and 2003 and found that films spanning more genres were rated lower by professional critics and by ordinary viewers alike. Her explanation is the part worth borrowing: multi-genre films are harder for audiences to make sense of, so they fit fewer people's tastes and appeal to fewer of them. She calls the underlying trade-off the principle of allocation.
Films are not consulting. The mechanism carries anyway, because it describes how the person deciding reads what's in front of them. Two doctors make it obvious. Both work at the same top hospital. One is in internal medicine and knows everything about the body; one is a cardiologist. If your mother has heart palpitations, you call the cardiologist, and you don't think about it for even a second.
Isn't my range the reason clients hire me?
Your range is real, and it's rarely the reason someone calls you first, because a client goes looking for help with one problem they've already named. Range is what keeps them once you're in the room. It's a poor thing to lead with, because it asks a busy person to work out which part of you they need.
Watch what happens when the client gets specific. My own before and after:
| The broad version | The specific version |
|---|
| You want more clients | You want to work with more of the right clients, not simply the ones who have found you so far |
| You feel uncomfortable marketing | Up to now you've gotten clients through referrals and word of mouth, and you know you should be doing something more proactive, but what |
| You want to make more money | You want to make more money, and you don't want to sacrifice yourself to get there |
The left column could be about almost any woman running a consulting business. The right column names one situation, and the woman in it recognizes herself.
There's a pricing consequence. If you try to be everything to everyone, you'll be nothing to no one, and you'll end up selling tactics. Selling tactics puts you in a bidding contest, and pricing the value of the work to your client is nearly impossible when nobody can tell what problem you solve.
What changes when I finally pick one type of client?
Picking one type of client changes who comes to you, how hard your marketing has to work, and how much explaining you do on a first call. Those three shifts show up in that order, and the first one is the one people notice.
Where picking one client type pays off
- Getting found: your marketing stops feeling like shouting into the void, because it's addressed to somebody.
- Being understood: the explaining gets shorter, and getting in front of the clients you want gets cheaper because you know where they are.
- Getting referred: when people know who you work with, they know who to send you. Nobody refers a generalist, because there's no moment that reminds them of you.
That last one surprises consultants who've built a business on word of mouth. A referral depends on somebody remembering you at the moment a problem comes up, and a broad description attaches to no particular moment.
My clients describe the change in almost the same words. Before, people told them they liked their website. After, women started saying it felt like someone had read their mind. One of my podcast guests spent months revising and landed on a value statement she loved (my Smart Gets Paid episode "The value of naming your niche" is her telling that story, including the bad advice that cost her time).
Leah's take
Here's the thing about being a generalist: it worked. In corporate, the woman who could handle anything got handed everything, and range was the asset. Nobody mentioned that the rules invert the moment clients start choosing you.
So of course narrowing feels like a loss, and the fear of missing out on work is the form it usually takes. It looks like you're being asked to hide the exact thing that got you here.
You're not. My fourth principle for this work is that specificity sells, and it sells for a reason that has nothing to do with your ability. Being clear about who you're for helps the right people know you're for them, helps them say yes, and lets you charge for the value of the outcome. If you try to be everything to everyone, you'll be nothing to no one.
And this is a choice, not a discovery. You don't sit there clicking around on the internet until an epiphany arrives. You look at the clients who lit you up, you pick, and you write it down. Version one is allowed to be wrong. Mine changed three times, publicly, and I learned more from the revisions than from any of the versions.
