Identify your Dream 100 and acquire new customers rapidly
You only grow a business by doing one of these three things:
- Getting more clients
- Getting a higher average order value per transaction – which means selling more per transaction
- Increasing the purchase frequency – getting your clients back more often to buy from you again
This lever focuses on getting more clients.
A lot of companies hire me to help them with a go-to-market strategy. “Help us find new clients in our current market and open up new markets for us.” They ask.
“Help us find the places where our potential customers are hiding online and offline to start marketing and selling to them.”
Russell Brunson introduces the concept of a dream 100 in his book Traffic Secrets. Only by asking this question:
Where are your best customers congregating or hiding?
Or easier said, if we want to go where the fish are, where are the 100 best fishing spots?
And what can you do to catch them at that spot? Let’s start with our first Growth Lever: the Dream 100.
There are variations of the Dream 100:
- One to one – This is when you create a dream list of 100 people/companies that you want to sell to.
- One to many – If you want to sell to many customers, you need to find the 100 most prominent spots where they are congregating.
How can you find your dream 100 in a one-to-many setting?
First of all, know as much as possible about your ideal customer, so you know who you want to target.
I’ve seen a lot of companies struggle with knowing who to target, and I’ve got some nice tricks for that. I’ll share them with you during the 30-Day Growth Challenge.
After you’ve identified your ideal customer, you can ask yourself these questions:
- What are the top websites that my dream customers already go to?
- What forums or message boards do they participate in?
- What are the Facebook groups they engage in?
- Who are the influencers they follow?
- What podcasts do they listen to?
- What are the email newsletters they are subscribed to?
- What blogs do they read?
- What channels are they following on YouTube?
- What keywords are they searching for in Google to find information?
After making this list, you add up the total reach all these spots have. So add up all the subscribers, readers, and followers. Now you know what the potential reach is of your campaigns, and you can start building a Dream 100 campaign.
How can you find your dream 100 in a one-to-one setting?
Do you remember Pareto? In many industries, 20% of the companies are taking up 80%+ of the market size. It can be the case that 100 companies are enough to capture more than 80% of the market size. So you’ll only need to focus on these 100 companies anyway.
The goal of a one-to-one Dream 100 is to get in front of all of those 100 companies that are on your list.
You want to convert them from saying about you: ‘I’ve never heard of this company before’ to ‘Yes, I do business with that company.’
You should, again, ask yourself the questions of page 9 and create a list of overlapping spots where your 100 companies are congregating. Understanding this will bring extreme focus to your marketing / sales efforts, as you can start on the top of your list and work your way down as you go.
You can leverage this with a Dream 100 Campaign, which we’ll explain next!
Building a Dream 100 campaign
Now that you’ve identified where your Dream 100 congregates, you need to get in front of them regularly. There are two ways to do this:
Start advertising based on where they congregate
You now know which brands and interests your ideal customers have, and you know who they follow. Advertising platforms allow you to target on these interests. Russel used Facebook targeting to find fans of Tony Robbins combined with other interests he knew his customers had, and bought ads specifically for that audience to convert them on his site.
Build a relationship with the owner of the fishing spot and try to set up a joint-venture campaign.
The community owner can promote your products as an affiliate, or you can create a more structured collaboration. You pay them a commission per sale or a commission per email sent. You can be as creative as you want with these types of deals.
For the relationship-building part, we can highly recommend the book Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. The bigger your audience, the easier it will be to get the community owner to work with you, as you’ll also have something to offer for them.
Why is this a lever?
You’re using assets that somebody else has already built. To do this, yourself from scratch would cost many years and lots of money. There is no easier way to reach a big audience than by using other people’s networks.
Do you want an automated way to find where your Dream 100 are congregating online?
Use a tool like SparkToro. SparkToro crawls tens of millions of social and web profiles to find what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online.
Want to learn more about leveraging your Dream 100? Read the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson or join my 30-day Growth Challenge.
And remember: you don’t have to spend all your time and money to build an awesome list of customers if someone else already owns it and you can make use of it. That’s the ultimate leverage.
