This is something that I highly reccomend both salespeople and business owners to do alike. The fact is within almost any given industry there is a ?niche?, you just need to look for it, and understand what motivates your customers to buy.



For instance, I am a sales coach and trainer. I help sales people and business owners improve their sales results. But what is their real problem?

It's getting more customers!

Right?

Well almost? you see if you dig a little bit deeper it really is more about cold calling reluctance. Every single sales person or business owner that I have ever worked with who has trouble in making their sales targets or meeting their budgets, has a problem with cold calling.

The majority of succesful sales people or business owners will tell you that generally the more successful a person is in business or in sales the more confortable they are and the better they are at with cold calling.

So I've discovered my ?niche? but have I uncovered my customers ?core? problem? Not quite yet? I know, I know I already said we were almost there? we need to dig ?just? a little bit deeper. You see people who have difficulty in cold calling and prospecting, generally have some challenges in and around their own internal belief system about cold calling.

Why is that?

Well despite the naysayers, cold calling works and it builds businesses, profits and companies. You show me a struggling company or sales person and I will show you a sales person or sales force who has poor cold calling skills. Successful people exude confidence, and they don't don't have any problems picking up the phone and calling a prospect.

How can you apply this sales technique to your industry? No matter what you are selling I implore you to go deeper and discover what your true ?niche? is and the real ?core? problems of your customers. In this way you can really help your client get the break throughs that they are looking for.

Do you have an online business or are you thinking of taking your business online? Do you have the right product and/or service that targets a specific need? What do you want to sell? What is your passion? What subject or topic do you have a lot of knowledge about? Let me start by telling you that selling an informational products online is easier than selling a service. But, selling a service online makes more money with monthly memberships.

Before you spend all your time working on a website and writing up eBooks, you want to be sure that your customers are going to be interested in what you are selling. Do your market research. Start by seeing how many competitors you have. Read through newsgroups, discussion boards, and chat rooms and learn about your target market customer base. If you already have an email list, send them a survey to see what they are most interested in.

When researching your niche, use www.Amazon.com and find the current top sellers. Find out what people are reading about. You will want to research keywords with keyword tools such as www.wordtracker.com. You need to discover which keywords are being searched for frequently.

Doing a little poking around your competitors web sites and subscribing to their newsletters isn't a bad idea. This is one way to come up with ideas on what would make your company different or better. Take a look at their traffic rankings (http://www.alexa.com/) and their related links. By analyzing this information, you can see how many visitors they have each day and how profitable their company is.