Welcome to Part 5 of this six–part series on how to take better control of your life and career through the art of making powerful offers.

The previous parts of this series laid the groundwork for what we’re going to examine this week and then complete next week: designing real-world powerful offers that you can make, and optimizing your chances that the offers are accepted. 

The Targeting Process

The targeting part of designing and making powerful offers deals with your intended listeners. There are two broad groups of listeners to think about for your offers:

1. People whom you already know, are reasonably close to, or are just a “few degrees of separation” from, e.g., people at work with whom you may not have daily contact but, nonetheless, you could have conversations with if you set your mind to it.

2. People who are not part of your current networks, and for whom it would take a separate, special initiative on your part to get into conversation with.

Reaching the latter group is a process in itself. So for now, focus on the first group: people with whom you can get into conversation with relative ease.

With this group of people in mind, basically the targeting process involves “walking in their shoes” and identifying what you think their concerns or issues might be—so you can design and make an offer that optimally addresses these concerns and issues. To do this, simply follow these steps to target your offers:

1. Write down an initial idea for an offer that you have in mind. Make it a “real” offer—one that you are capable of fulfilling. Make it as precise as possible but it doesn’t have to be perfect (we’ll work on refining your offer in the next part of this series). Be sure to describe your offer in terms of the results that you will produce. For example, instead of “My offer is to supervise the building of automobiles,” state it like this: “My offer is to supervise the building of energy efficient automobiles that use alternative fuels, such that they are completed within budget and ahead of schedule.”

2. Write down who your listener(s) will be, that is, to whom would you like to make this offer. Depending on where you are in the process of designing your offer, this may be more or less specific. For example, if you believe your offer would provide value for say, the Accounting Department, then start there. Or your starting point may be a particular person in the department that you already have in mind. For purposes of this exercise, design the offer with a focus on identifying a specific person (or persons); you can refine your offer later as you become more and more specific, and as particular organizations and people come into focus.

3. With this person or group of persons in mind, choose one of their “primary” roles that I presented in Part 2 of this series: economic, consumer, or craftsman. (Remember that one person can be concurrently fulfilling more than one role; pick the one you think is the most relevant to your offer.)

4. For that role, summarize your current understanding of the dominant influences on the role. For example,

   For the economic role:
   Foreign competition is expanding rapidly;U.S. companies are losing market share, and profits are steadily declining.

   For the consumer role (within your company):
   The customers of my offer work in the Customer Service Department. They are barely able to handle the call volumes with current staffing. Everyone has to work overtime with no end in sight. Morale is low and turnover is high.

   For the craftsman role:
   The internal auditors have determined that the production defect rate is unacceptably high, substantially higher than that of the foreign competition.

   Remember, the goal here is to start “walking in the shoes” of those who will be listening to your offer, seeing the work through their eyes.

5. For the role you chose in Step 3, make a list of the following:

   • The opportunities you know or suspect that the people in that role are considering, and why.

   • The opportunities you know or suspect the people in that role may not be open to, and why.

   • Possibilities that you think they may not be considering.

   • Your assessment of the readiness-to-act of the people in that role.

6. If the person or group of persons fulfills more than one role, repeat Steps 4 and 5 for each of the other roles identified in Step 3.

With this information in mind, you may discover that if where you started thinking about your offer’s listener was broad in scope, such as the automobile industry, now you want to target the Director of Product Development at Daimler-Chrysler. At any rate, use what you came up with in this first pass to continue to refine what you think your listener(s)’s concerns and issues are; you will probably need to do several iterations—each time, becoming more and more specific. Where there are gaps in what you know, perform the necessary research to get more and more clear about the world of concerns and opportunities that your prospective listener(s) live in. By performing this “due diligence” you will be able to see the world through their eyes, and generate a powerful offer.

Next Time

In Part 6 of this series I’ll show you how to refine and complete the design of your BIG offer, and the steps you can take to actually make your offer.