What Market Do You Serve?

It seems like an innocent question.

And it’s one most agents field every day.

The knee-jerk response is to cast a wide net, and rattle off just about any city or town within a 10-20 mile radius.

I serve Daytona Beach, Ormond Beach, Port Orange, New Smyrna, and Orlando.

Follow the herd. Everybody else is doing it, so I should too.

Wrong answer.

This is terrible positioning.

You may very well serve all those areas, but clients want specialists, and whether they know it or not, subconsciously its what they’re trying to figure out when they ask “What market do you serve?”.

What message are you sending out?

Last month I had a lead come in from someone interested in 5 neighborhoods within one very specific community.

The agent I gave the lead to (let’s call them Agent #1) followed-up with the prospect in an email, saying:

I can help you find a home in [specific community] but also [other community], [other community], [other community], and [other community].

Raise hand. Place palm over face.

Contrast that with another agent, let’s call them Agent #2, when I asked if they would be interested in a lead for a certain area responded with:

I work mostly with [specific type of homes] in [specific area].

Short and sweet, but very powerful in the eyes of your potential clients.

They even qualified the response with “mostly” and it’s still powerful.

Now let me ask you, do you think this Agent #2 turned down my lead because it only met one of the criteria they “mostly” work with?

Heck no. They accepted this lead and several others I’ve sent since then.

The point here is not to exclude prospects if they seem like they’d be good clients but otherwise don’t meet all of your criteria.

After you attract them, you can decide whether or not you want to work with them.

It’s totally o.k. to be a generalist with a specialty. Just be careful how you position yourself.

While prospects are still “playing the field” it’s in your best interest to project to them that you’re a specialist, and not part of the herd like all the other agents they run into.