Niching

"The danger with your approach is that we risk niching the product with the individual customer."

As it usually does the comment came from a sales manager at the back of the room.  Salespeople are paid to be ambitious (let's not say greedy) and, practical souls that they are, tend to view the contributions of external consultants like me with a suspicion that regularly crosses over into contempt.

Niching, in the marketing sense, is one of those words that stupid people toss into a discussion to seem more intelligent.  Apparently we are all marketers now, which creates endless frustration for those of us who actually know what we're talking about.

Let's start with the definition: -

niche (n) a specialised but profitable corner of the market: [as adj.] important new niche markets.

When did having a profitable corner of a market become a Bad Thing?  Somehow owning a corner isn't ambitious enough.  We could have an entire wall or even half a room if only we weren't so conservative.  The confusion stems from the differing outlook of sales (where the aim is to have the customer do something specific, usually in the short-term) and marketing (which attempts to get the customer to think or feel a certain certain way over time).

For action-focused salespeople, the worth of a customer should only be determined by his or her current and future actions: either buying our products or not.  To say that an individual has 'niched the product' is meaningless.  Yet in many sales teams there is a strange, pervasive sense that we can remedy this non-existent threat by asking it away.  This is how we get those horribly jarring questions at the end of bad sales calls: -

Why are you staying just one night at our hotel?  Why don't I put you down for five?

The logic is that by demanding that the individual customer do more for us we can't be accused of niching ourselves.

Marketers, who should think deeply about such things, know that a niche (aka a 'segment') is a description of an aggregation of customers that have a certain, consistent set of needs.  If we can meet those needs and make a profit then we just need to communicate this in a meaningful way.  If not then turn your attention elsewhere.

Salesmanship requires passion and persistence.  A big part of marketing is dispassionately doing the maths and being prepared to walk away.