Pick the low-hanging fruit

In our postage-stamp sized backyard, we have two pear trees.  I don’t know my pear varieties, but I recall being told one was a Bartlett, the other Anjou.  Almost every year, at least one of these trees bears no less than 500 pears.  The last two years both trees produced at once, giving me some 1,000 pears to deal with (though the squirrels and yellow jackets took their share).

So, each fall, whenever I want a delicious pear, I simply go out back and pick one.  I will often pick a bagful of them to give away to friends, clients and associates.  Because I’m just one person, I just pick what I can reach.  My neighbor has a fruit picker – a wire basket at the end of a ten-foot pole – but there’s no sense in using that until I’ve picked all the pears in arm’s reach.

If your Metaphor Alarm is going bonkers, it’s working properly.  This post is a result of a post by Jim Connolly about marketing mistakes that got me thinking.

It may be a bad metaphor, but this story is relatable to marketing.  Often, I see small companies spend so much time and effort attempting to get customers that are out of reach.  They use expensive, time-consuming marketing efforts to attract customers they think they want, but ignore the ones that are much easier (and cheaper) to reach.

Who are the low-hanging fruit in your business?  Geography is often the first criteria.  Many companies make the mistake of trying to go nationwide before developing the business that’s around the corner.  Other companies design their products for one customer set, but find another banging down their doors.  Instead of embracing them, they still spend so much time going after who they think are the “right “ customers.

The point is, work at attracting the customers who are the easy sell first.  You’ll spend less money on marketing in return for greater sales.  Once you have that fruit all picked, you can get out the pickers and the ladders to go after the higher branches.