By Genevieve Skory, Sales Confidence Coach for Women & Network Marketing Expert
This is Part 2 of the Customer Acquisition Series for Network Marketers. If you missed Part 1, start there for the full framework overview.
Despite the advice to “start sharing,” before you say a single word to a single person, two things have to happen. In their excitement, most people skip both of them and wonder why their conversations feel scattered and their results feel inconsistent.
Steps 1 and 2 of the customer acquisition process form the foundation. They need to happen long before the conversation starts. And getting them right changes everything that comes after. In my 20+ years of coaching female entrepreneurs, including building growth strategies for tens of thousands of independent business owners as a former Chief Sales and Enablement Executive of a half-billion-dollar direct sales company, I’ve watched this pattern repeat more than almost any other. You’re told to just start sharing. That’s the worst advice in the industry, and it’s setting you up for a very specific kind of disappointment. Skipping the foundation doesn’t just slow your results. It creates a confusion neither you nor your upline can name, and that confusion is what makes this business feel harder than it actually is.
Step 1: Identify Your Ideal Customer and Get Uncomfortably Specific
The fix is simple, even if it’s uncomfortable: stop trying to talk to “everyone.” Your ideal customer is not “anyone who wants to feel better” or “busy moms.” She is a specific person with a specific problem at a specific stage of her life, one that your product or opportunity solves really well. The moment you get that specific, your messaging stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like recognition.
Here’s why the specificity matters so much: when your messaging is vague like “I help people lose weight,” “I help people get healthy,” your conversations get awkward fast. You start attracting people who aren’t a real fit if you are heard at all. And that creates a whole different set of problems down the line. We’re talking leads who ghost. Recruits who disengage. A leaky customer bucket you’re constantly refilling. I saw this repeatedly in my work building field sales strategies. Leaders who struggled with retention almost always had a clarity problem, not an effort problem.
Getting clear on your ideal customer means sitting with some honest questions:
- What is she struggling with right now?
- Has she already tried products or services that haven’t worked?
- What is she telling herself that’s holding her back?
- How do you get her to stop scrolling and say, “wait, that’s me”?
The reframe: You don’t have a reach problem. You have a precision problem. A smaller, more specific audience that actually recognizes itself in your content will always outperform a large, vague one that sort of relates to it. As Harvard Business Review has noted, the most important thing niche marketing teaches is to think of customers as individuals and respond to their specific needs, not as a category. Narrow your focus until it almost feels too specific. That’s usually exactly right.
Step 2: Generate Awareness: Which Is Not the Same as
Posting More
Generating awareness means consistently showing up in the headspace where your ideal customer already is, with content and conversations that speak directly to what she’s experiencing. Not pitching or promoting. Just being genuinely useful and recognizable. That’s what builds the kind of familiarity that makes selling feel easy instead of desperate.
This is where most people think selling starts. It doesn’t. This is where visibility starts, and the difference matters enormously.
Think of it this way: your content’s job is to do the first part of the conversation for you. When someone reaches out already familiar with your point of view, what follows is completely different from cold outreach. She’s not suspicious. There’s trust, and she’s already warmed up. That’s the power of relationship-based selling done consistently over time.
Social media, word of mouth, referrals, live events, whatever platform you use, the goal is the same: be findable and be real.
The reframe: Posting more is a volume strategy. Awareness-building is a positioning strategy. One creates noise. The other creates the feeling that you’ve been in her head. Ask yourself: Is your content designed to attract everyone, or to stop the right one? Those are two completely different briefs, and they produce completely different results.
What Skipping These Two Steps Actually Costs You
When you skip Steps 1 and 2, the cost isn’t just slower results. It’s a specific kind of frustration that’s hard to name because you’re working hard, showing up, having conversations, but nothing sticks. Prospects say they’ll think about it and disappear. New recruits join and go quiet within weeks.
The problem usually isn’t the product or even the pitch. It’s that the right person was never in the conversation to begin with.
Selling as yourself only works when you’re talking to someone who’s actually looking for what you offer. The Sell Without the Spiral framework starts here with identifying who you are for before you ever open your mouth, because without that foundation, every conversation is starting at a disadvantage.
The reframe: If your conversations feel like convincing, the issue almost certainly isn’t your closing skills. It’s your targeting. As Inc. puts it, persuasion often creates resistance — trust creates momentum. Convincing is what happens when the wrong person is in front of you. Confirming is what happens when the right person is. Your job in Steps 1 and 2 is to make sure you’re always doing the latter.
What to Do With This Right Now
Before you move on to Step 3, do one thing: write down three sentences that describe your ideal customer at her most frustrated. Not demographics. Her actual internal experience.
- What is she thinking about before she falls asleep?
- What did she try last month that didn’t work?
- What would she type into a search bar at 11 pm when she’s finally honest about where she’s stuck?
Then look at your last five pieces of content or your last five conversations. Were you speaking to that woman? Or were you speaking to everyone and hoping someone would bite?
That gap between who you’re actually talking to and who you need to be talking to is your starting point. Close it before you do anything else.
Next up in the series: Steps 3, 4, and 5 — the listening-first middle of the conversation that most people rush through, and why slowing down here is what makes the close feel easy.
If you want to keep pulling on this thread, The Shift is where I go further. Each week, a short, honest piece of writing on the interior side of building a business, the part most coaches skip. No hustle. No hype. Just clarity.
→ Join The Shift. It’s free: newsletter.gskory.com
If you’re ready to go deeper, the Sales Confidence Studio is a high-touch coaching community for experienced women leaders who are done with beginner advice. Start with the free 7-Day Sales Transformation and find your own voice in the process. Your first 7 days are free. You’ll know by day three if it’s your room.
Finding and Attracting the Right Customers — FAQ
You’ll know when your content starts attracting people who say, “This is exactly me” without prompting. A practical test: read your last five posts out loud as if you’re speaking to one specific woman. If the language could apply to almost anyone, your customer definition is still too broad. Narrow it until it almost feels too specific; that’s usually the sweet spot.
This is almost always a Steps 1 and 2 problem. When your visibility content speaks to everyone, it self-selects for people who aren’t the right fit. The solution isn’t more content, it’s more precise content. Define who you’re for, then speak only to her. The right people self-select in; the wrong ones self-select out.
Posting is a tactic. Generating awareness is a strategy. The difference is intentionality. Awareness-building means consistently showing up in the right spaces with content that speaks to a specific person’s specific experience. Posting without clarity on who you’re talking to or what they need is just noise and it creates the exhausting cycle of high effort and low return.
Cold outreach works, but it works much harder than it has to when you skip Steps 1 and 2. When someone already knows your point of view before you reach out, the conversation starts from a completely different place. She’s not skeptical because she’s already familiar. The goal of awareness-building is to warm the market so that outreach feels like a natural continuation rather than an interruption.
The Sell Without the Spiral framework starts with identity and clarity before conversation, which is exactly what Steps 1 and 2 address. When you know precisely who you’re for, and you’ve been showing up consistently in her world, the selling conversation becomes far less pressured. You’re not convincing, you’re confirming what she already suspects. That’s the foundation the framework is built on.
About the Author
Genevieve Skory is a sales confidence expert for women with over 20 years of experience coaching female entrepreneurs. As the former Chief Sales and Enablement Executive of a half-billion-dollar direct sales company, she developed growth and sales strategies for tens of thousands of independent business owners. She is the host of the Fix This Grow Fast podcast, creator of the Sales Confidence Studio, and author of the Sell Without the Spiral framework. Her work focuses on helping women sell with calm authority without pressure, performance, or burnout.
Website: gskory.com | YouTube: newsletter.gskory.com | Podcast: Fix This Grow FastBy Genevieve Skory, Sales Confidence Coach for Women & Network Marketing Expert
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Finding the Right Customers in Network Marketing: Who Are You Even Talking To? (Part 2 of 5)
Finding the Right Customers in Network Marketing: Who Are You Even Talking To? (Part 2 of 5)
Finding the Right Customers in Network Marketing: Who Are You Even Talking To? (Part 2 of 5)
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