How to Attract Your Ideal Client

Episode 27: How to Attract Your Ideal Client, with Erik Jensen

How to attract your ideal client? This podcast with Erik Jensen will teach you the secrets of how to attract your ideal client.

Erik Jensen is the chief strategy officer at Predictive and a co-owner. Predictive helps clients build their authority positions in the niche(s) they want to serve — and then — monetize that position in the form of a sales pipeline filled with a steady stream of right-fit clients.

But often — Erik has conversations with agency owners, business coaches, and consultants (that’s our tribe here at Predictive ROI) — and the commonly asked questions are…

“How to attract your ideal client?”

“Hey — how do I get my list to buy more of my stuff.”

Here’s the reality — you can “get” your “list” to “buy your stuff.” What you CAN do is prove over and over again that you can help solve business issues and challenges they care about deeply.

So let’s reframe. Instead of the earlier question — we’d like you to consider three variables as the starting point for solving the equation of increasing sales.

The first variable is WHO.

The second variable is WHAT.

And the third variable is HOW.

Over the next three episodes of the podcast — Erik will join Stephen to work through the three variables of WHO — WHAT — and HOW they can work together to fill your sales pipeline.

We’re going to define each.

We’ll share specific examples in full transparency.

And — we’ll share any helpful frameworks along the way.

Why?

Because no matter how long you’ve been running your business — no matter how much experience you have — no matter how successful you’ve been — if we lose sight of the fundamentals…we lose our way, and we start showing up as “buy more of my stuff.”

Whether you show up that way by accident or not — it feels like a whole lot of not awesome for your clients and prospects.

Think of this episode as the “Starting Block” — it’s time to get set…here we go.

What you will learn in this episode is about how to attract your ideal client:

• Who is your ideal client? How to attract your ideal client?
• The three ingredients in the right-fit client avatar recipe
• How your client stories can connect to your prospect’s “psychographics”
• How to win the “heart” with the pain-pleasure principle followed by winning the “head”
• Why “hope” is the strongest decision-making force
• How to attract your ideal client avatar then share it with a prospective client during an actual biz dev meeting

Free Resources:

• Order your free copy of “Sell with Authority”: https://predictiveroi.com/resources
• Listen to this podcast of how to attract your ideal client, with Stephen Woessner
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PredictiveROI/
• Website: https://predictiveroi.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-jensen-b9946068/
• Read this blog from Predictive ROI about how to attract your ideal client and engage with them

 

How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Full Episode Transcript

 

How to attract your ideal client in the best possible way? If that’s what you want to learn then welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI. My team and I, we created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner, a business coach, or a strategic consultant, and you’re looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality, well, then you’re in the right place.

 

If you want proven strategies for attracting a steady stream of well-prepared, right-fit prospects into your sales pipeline. Yup. We’re going to cover that. You want to learn how to step away from the sea of competitors so you actually stand out on the ground. You’re standing on. Yeah. We’re going to cover that too. You want to futureproof your business so you can navigate the next challenges that come your way?

 

Absolutely. We will help you there, too. I promise you, each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights and tangible examples of best practices. Never theory. From thought leaders, experts, owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do. So I want you to think practical and tactical. Never any fluff. So, each of our guests builds a position of authority and then they monetize that position by claiming their ground, by growing their audience, by nurturing leads and, yes, converting sales.

 

But all the while, they did it by being helpful. So, every time someone from their audience turned around there, they were given a helpful answer to an important question. So their prospects never, ever felt like they were a prospect. I also promise you every strategy we discuss every tool we recommend will be shared in full transparency in each episode.

 

So you can plant your flag of authority, you can claim your ground, and you can fill your sales pipeline with a steady stream of right fit clients who never ever were made to feel like one of your prospects. Okay. I am super excited for you to meet our guest expert today, and he’s becoming a bit of a familiar voice, Erik Jensen.

 

Check out this podcast of How to Attract Your Ideal Client, with Stephen Woessner

 

How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Erik Jensen’s Introduction

 

So, if you’re meeting Erik for the first time, you might know already, perhaps, but he is my business partner here at Predictive ROI, and we’ve worked alongside each other for the last ten-plus years. Erik has a depth of expertise in helping agency owners, business coaches and strategic consultants. That’s our tribe here at Predictive, go deep into their niche and then build the right content strategy that helps them grow their audience, that helps them nurture leads.

 

And just like I said a minute or two ago, to help them increase sales without a prospect ever being made to feel like they were one of your prospects. Because no one ever wants to feel like they were a prospect in that someone had set a goal to quote-unquote convert them into becoming a new client. But oftentimes, that’s actually the question that we get.

 

Erik and I have conversations with owners and coaches and consultants all the time, and we’re asked questions like, Hey, how do I get my list to buy more of my stuff? And while there’s a whole lot of things that are wrong with that question, let me just emphasize a couple of those points because we’re going to that’s essentially going to form the foundation of this conversation.

 

So let me emphasize, how do I get you. First of all, you can’t get your list to do anything and to refer to your list as a list as opposed to your community or your audience, people that you enjoy helping is just it really takes you kind of behind the curtain as to what that person’s motivation is.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Solving The Equation to Increase Sales

 

How do I get my list to buy more of my stuff? It’s not about you. It’s about you being helpful to your audience instead. So this is how Erik and I would like for you to reframe that. And that’s what we’re going to work through during this conversation. So instead, we’d like you to consider three variables, three variables as the starting point to solving the equation of increasing sales.

 

So the first variable is who, the second variable is what in the third variable is how so who, what? Over the next three episodes of this podcast, Erik and I are going to work through those three variables: who, what, how to help solve the increasing sales equation. We’re going to define each. We’re going to share specific examples and full transparency, and we’ll share any helpful frameworks that we have along the way.

 

Why? Because no matter how long you’ve been running the business, no matter how much experience you have, no matter how successful you’ve been, here’s the reality If we lose sight on the fundamentals, we lose our way and we start showing up as buy more of my stuff, whether by accident or not, it feels like a whole lot of not awesome for your clients and prospects.

 

So think of these next three episodes as the starting block, this time to get set because here we go. Okay, Without further ado, welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast, partner. Thanks for joining me again. Absolutely. It’s fun to be back. So again, we have not done this nearly enough, considering the decade-plus that we’ve been working together on this stuff so seriously.

 

There have been so many times that I have thought about that. Like in the thousand episodes of Onward Nation, you’d think one time I would have had the idea, Hey, maybe, maybe you should have that idea too. So, I think it goes both ways. My gosh. Well, anyway, thank you for your graciousness in your schedule, and you’re always so generous in sharing your smarts, which I’m grateful for.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Don’t Lose Track of The Fundamentals

 

So, before we dive in here, I want to share a quick story about why the fundamentals are important. And you’ve heard me share this story a million times. But anyway, I don’t know that I’ve ever done it in the podcast episode. And it’s the story that Don Yeager, our mutual friend Don Yeager, had shared with us about back in the day when Bill Walton was the number one collegiate basketball player in the country playing for coach John Wooden at UCLA, and coach John Wooden won ten NCAA championships in 11 years.

 

Just insane. Amazing. And so Bill Walton was the best college player in the country and had just won the national title. And in the very first practice, you know, the media is kind of swarming around and in all of that, and they see Bill Walton as well as the other players putting on their socks, putting on their shoes, tying their shoes, untying their shoes, taking off of their sock or taking off their socks and then repeating that process over and over and over again.

 

Bill Walton was actually later asked about this, like, why would you do that? But anyway, during that scene, if you will, see the national championship team and in the media, there is again, you know, watching them do these socks and shoes for 90 minutes. So, a reporter comes up to Coach Wooden and says Walton is the best player in the country.

 

You just won the national title. Why on earth are they putting on their socks and shoes and taking them off, and putting them on for 90 minutes? Coach, Why? Famously, Coach Wooden turned to the reporter and said that even Bill Walton couldn’t be the best basketball player in the country if he had a blister on his foot.

 

So it is so easy to lose track of the fundamentals. That’s why I’m so excited for Erik to join us here on how to attract your ideal client avatar, The WHO is an area of deep expertise for Erik. So, Erik, anything you want to add to that story? I know you’ve heard it a million times, but anything you want to add to that?

 

Well, interestingly, not to that story. It was actually to an earlier part where you were saying, how can we get our list to buy more? My favorite variation of that is how can we make our list buy more as if we can arm wrestle people into purchasing our goods and services? Yeah. Isn’t it funny, though, that because I know you’re asked that question a bunch, and it just doesn’t.

 

It just doesn’t. That’s the wrong sort of point of view. How do I get, how do I make, how do I. You don’t. I don’t. So, let’s start working through the fundamentals, as I mentioned in the starting block around the Who. Yeah. So when you think about it, let’s maybe set a foundation of some terminology because we use the term right-fit prospect. We use a lot of right-fit here at Predictive. We talk about it in the Sell with Authority book.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: 3 Areas to Considering in Finding Clients

 

So, how to attract your ideal client and identify them? Okay. So, and you’re right, the definition is important because getting a client versus a right-fit client is usually the difference between having a profitable client and having a client that ends up costing you money. And, so that’s why we make the distinction instead of just saying, how can you get a client?

 

I would be shocked if everybody that’s listening right now, I mean, like do a quick scan of your memory, almost all of you. I would say all of you have probably worked with somebody at some point or another. They ended up losing money because they weren’t the right fit either. The problem wasn’t right. The personality wasn’t right. The way that you could help them wasn’t right.

 

Whatever it happened to be. And you had to put in a tremendous amount of extra time and effort for the cost. So it’s the right fit. When we think about the right fit, there are two kinds of big distinctions. All right. So there’s the side of the right, the clients about how you find and identify right-fit clients. And then there’s how you connect with right-fit clients.

 

And you need to get both of those pieces right when you’re thinking about the client. So we’ll go through the definition first and then we’ll talk a little bit about how you connect with them. So, there are three big areas that you want to look at when it comes to defining the right fit for the client. The first one is the niche term, but it is there to talk about niche.

 

That’s obviously something that we think is pretty important. Yeah. Second one is the demographics. All right. That should feel really comfortable for a lot of marketing agencies, especially with the idea of like, it’s the right industry, the right size a company can afford you. Right? And then the third one is the psychographics. That’s the more emotional side that the less tangible sides, the her things to be able to find.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Noticing The Trend

 

So we’ll go through them and give some examples of each of them. So that makes sense to me if they have a business problem. You are adept at solving. So you as an agency can’t be good at solving everybody’s problem in every situation. All right. So this is again where if you get in a client that has a problem that you’re not adept at solving, are they right-fit? Probably not, because solving that problem is going to be very costly. 

 

All right. It might be brain candy for you, and you might enjoy solving the problem, but can you do it profitably? Probably not. The other part of niches they are a type of organization where the problem that they face is so familiar to you can easily tell them relevant stories and examples.

 

Right? So, if you were to ask Stephen and I about, well, what do you normally see other agencies doing, we have thousands of stories to be able to tell. Right? Right. There’s very little that we haven’t seen come across our doorstep over the last decade when it comes to agencies, coaches and consults. Is that good or bad? Well, you notice trends, We’ll just put it that way.

 

Okay. So you notice trends so you can do the work more efficiently and you should another really important thing with a niche and a lot of people ignore this one is this one, bring it up as an example, you should be able to find ponds where 80 to 90% of the audience fits your other criteria in niche and demographics.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Creating Connection Points with Your Clients

 

Okay, so if your demographic is the industry, we’ll use ourselves as an example agencies, coaches, and consultants, and we identify where agencies, coaches, and consultants hang out, not agencies, concert consultants, coaches, plumbers, doctors and teachers. Yeah, right. We want to know that the audience we’re in is truly dedicated to that. Well, let me ump ahead here for just a second, and then we’ll come back to this piece because like, when you were talking about coaches, dentists, teachers, when you, like, broadened it.

 

What’s next on how to attract your ideal client? Right. I want to go back to like what you said about the thousands of stories. Right. As you add in all of these others, the relevance, the impact, the importance, and the significance of all of those thousands of stories then start to break. Then you have to start because everybody thinks they’re a unique snowflake. You then have to start explaining the story and how it relates then to the dentist or how it relates to a capital equipment manufacturer or whatever, right?

 

It’s like, well, that breaks right? Or worse, you try to make your message so generic so that it’ll fit everybody right down vanilla and you sound like everybody else generally. So you’re either going to sound really irrelevant to a big section of the audience or you’re going to sound boring and you’re going to have no differentiation. So this is the connecting point then, and this is a little bit of jumping ahead.

 

So then we’ll rewind. But I think what you’re saying is that the stories help you then connect into the psychographics piece, right? Right, exactly. Okay. So again, from a head standpoint, a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about is kind of a niche in the demographics. Like, that’s logical stuff you can think about.

 

And I should be careful because there’s specific terminology that I mean, which we’ll get to in just a second here, but this is the logical stuff that I think a lot of folks are used to doing. 

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Make Sure Your Clients Are Invested in Your Process

 

But we see a lot of mistakes in the niche, which is why bringing those up in-depth is easy to go. Well, you know what? I’m going to go to this conference that has business owners at it. I am bound to find my people there. Well, that’s probably true. But, you know, if you go out into the ocean and you reach your hand enough times, you’re bound to catch a fish. Yeah, right. But you, you’ve made it so much more difficult for yourself to do that.

 

And again, you’ve made yourself irrelevant, and you’ve likely been unsuccessful in those efforts for a large part. So again, the demographics, right? They should be able to afford you. Not a big surprise there. They should be in an industry that you know and understand you’re aiming to actually grow your business in. They should be the right size company.

 

And really, truly this is a consideration like Predictive. We don’t work with multi-thousand employee companies because the work we like to do involves being able to change rapidly at an enterprise level. Company like that is like steering the Titanic, right? It just takes so long to do anything. That’s not our ideal. At the same time, we don’t really work super well with solopreneur, right?

 

Or startups, right, because the work that we do requires a team to be able to run with some of the things internally or have an expertise there. So, there is a little bit of a sweet spot that you want to be able to find. Okay, so then psychographics, a big one, should be invested in solving the business problem that you’re really good at solving.

 

Okay? If they’re not invested in it, you get an organization that has abdicated its responsibility and solution. Again, I would say most, if not all of us have been there before, and that can be really rough. Yeah. Okay. They believe you’re the right company to help them. There is. I don’t mind the fact that you have to be able to prove through your work that you’re still the right partner, but it’s a whole lot easier if they’ve been able to identify you as being a really good person to work alongside.

 

And they kind of go, Hey, we’ve thought about a bunch of different people, but man, you speak our language. You seem to know us. You’re in our industry. Your inner need, like everything you talk about, is super relevant to us. I think you’re the right-fitt. Okay. And this is one that we hear more and more, is that they’ve got the right level of IQ.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Introducing The “HERO Offer” To Clients

 

All right. So again, all of these things can be really difficult. This is where psychographics are more challenging. They can be difficult to test for, which is where we’ll get into the next kind of. You describe it as a starting block. And so in what we can talk about how, you can actually test for some of those psychographics after bringing on a client in a less painful way, a less risky way.

 

So okay, so that just made me think that I could have done a much better job when I was teeing up and introducing the who, what, how to give a little bit more context to that in the introduction. So today we’re obviously focusing on who is the right fit client, how to define it, how to attract, how to make sure that you have that avatar correctly built in the what piece next week or next episode.

 

How to attract your ideal client and get them on board? That’s where Erik and I are going to spend time on what we like to call the hero offer, sometimes the 90 day hero offer and how to price it accordingly and so forth. And then in the how, it’s how do we then sell the hero offer by making it attractive to the right fit client at the right time and in the right way.

 

So these don’t sound like how I get my list to buy more of my stuff because that’s obviously counterproductive. So, I could have done a better job of explaining that at the onset. So okay, so we know that we’ll all be talking about that as psychographics seem challenging to be able to identify needs, and demographics are easier for sure.

 

So those are the three big distinctions in how you find and identify the right fit. It doesn’t say anything about how to connect with them, but it’s how you can identify them. Well, okay, but so you mentioned this, this headpiece, this, you know, quote unquote, this headpiece, and you’re talking about like niche and in demographics and all of that, and you’re talking about the defined piece, and then the connecting piece, does that go into the psychographics and or psychographics part of head or a psychographic?

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Identifying Things to Make It Relevant Clients

 

I’ve also heard you talk about there’s the headpiece, everyone. But then there’s the heart piece. So how do those pieces then link together, I guess, if that’s the right way to say it. Yeah. So don’t mistake this for the band, the head, and the heart. So these are truly just two things that you need to get right from a direct connection standpoint.

 

And you’re right. They totally come out of those three things that we just went through: the niche, the demographics, and the psychographics. Okay, so to connect, once you’ve identified, like, okay, these are my people right now, what you want to do is you want to be able to talk to them in a way that makes you relevant to them.

 

And now people make decisions on two different levels. All right? We make decisions based on our heads and our hearts. There is a lot of evidence. This is a belief, a predictor. If somebody wants to argue this point, that’s totally fine. We believe that people are emotional beings and the heart is where decisions happen.

 

First, their head is where the decision gets justified or tested well. So I like how you said that. Yeah. So when you think about the sorts of communications, if you want, once you know who someone is, the next part of being able to get a right-fit client is to be able to then connect with them first on an emotional level and then give them the information that they need to justify a logical decision.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Stepping Into the Shoes of Your Client

 

Okay, so from an emotional connection, are you going to totally use some of their psychographics, demographics, and niche? Are you going to be trying your best? And this is going to maybe sound a little bit weird, right? You’re going to do your best to put on their shoes or lay in their bed at night.

 

We don’t mean that literally, but we meet. What we mean is how good are you at being able to be empathetic to what they’re going through, Their fears, their hopes, their aspirations, who they want to impress, what keeps them up at night, all of those other sorts of things. So what we just talked about is we’ve been able to identify people.

 

Got the basics of how to attract your ideal client? That’s great. Now comes what I believe is probably the harder part of it, and that is you need to get out of your own head. You need to get away from how we make them do something that’s 100% self-serving and you need to be able to step into what is their life like? Why would they even buy from me?

 

Why would our services and products even help them? And what specifically about our products and services and about us matter? Right. So talking with a very brilliant man just recently, Marc Levy, and he was talking about pitches because he’s excellent at pitches. I mean, his background is pitched 25,000 times like if anybody can get to the heart of what makes someone different and what it is that they need to be able to call out like he’s a good guy to know.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Trust Your Gut

 

It is one of his gifts for sure. my gosh. Right. So we were having this conversation and one of the things that he brought up was this idea of people a lot of times trying to sell the wrong thing. Okay. Okay. Well, what does that really mean? It doesn’t mean that they’re trying to sell the wrong product or service.

 

It’s that they’re focused on features and benefits or focused on the thing that doesn’t actually matter. Well, of course, that’s going to happen if you can’t get into someone’s heart and then their head, right? Yeah. The end. Okay. So as you’re saying this, I needed to quickly look it up because I know that Dr. Sigmund Freud studied this, but I’m pretty sure it comes out like the 1500s or 1600s from an earlier researcher.

 

But Dr. Freud is given the credit for doing this. So he developed what he calls the pain pleasure principle. And it suggests that people make choices to avoid or decrease pain or make choices to create or increase pleasure, hence the pain-pleasure principle. And we’ve seen that in the IMF. Michael Gerber talked about that in exactly what you’re saying about how the decision is made in the heart, potentially first in options to either avoid pain or to get pleasure.

 

And then, as you astutely said, when we think, wait a minute, I better now rationalize that decision with all of these different data points or whatever used to have to rationalize that decision. But ultimately, you know, we’re driven by the pain-pleasure principle that Dr. Freud articulated during his career. Right. And it’s interesting, too, because this is a habit that’s actually healthy for us.

 

So they’ve done studies when it comes to test taking, and I promise this will be relevant. So when it comes to tests, one of the big pieces of advice people get is trust your gut, right? And so we do that. We trust our gut and we go through and we can answer things. But then what they found is that if you go back and you actually think and test your gut, you will increase your test scores.

 

Okay. So this idea that we follow our heart, first we do a gut check. That’s fast, it’s good. But then we naturally follow with our head. Now, we may not do this in tests. We may not do this everywhere in life, but we get better results when we do so. Naturally, we are inclined to follow both of these when it comes to our own actions, especially when it comes to our decision.

 

Right, and investing in our businesses, especially in a significant way. That’s a hard decision. So we’re going to fall back on every tool that we have. Those are the main tool tools we use from a decision-making criteria. I love that. That’s really, really great. Really great and super relevant. Okay, so let’s go back to one of the things that you said a few minutes ago, and I know that we’re bouncing around here.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Writing Down What’s in Your Head

 

I always get super excited when you and I have this chance to have these conversations because we go down all these different rabbit holes, and it’s just a ton of fun. Hopefully people will follow and I don’t know, but a few minutes ago you said, how do we then connect with okay, so if the pain and pleasure principle exists if the head heart decision-making process exists, and it’s something we need to be aware of, and if we’ve identified the right fit client through niche demographics and even some psychographics as you walked us through, then how do we connect with the right fit client or prospect?

 

So one of the big things is you have to get this out of your own head and you have to get it down on paper. Okay. Because the odds are very good that you’re not doing all of the activities in your business when it comes to connecting with your right-fit avatar, your right-fit client. Okay. And Avatar, by the way, that’s also a term that we use.

 

And just get a quick definition of it. Avatar has a lot of different names, personas, and popular customer profiles. The crux of all these is this being a concise, written representation of what you know or believe to be true about your clients or ideal clients that you want to work with and who you can do good work for.

 

Okay, So one of the very first things that makes a big difference is to write it down because if it’s in your head, no one else in your organization is going to be able to make a bit of difference on this. All right. And you’re always going to wonder, like, why do my writers kind of keep missing the mark? Why do my designers just never quite get that right?

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Sit Down and Discuss Things with Your Client

 

Why do our marketing campaigns seem to just fall a little bit flat? Why do our ideas feel stale? Because everybody else is working in the dark, right? You might have a pretty good idea where all of this is, but if nobody else on your team does, it doesn’t really matter. Okay. And then this is not a discipline we’re going to; we’re going to sit down together as a team or maybe me as an individual, and I’m just going to hash it all out.

 

I’m going to have this beautiful piece of paper and I’m going to go to check the box. Okay? This is something where you have to be doing this work regularly and sitting down and as a team and practicing being empathetic to your right that clients are working on thinking like that, working on feeling like them. Okay, so that you can do a good job of talking to them and connecting with them.

 

Okay. I think we’ve all been in a situation where someone has talked to us, and it felt like we’re looking around. There’s someone else here. They took it. Was there someone behind me that they were talking to, and that was not me, right? It was either addressed wrong, it was approached wrong. The content was wrong.

 

You know, the situation was just wrong. The context was wrong, whatever it happens to be. And we get confused by that. And we obviously don’t want to do that with any of our marketing because when you are connecting with your right big clients, every time you have a mess, it negates several hits. And I’ll put this in a way that I kind of grew up with, although I will clean up the language compared to how it was told to me by most farmers, and that is that one offshoot takes care of 100 attaboys.

 

It’s true right. And so this is the idea that every time you miss you, you’re taking a lot of hits with you simultaneously. Right. You’re drawing from that bank. So you want to hit far more often than you miss. You’re going to still miss getting used to that fact. But you definitely want to head a little bit more often.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Establish The Common Grounds

 

This is so good, and this is reminding me of how you know, it sounds so crass to say in our quote-unquote new business presentations, which we don’t really do presentations when we’re having conversations with someone who would be a prospective client. They’re vetting Predictive to make sure that we can be as helpful as they think we might be able to be, you know, kind of kicking the tires and all of that kind of stuff?

 

One of the things that we boldly have shared is love. This is who we do good work for. And we literally share the avatar. Share the avatar. And it’s like, you know, it’s this type of person and this type of problem and this type of feeling. And this is what’s going on in her head. And what she or he might be struggling with or whatever.

 

And then literally at the end of that conversation, not only does it create some commonality, that kind of stuff, whatever, like Erik is talking about, but then that person will say, my gosh, you just described me, right? my gosh. Yeah. So again, listeners are our Avatar. We actually encourage you to name your Avatars, but it’s so ours.

 

Our names are Harry and Sally. So that’s a little bit of my bias because that’s one of my favorite movies. When Harry Met Sally, even less ever gets a lot of times. But what happens is we encourage someone to name their avatar because it makes it easier to think about and talk to them as an individual, as a person.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Address Any Concerns or Issues Your Client Might Have

 

Right. And if you’re struggling with any of these, exercise is a great way to get started with this. Think about a current or past client that you’re like, I wish we could just clone them. If we could have 500 of these people, And that was our entire community and audience. Life would be grand. I would go to work happily every day.

 

It would be rainbows and unicorns all the time. Like, it would be amazing. All right, well, we have bowls, the fruity pebbles everywhere, and bowls of Fruity Pebbles and Mountain Dew to wash it down. Doesn’t like big rock Rocky Mountain, but yeah, that’s. That’s the idea, right? So. So, if you can take that a lot of times, just naming that avatar after that person makes it easier for you to imagine.

 

Have you started your journey on how to attract your ideal client? What was it like talking to them? How did they approach problems? What are their problems? Did they have deep concerns? Like all of those other sorts of things. So that can be a really great place to start that. But yeah, like your avatar, you should feel comfortable enough with it that you could share it with someone and give an idea, right?

 

So when we talk about Sally, like here are some of the phrases that we literally have written down, right? She knows there’s more opportunity and growth out there. Out there is in quotes. Right. And she’s frustrated because she doesn’t know how to capitalize on it faster. She reads lots of books but struggles with knowing a good idea from a bad one.

 

She’s uncertain and afraid to fail. She’s been fooled before and doesn’t know who to believe. Everything sounds too good to be true because of that, right? So like these are things that when we are connected with the right person, we can show them and they go, Yeah, that’s me, man. I’m dealing with all that stuff. That’s the hard stuff.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Don’t Make False Promises to Your Client

 

That’s you get me right now. You may not be as bold and you may not be as explicit as what we just described here, But could you absolutely put some of those phrases into your communications? Boy, are you uncertain and afraid to fail? Does it feel like you’ve been fooled before and you don’t know who to believe?

 

And because of that, does everything sound too good to be true? Yeah, right. Are you frustrated you don’t know how to capitalize on all these opportunities to grow faster Right? All of those things speak to that avatar, that language. Yeah. And there’s the promise that we also share, which is that Sally will literally look us in the eye and say, I want to believe you.

 

I want to trust you, that you’ll do what you promised that you’ll do, and that you’ll do it quickly so that I can see that things are moving because the reality is, everyone, your clients and prospects make a decision. Your right fit client makes a decision based on hope and is talking about pain and pleasure and the heart in the head.

 

They’re making that decision based on hope. And here’s what it is. They’re hoping that tomorrow is going to be better than today because they hired you because they trusted you enough to hire you. That’s all emotion. So when Erik is talking about connecting, it’s really speaking to the heart first and then the head so they can make an emotional plus logical, rational decision.

 

But all of that is based on trust. Did you actually create enough trust? Well, what’s interesting is what you just described, Sally’s words. And again, guys, we have this written down and I’m looking at it right now, and Sally has said to me, Stephen, I want to trust you, that you can do what you say you can do.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Show Evidence That You Walk the Talk

 

Show me the evidence quickly that it’s working and you’re delivering on your promises. That’s her telling you I’m following my heart. I need you to help justify in my head. Yep. Right. So that’s an actual quote from somebody talking about exactly the principles that we’re talking about today when it comes to the connection side of things.

 

How to attract your ideal client and convince them? So again, you need to be able to do the work around the niche, the demographics and the psychographics to get into the ballpark. Then you need to do the hard work of being very empathetic, trying to put on their shoes, trying to understand where they’re at in order to be able to get into both their head and their heart.

 

And then there’s one more step that I heard you share a few minutes ago, and that is when you define all of this, and you and you figure all of this out because you’ve looked at data and all of that and people that you enjoy. As you said, if I could clone 500 of these, like when you have all of that figured out, not just share with your team, but actually incorporate that into your right, incorporate that into your cornerstone content, your cobblestone content and so forth, so your audience can hear you speaking to your avatar, your right fit client avatar.

 

Some will leave, and then more will come in, so you can have that person cloned 500 times. Right? Right. And so when we talk about where the rubber hits the roads, right, once the avatar is created, how should someone use it to focus their content on attracting those? Right. That folks. And so part of it is to print the darn thing out.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Gather Your Team and Start Planning

 

Get in front of your designers, get it in front of your marketers, get in front of your writers, etc. Because they’re the ones that create, they’re the ones that are creating content for this Avatar. I know that we mentioned that a little bit, but I really, truly want to have it printed out physically there. Don’t have a digital document if you can avoid it. If your team is good at managing digital documents, maybe you can.

 

But you know I would recommend printing. And the other thing is, like I said, don’t don’t rest on your laurels and put it on a dusty and don’t ever talk about it again or hope that everybody actually understands it deeply. You need to go through exercises with this on a somewhat regular basis to talk about, and it doesn’t have to be a big grand thing.

 

But how are you as a leader referencing this avatar as an educational tool and navigating difficult campaigns, navigating difficult conversations, navigating questions around content, things along those lines you have to model that? You actually look back and use the avatar to solve these problems. And in addition, one of the things that we’ve done on occasion, we need to do it more.

 

So I’m saying this is a good thing to do even if we’re not good at it. And that is basically assigning someone to be hairy or assigning someone to be Sally, you know, when you’re going through a review process, right? So their job is to be the advocate for your audience, for your right-fit clients in the room to say, Yeah, that sounds awesome, or that sounds boring, or that sounds irrelevant to me, or That sounds self-serving to me.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Always Make Decisions with Your Client in Mind

 

I don’t care about those things. And part of that is, again, that takes practice. You probably want to have someone that’s very good at being able to think like your avatar assigned to that role. But boy, can that make a big difference on having a campaign. You put a ton of time and effort into and having it fizzle versus having a campaign that you put a lot of time and effort into and going, my gosh, we’ve never had this sort of response before.

 

It’s funny that you now say that because literally that reminded me of a story from when we were working alongside Darren Hardy when he was the publisher of Success magazine, and he was sharing with us about, you know, the avatar. And shared the story about how they actually created a cardboard cutout with a photo of their avatar.

 

And I can’t remember their avatar’s name. Ours is Sally and Harry, and I can’t remember what theirs was. Little Sales Jordan or Bath or something. Anyway, they printed out a full-color photo of what they believed their avatar to look like, made a full cardboard cutout, and gave that person a literal seat in the boardroom or a conference room.

 

So when they were thinking about new campaigns or people to feature on the cover, they would literally look at the cardboard cut-out and say, How do you think she’ll feel about that? I like, Yeah, we got it. Yeah. No, we got to change that because, yeah, you know, Beth is not going to like that, right? Yeah, it’s amazing that the sound might sound silly to some.

 

It might be amazing to others. But this idea of having your right fit clients, your ideal audience, and having a voice in the room when you’re making decisions is invaluable. Yeah. So again, when you think about it, it defines them. Then it’s then it’s actually thinking about what matters to them emotionally and logically. Then write them, write it all down, and give them a name so that it’s no longer just rattling around in your brain.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Be Ready to Adapt. Life Is Not Static

 

Practice thinking like them is what we’re really talking about right now. So again, whether you assign someone to be that, whether you got word got out that that represents that person in the room, whether you’re going through and using this as teaching moments and referencing back to the avatar sheet that you got like all of that is really about giving a voice to your audience in the room.

 

And this doesn’t mean that you let this sit on a shelf and gather dust. It becomes some sort of sacred, never changing document. You’re going to learn on this and you’re going to want to change it just like you would your business plan, just like you would your products and services, just like every other piece in your business.

 

Life is not static, okay? But as you change things, you’ll also notice the things that don’t change the grid. Those are the core elements of your ideal clients, and the rest of it may be tactically nice, but it might also end up being fluff or irrelevant. This is amazing.

 

Erik, I really appreciate your time. I know that we’re quickly running out of it. So before we go, closeout, and say goodbye, please tell everyone the best way to connect with you so that they can do that. yeah. Okay. So the best way to connect with me is probably email. So [email protected]. So Erik, I spelled it the right way.

 

You can find me on LinkedIn. If you type in Erik Jensen, there are about 8 billion of us in the world, so you’ll want to type in like Erik Jensen, and then the Predictive profile comes up. That’s a great way to connect. And then, obviously, my favorite way to connect to people really want to is to join us for one of our Q & A’s. If you go to PredictiveROI.com/QA, as in the question-answer register.

 

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How to Attract Your Ideal Client: Get The Tough Work Done Around The WHO

 

We have a great group of people that get together on a very regular basis and we teach for 10 to 15 minutes and we open it up to whatever business problems there are. And I tell you, every time we walk away from that, those sessions are like, wow, we learn stuff. Yeah, we learn amazing things. Yeah, it is.

 

It is like being able to go to school every Wednesday at noon, like, like what we’re able to take out of the sessions and what we learn. And certainly we hope that we’re being helpful too. But holy bananas, it’s amazing. Yeah. I mean, we just had one of our client sessions earlier this week too, and my goodness.

 

Sharon crushed it. Yeah. Yeah. So it is great. It’s great. So anyway, those are great ways to be able to connect, if that would be helpful. Okay, everyone, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and re-listen to the words of wisdom that Erik so generously shared with you. The key is to build your own great client avatar.

 

Get the tough work done around the WHO. That’s the fundamental number one in the starting block, right? We’re in the starting block, and now we’re going to go through the what, next week and then the how the following week. But it starts with who? Because you can get really great around what you can get really great around the how.

 

But if you miss the WHO, it doesn’t matter. So it’s really critically important to get them right. And Erik gave you all of the fundamentals to do that work. So Erik, thank you again for being our great guests to come on to the show, to be our guide and mentor, to help us move our businesses onward to that next level.

 

Thank you so much, partner. Absolutely. I love doing these sessions and I’m looking forward to diving into the next two.

 

Check out this podcast of How to Attract Your Ideal Client, with Stephen Woessner