How to Find Your Ideal Client
Episode 53: How to find your ideal client, with Stephen Woessner
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How to Find Your Ideal Client? Attract more clients and build stronger relationships by focusing on how to find your ideal client.
For over 30 years, Stephen Woessner has been in the trenches of agency new business strategy working alongside and consulting with hundreds of agencies, business coaches, and consultants — teaching them how to plant their flag of authority within the markets they serve, grow their audience, and fill their sales pipeline with a steady stream of right-fit clients so they can win new business.
Stephen founded Predictive ROI in 2009 and remains its CEO and co-owner, working alongside his business partner, Erik Jensen. Stephen hosts the “Onward Nation” and “Sell with Authority” podcasts with listeners in over 140 countries and over 1,000 episodes. His agency new business and marketing insights have been featured in major media, and he’s the bestselling author of five books, including his latest entitled, “Sell With Authority.”
How to find your ideal client? In this solocast episode of Sell With Authority, Stephen shares his insights and strategies for finding and attracting ideal clients for your business.
Drawing from his own experiences as a lifelong baseball fan, Stephen explores the parallels between the game and the world of business, highlighting key strategies and insights that will help you and your team be more successful.
While exploring these parallels, Stephen uses baseball analogies to illustrate the concept of getting “at bats” with potential clients and how to scout out and attract clients who are right-fit for your business. He also discusses the importance of having a well-defined customer avatar and using data to track and optimize your marketing efforts.
Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, this episode offers valuable tips and strategies for how to find your ideal client and attracting your ideal clients and taking your business to the next level.
What You Will Learn in this Episode is about how to find your ideal client:
- The concept of getting “at bats” with potential clients and how to find your ideal client
- The importance of understanding your own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to attracting right-fit clients
- The power of building relationships and delivering value to win over clients
- The role of communication and feedback in maintaining successful client relationships
- How to continuously evaluate and adjust your approach to attract and retain the right-fit clients
- Strategies for crafting a compelling message that resonates with your audience
- The power of social media and networking in attracting clients and building relationships
Resources:
- Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to this Episode of Stephen Woessner and Colleen Gallagher: Make Yourself an Easy Yes for Right-Fit Clients
- Visit our newly expanded Resource Library
- Join us in our free How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline Facebook Group
- Stephen’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
- Order your free paperback or Kindle copy of our Book: Sell with Authority
- Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client and you can find Stephen here
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Sell With Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of predictive ROI. And this episode is going to be a solocast. So I’ve, sort of gotten off of my normal schedule of every four to five weeks of a solo cast. We’ve been teaching a ton, recently, and so maybe you attended some of our Q and as in March. We hosted two, we also hosted collabs and cocktails. we also hosted our, um, March intensive that we, that we offer, our clients every March, July, and November. So that was a two-day intensive. So there has been a lot of teaching, over the last several weeks. So in full transparency, the schedule has been full, working on a lot of curriculum and new frameworks and, and all of that. So, but we’re past that now, and we’re getting ready to put a lot of new experiments into the lab as we test those out.
And then we share the results and so forth in our, upcoming July intensive. But now we’re shifting gears. We’re shifting gears to the, two q and a’s this month, we’re shifting gears to, the Build a Better Agency Summit that is coming up in May. And if any of you’re going to be there, yay for that. Be sure to look for us, because Eric, my business partner, Eric, Hannah, who’s our mad, scientist and strategist, yes, that’s her actual title here at Predictive, as well as Megan Kimmel, who’s our operations manager and me. So, there are going to be four from the predictive team who are going to be at the Baba Summit. and we look forward to crossing paths with you and spending some time in person. So if you’re gonna be there, drop us a note.
How to Find Your Ideal Client: A Deep Dive into the WHO Framework
we’d love to see you. So back to the solocast, today’s topic is, if you’ve been listening to the show for a while now, you know that every four to five, four to five weeks or so, like I was just mentioning, I like to take some time where it’s just you and me, focusing on a particular topic and a particular topic at depth. And that’s what we’re gonna do today. And the topic is how to find your ideal clients. Now, here, predictive, um, we, we take that a little bit further and, and we put this, I don’t know if moniker is the right word, but right-fit client. so the words right fit instead of ideal, in front of that, because we’re, we’re always looking for ways to, make that more narrow, make that tighter, make that more clear as far as helping you find your right fit client.
Because we all know what it feels like to work alongside a wrong-fit client feels like a whole lot of not awesome. So when we think today, high level, how to find your ideal client, the things that we’re gonna be working through, is, is actually our WHO framework. So I’m gonna walk you through each of the sections. So if you’ve not yet downloaded our WHO framework, this would be a good opportunity to do that. If you go to predictive roi.com/who, you’ll be able to download the framework. There’s also, a short kind of summary training there. I think it’s about 10, 15 minutes or so. We’re gonna take more time in the solocast to go through kind of the nine major boxes, if you will, that are on the framework, and walk through that. So if you have it, great. Then this episode is essentially gonna be kind of your tutorial through the framework.
if you’re driving, if you’re doing something else, working out, whatever, and you don’t have the framework in front of you. Okay? So, so I’m recording this for you, and then obviously you can go back and, and fill out the framework. and hopefully, this solo cast is going to be a helpful guide in doing that. Please know that any of our q and A’s, I think our q and schedule, this month is April 12th, and then I think the 26th, so April 12th and 26th, at any time, any of our frameworks, please feel free to bring them to Q and As. And if you have questions, even if it’s not the topic of the q and a, that’s fine. You know, we start off the q and with 10 to 15 minutes of our latest insight around whatever that topic is.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Moving Further, Faster Towards Your Goals
How to find your ideal client? Like, for example, I think April 12th, if I remember correctly, is how to make money from your rant. And then I think April 26th is, how to create content like cornerstone content, cobblestone content, how to create that more efficiently, how one thing can be to get into a bunch of other things, and we’re gonna walk through some recent experiments, and some results and all of that. So, even if, those two topics are not something that you feel like you wanna learn, something you know about, or hear about those experiments and the results and that kind of stuff, or whatever, to put that into your process, maybe you feel like you’ve got that in a, in a solid, inside your agency coaching practice or consultancy, but you have questions about frameworks. Okay, bring, bring the frameworks to the q and a, and even though they might not be aligned with that particular topic, that’s fine.
Bring them to the q and a, because after we share the 10 to 15 minutes of insights around the thing, whatever the theme is of that, particular q and, you know, then we go open mic, and we answer lots of different questions. So if you have questions, after this solo cast, after filling out your framework and that kind of stuff, and you feel like, you know, hey, predictive, I’d like to have some additional insights, or I have some questions about this or that, or whatever, can you gimme some examples here? bring it, bring it to the q and, and then we’ll help you fill it out. So, I’m gonna ask for your grace in advance here, And the reason why I say that is because, you know, baseball season, I’m a big baseball fan. Baseball season is now in full swing, as of Thursday last week.
And so I might be, dropping more than, one or two baseball metaphors, but, but one of them is, is actually really relevant. And here’s what I mean by that. And this will start to kind of set up our conversation for, this morning or for, this episode, is what I meant to say. Um, so when, whenever we’re out and about, whenever we’re, you know, teaching workshops and, or hosting q and as, or maybe the Tuesday afternoon call, with some of our clients and members or, um, you know, when we’re meeting with prospective clients, maybe for the first time, we hear this question sort of over and over again, and it’s not really more, it’s not really a question, it’s more of a statement. And that is, Hey, predictive, I would be able to move further faster, further faster toward our goals, further, faster toward our vision, further, faster toward our mission.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Accelerating Progress with the Right Fit Clients
How to find your ideal client? You know, insert whatever at the end there that feels appropriate for you. We would be able to move further, faster toward x if we just had more at-bats, more at-bats with prospective clients. Now, there’s a lot of nuance in that statement, and it’s not as simple as, oh, okay, you’re getting a hundred at-bats this quarter, or this year, whatever the number is, and now it just needs to be 150 or 1 25, or 1 75 or 200. It’s more complicated than that from the standpoint that they obviously have to be the ideal client or that they will turn into the ideal client, or in using our language, the right fit client, they have to fit certain criteria. And also we have to set up the business in order to make sure that we’re standing in the box, we’re standing in the batter’s box, and we’re ready to receive the at-bats, you know, when they get thrown our way, and we can improve our probability of success when we step in the right batter’s box when we face the right picture.
When we’re very clear about our criteria and the type of client that we’re looking for, then it’s then we have a higher probability of actually attracting the right fit client. That is a great fit. So, another baseball, um, sort of story, I guess. So in, in, in the major leagues, and this, and this is, this is part of the game that I just, and I should say baseball in general, not just major leagues, but this is part of, the aspect of baseball that I really love, and that’s really the science behind it, and it’s the strategy behind it. Because here’s the reality, inside a strike zone, there are typically, so if you think of a strike zone as kind of like a rectangle, a thin vertical rectangle, right? But that rectangle is actually broken into nine kinds of squares, if you will, or nine boxes, and pitchers and hitters use those nine boxes to train in different ways or for different purposes, I should say.
How to find your ideal client? So here’s what I mean by that. So a pitcher will use those nine boxes as a way to master their four, their 2, 3, 4, 5 pitches that they essentially have in their repertoire. You know, like, can they actually hit those nine different zones on command with the right speed, the right pace, the right movement, you know, can they actually throw a slider that starts, you know, high out of the strike zone and then hits in the bottom left corner of that box? And so then they use that as a way to train and develop the control and delivery of the pitches in the repertoire. It’s really, really cool. And so each pitcher essentially then develops kind of a sweet spot. They may have 2, 3, 4, or 5 pitches in kind of their repertoire. Um, and then they, there’s a certain kind of zone, sort of like, if you thought of it as like a heat map, if you will, across those nine boxes, you know, where they really have mastery and skill.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Matching Pitches to Your Strengths
I assure you it’s not all nine of the boxes, you know, just because of their mechanics and how they’re, you know, sort of like they’re the angle at which they deliver the ball. I mean, there are just so many different things from a physics perspective that affect the pitch, okay? My point is, is that they start to see some clustering. It’s like, oh, okay, this pitcher, you know, they, they, they tend to throw, they’re 3, 4, 5 pitches, you know, in these five or six boxes within the nine boxes, okay? So that’s how they help, or that’s how pitchers get better by mastering their craft and really understanding their sweet spot and what they can do within that sweet spot. Alright? Now, let’s take it to the hitters. Same nine boxes. And every single hitter has a different type of swing. They have different hand-eye coordination.
How to find your ideal client? They have a different sort of speed at which they can process, you know, when the ball, like literally their brain’s processing the information of when the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. Did you know that it takes less than a second? It takes 0.7 seconds. So it’s seven milliseconds from the time that the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand to the time it hits the catcher’s glove. It’s less than a second. And it takes about 0.3 seconds in order for the, batter to even see the ball. And then it takes another point, three seconds, to decide if they’re going to swing. So literally, in fractions of a second, these decisions are made, okay? So when they’re rushed or when it’s, when, when the swing is smooth when they feel like everything is kind of going the way that it should be, um, all of these things need to, like, go into place or fall into place in order for the batter to get a hit.
And also, the pitch that is coming in also has to be in the batter’s sweet spot. So, not every batter, no matter how good they are or how long they’ve been playing the game, can hit a pitch in all nine of those zones. They, too, like the probability of a strikeout goes up, if it fits into, or if a pitch goes into one of the zones where they don’t have a lot of strength, either because of hand-eye coordination, the strength of their swing, the speed of their swing, all of that kind of stuff. So there are two is a heat map and a clustering, you know, that, that they may be able to hit a pitch super sweet, like right in the sweet spot of the bat if it hits in zone or they, they can hit it in zone four or five, but if it’s in zone nine, they’re toast, right?
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Navigating Your Right-Fit Client Zone
They’re gonna, they’re probably gonna strike out. So that’s where the strategy of baseball really comes in. Pitchers know where the strengths and weaknesses are of various batter batters, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of a particular pitcher. So in, in the, and I, and I know I’m kind of rambling on here, I’ll pull this back to the who framework, I promise, in just a second. So when a batter steps into the box and, and that batter takes 6, 7, 8, 9 pitches in the at-bat, you know, they’re fouling them off or they, or they, you know, you know, they, they have a really good eye, and so they’re taking the balls and, and not swinging, or they’re fouling off the strikes. And, so there’s lots of different ways they can elongate the time that they have at the plate, but here’s why that strategy. And so they’re wearing out the pitcher, yes.
That’s important, too, because a pitcher wants to be able to get in and out of an inning in 10 to 15 pitches if they can. So when, when, when a batter elongates a batting or an at-bat, the pitcher gets more tired. so, so that’s part of the strategy. But then also the people behind, like on deck, waiting for their turn to step into the box. They get to see all the pitches, pitches, they get to see like in a nine-pitch at bat. And if a pitcher has three or four good pitches, they may get to see those three or four pitches delivered three or four times. And so now they feel like they’re better prepared. And so the pitcher is kind of giving their sort of recipe away in full transparency. And now every other batter downstream kind of sees the pitcher stuff if you will.
How to find your ideal client? Okay? So now let’s take this into right-fit clients. The more we know about our nine boxes, the more we know about where our sweet spot is, kind of a heat map. If you want to think about this from the point of view of you being a pitcher, or if you want to think about this from the point of view of you being a batter, you got nine boxes in the strike zone, right? You have a sweet spot in the strike zone. You may be able to serve clients in all of those nine boxes, but you do have a sweet spot. Now, I am not suggesting that if somebody swims into your net, maybe they’re not part of the niche. That, and yes, we are gonna be talking about niche here in just a second, but I promise you we’re going to talk about it in maybe a way that seems a little bit weird.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: When to Take on Right-Fit Clients
I say I promise you in, and then maybe we’re gonna talk about niche in a way that you may not have heard before. So a little bit more flexibility in the criteria. But, so if somebody swims into your net, and let’s say that they’re not, you know, in the quote-unquote niche, but they swam into your net, meaning that they were a referral or, had seen the work that you had done for a different client and then they looked you up and they want you to do that same type of work, there’s a variety of different ways, obviously, that somebody can swim into your net, but you didn’t put any biz dev resources toward it, okay? They swam into your net, should you take the work? Maybe. And here’s what I mean by that. And so maybe you’ve heard, Eric and Hannah and Megan and I or other members of our team say something like this.
How to find your ideal client? If you can do that work, and you can do it well, and you can do it profitably, then take the client, right? If you can do it well, and the client’s gonna get result outcomes, awesome, and you can do it profitably, you’re not gonna lose money, then take the work, right? So, so I want to, I want to go back to the nine boxes here for a second because, you know, that might be in box number one. You know, if you’re a batter, that might be in box number one, and it’s not part of the heat map, but somebody swims at your net, fine, take the work. If you can do it well, the client’s gonna get great results outcomes, and you can do it profitably and take the work. But when we’re dedicating business development resources, meaning you’re following the sell with authority methodology, meaning you’re creating cornerstone content, you’re slicing and dicing that into cobblestones, you’re using that cobblestone as transitional moments to fill your funnel.
The people who step through the transitional moments, you’re giving a great experience so they never feel like one of your prospects. And then you’re having conversations around your multi-tiered value ladder that are strategically linked and strategically priced, and then you onboarding new clients, and you’re showing them in full transparency how you’ll help them never run out of future because you’re always going to be helpful over a long period of time. That process probably covers maybe 4, 5, 6, 7, um, probably not that many, many, many. It probably covers three, four, or five of the boxes out of the nine, right? So you’re getting more and more narrow, more and more focused on your sweet spot, knowing when to swing or where to throw it, depending upon if you’re thinking of this from the point of view as a pitcher or a batter when you know that your batting average is gonna go up.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Mastering Business Development
So if we’re thinking about it from being the batter, the perspective of the batter, excuse me, your batting average is gonna go up, you’re hitting more pitches with power RBIS go up on-base, percentage goes up, maybe team wins goes up. I mean, just a lot of different things happen when you’re hitting in your zone, alright? And when your pitcher, your strikeouts go up, the command on the mound goes up, you’re confident, your command on the mound goes up, your confidence goes up, right? And it seems like everything is just working out. You’re just, you are really in the zone that particular day because you have command of your pitches, and they’re going exactly where you wanted them to go, right into the sweet spot, the right fit pitch into the right fit area of the strike zone, okay? The same methodology, framework, metaphors, and whatever word you want to use can be applied to business development.
And that’s what we’re going to break down now, using the WHO framework as our guide. So again, if you have not yet downloaded a copy, it’s a free copy, or it’s a free framework, excuse me, go to predictive roi.com/who, you can download, the framework. Okay? So just like the strike zone, the WHO framework has nine boxes. There are three columns of three, and we’re gonna go from left to right from top to bottom in each of the columns, and we’re gonna break this down so that you can fill it out. And then you’ll be able to start to see how when you master these columns and how you master these nine boxes, you’re gonna get more and more clear, and it’s gonna become, it’s going to become so much easier in identifying in how to find your ideal client. It will become like, gosh, what word am I trying to, all of a sudden I got a loss for a word.
It’ll just become more, a lot easier. I was trying to think of like, some sort of catchy metaphor, like a hot knife through butter, and it, and it just wasn’t happening. Okay, so let’s go through the columns first. Um, and then from left to right, and then we’re gonna fill in each of the boxes. So high level first, the three columns. The first column on the left is find and identify. And if you don’t have the WHO framework with you but you have a sheet of paper, that’s fine. draw three columns and then, two horizontal lines. And now you’ve got nine boxes on a sheet of paper, right? So the column, the vertical column on the left at the top, write the heading, find and identify the middle column, and write the heading emotionally and logically connect. Then the column on the right, write the heading Niche deep dive.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Unlocking Business Potential
Okay, so now we have the three columns, labelled. Find and identify for column one, emotionally and logically connect for column two. And then niche deep dive for column three. Okay, so now you’ll have three boxes from top to bottom in the first column. So here are the three boxes. Go ahead and label them, on your sheet of paper, or you’ll see this obviously in the WHO framework if you have it in front of you. But we’re just gonna label the nine boxes, and then we’re gonna go through and break them down. So, top to bottom in column one, on the left is niche, and box one underneath Niche in box two is demographics, underneath demographics, and box three is psychographics. Okay? So niche demographics, psychographics, that’s box 1, 2, 3, top to bottom. Alright, the middle column, emotionally, logically connects the three boxes from top to bottom.
box number one is pain, and then in parentheses, heart. And then number two is pleasure, in parentheses heart. And then number three is justification in parentheses head. So it goes: Pain, pleasure, justification. 1, 2, 3, pain, pleasure, justification. Okay, a final column on the left column heading, niche deep dive, and box number one, problems. Box number two, stories box number three, ponds. So problems, stories, ponds, top to bottom, 1, 2, 3, problems, stories, ponds. Okay, so we now have nine boxes, nine boxes labelled. Okay? So let’s start going through them and, um, making this as detailed and specific as possible. And again, if you ever have any questions, concerns, and so forth about filling out the WHO framework, you can always get in touch with us. raise a hand in a Q and A, drop me an email at [email protected]. And Stephen is spelled S-T-E-P-H-E [email protected]. We love this stuff and we’re happy to answer, any questions or concerns that you might have.
Alright, so let’s start going through the niche. So when Drew McClellan and I, CEO of Agency Management Institute, he and decided to write the book, so with Authority, um, we wanted to take niche to a different level. And, here’s what I mean by that. You know, it’s, it’s interesting when, when, when we meet, um, when we meet agency owners, business coaches, strategic consultants, that is our tribe here at predictive, as, as, as you probably know, um, and, and we’re out and we’re, let’s say that we’re at a conference and we start talking about niche. Or if I’m teaching a workshop and we start teaching niche, it is amazing to be able to see. Now, this doesn’t happen obviously a hundred percent of the time, but oftentimes, we can start to feel sort of the shift of energy or the energy shift or sort of momentum in the conversation shift.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: The Four Ingredients for Business Abundance
We can feel a little defensiveness come up because when, when you talk niche, oftentimes niche is met with, oh, that means scarcity. Oh, that means I would have fewer prospects. The reality is, is that when we niche, according to the four ingredients that I’m gonna give you here, you actually step into opportunity, you step into abundance, okay? So, and what’s also important to know about the kind of niche recipe, if you will, that I’m gonna share with you is that it can be any of the four ingredients, any of the four ingredients, listen to the four that I’m gonna share with you. And you might decide, yeah, alright, I’m gonna pick one, I’m gonna pick ingredient number two, okay? And though also recognize the more ingredients that you choose out of the four, the better the cookie, right? So, the better the recipe is going to turn out.
So here are the four ingredients, and I’m almost even res reticent to mention ingredient number one because I promise you this is where most people, when they’re thinking about going down niche, going down the path of niche, excuse me, this is where they get hung up. But my job is to mention, the, the sometimes the tough topics. So the first ingredient of niche is industry. And again, this is where, um, a lot of the hangup happens. Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re telling me that I can only work with, manufacturers of capital equipment, using ex extruded aluminum processes? No, that’s, that’s, that’s not what we’re saying. Um, and, and so let’s, let’s move into all four of the ingredients, but I’m gonna give you all four first, and then we’re gonna come back and talk about how they knitted, how they get knitted together.
Um, but the industry is one of them. Can you go more narrow by being selective and strategic about the industry? Yep. You most certainly can. Okay, so the next one, the next ingredient in the recipe, ingredient number two, is the audience. And here’s what we mean by that. That, you know, your clients and prospective clients audience better than maybe even they do that, you know, the motivations, the psychological, or excuse me, the psychographics, the demographics of their audience better than they do you understand the business issues that your clients’ perspective clients are dealing with. You understand the challenges, the obstacles, and how they’re trying to scale. You understand the trends, and you understand what’s going on in your clients and prospective clients’ world better, maybe better than your client does that is having strength. And so when you understand your audience or excuse me, your client’s audience, what ends up happening is you are going to start attracting clients and prospects who want to sell through to that audience.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Unlocking Niche Success
And they say things to you like, um, hey, you know, one of the reasons why we want to start working with you is because you understand that audience. Maybe you have a pond of that audience that they wanna step into. Maybe you host an event for that audience that they want to be in front of. There’s a variety of different ways that you can develop that audience strength into a strength. But now you start attracting clients because they want to be able to step into your audience because your audience is their audience. Holy bananas. That’s good. Strong stuff. Alright, so now let’s talk about number three. Number three is business issues or challenges. Maybe you solve a particular business issue or challenge better than anyone. So I don’t know. Let’s, let’s say, you know, in our world, we often talk about how we help clients fill their dry sales pipeline, or better yet, go from having a dry sales pipeline into a pipeline that is more like a steady stream of right-fit clients flowing into their pipeline.
and these clients are eager to work with them and want to pay a premium price for the privilege to do so. But that’s, that’s one of our gifts here at predictive. So whatever that might be for you, maybe it’s lead gen, maybe it’s, maybe it’s, a cultural issue, maybe whatever that business issue and challenge is that you solve better than anyone in, in, over and over and over again. You meet prospective clients that struggle with this same business issue and you and your team, you just knock down that domino over and over and over again. And prospective clients are like holy bananas, how do you do that? And you’ve got all this wonderful social proof for your clients about how you do it again and again and again and again, right? So business issue and challenge, a business issue and challenge is ingredient number three.
You can absolutely build a niche around that. Okay? So, ingredient number four is a superpower. So let’s say, you know, like almost 10 years ago, I guess maybe eight years ago, I would’ve said, like our superpower, and I talked about this in episode 354 of Build a Better Agency with Drew McClellan in his podcast when he was asking me about, and, and, and he was super helpful and us really pivoting our niche from, you know, eight years ago. But eight years ago, I would’ve said the predictive ROI was an awesome podcast shop. That was our superpower. I mean, to date, I think we’ve produced like 12,000 episodes, you know, podcast episodes for our clients over the years, and for predictive so that we’ve produced a lot. Like we understand audio, we understand how that structure, we understand how to optimize it, we understand like all of that stuff because over the last eight years we’ve done 12,000 episodes.
Learn more about How to Find Your Ideal Client by tuning in to our tutorial: The “HOW” Framework
How to Find Your Ideal Client: Building a Business Recipe
Are we a podcast shop today? No. Do we still produce podcast content because that’s the cornerstone that our clients have chosen? Yes. And then have we developed expertise in how to slice and dice that, turn that into sales funnels and all that kind of stuff? Yes, of course we have. And then our business has become much more channel-agnostic, so we can help our clients across a myriad of cornerstone and cobblestone, you know, channels, if you will, with the whole goal of not producing a podcast. The whole goal is how do we fill their sales pipeline with a steady stream of rife clients who are eager to work with them and pay them and, eager to get them, or eager to pay them a premium price and the privilege to do so? Like how do we do that? Right? There are all sorts of arrows in the quiver today that didn’t exist eight years ago.
Eight years ago, I would’ve said that that was our superpower. Today, it’s much more, um, much more balanced, if you will. You know, eight years ago, I would’ve said that we were one trick pony, as we talked about in the book, sell with Authority today. Nope, not a one-trick pony at all. So think about it from that context. What is your superpower, right? What is the superpower that you are best at in class? You know, maybe it’s SEO, maybe it’s lead gen, maybe it’s PPC, maybe it’s omnichannel media, maybe it’s PR, maybe it’s something else. But what is this superpower that you are best in class? Alright, so now let’s think about these four ingredients, niche, audience, business issue or challenge, and then superpower. You can absolutely build a niche around one thing. Like we’re only gonna work with capital equipment manufacturers that produce these types of things for these types of clients.
Yep, you can absolutely do that. Or, we’re gonna only work with Dennis. Can you do that? Yep. Could you also then say, we’re gonna only work with Dennis because we understand, you know, moms better than anybody and, we happen to really solve the issue of lead gen over and over and over again, and we do that through this PPC strategy that’s best in class. Can you knit that together in such a way, that dentists might find that super attractive? Absolutely. So there’s a very quick example of how to knit all four ingredients together in such a way that the niche becomes really strong. Okay, so that’s niche. So now let’s take that deeper, and then we’re gonna start to pick up pace and tempo. I spend a little bit more time on niche pieces because that’s typically, again, that’s why we put it at box number one, because if we can’t get niche, right, everything else in the other eight boxes doesn’t work, it becomes incredibly hard to say in box number nine.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Crafting Your Client Profile
You know, the three columns of three, and then the, you know, box number nine, the lower right corner ponds is what that’s going to be, right? As we talked about, it becomes really difficult to step into the right pond when you’re trying to serve everybody. You’re trying to catch fish, any type of fish. So that’s why we cover niche first. Okay? So now let’s look at demographics and psycho-psychographics, and I promise we’re gonna pick up our pace and tempo. So with demographics and psychographics, demographics are the things, the criteria if you will, that are essentially searchable in a database. Could you take these things, whatever you identify for, demographics around your, right-fit client? Again, you know, the demographics are super important because what’s the overarching goal of this solocast? How to find your ideal client. So that starts with demographics, right?
That we can step into searching a database, whether that’s Crunchbase, whether that’s LinkedIn sales navigator, whether that’s insert database X, y, z doesn’t matter. But we need to be able to have a series of 2, 3, 4, 5 things that are going to help us start creating that separation. We do this exercise in our, workshop that, drew and I teach, um, it’s called Build and Nurture Your Sales Funnel. And, we spend a few minutes before lunch, so let’s say 15, 20 minutes before lunch on the first day,, and we hop into Sales Navigator, I pull it up on the screen. Now, there are a bunch of agency owners in that room, and oftentimes, we’re meeting them for the first time. So I’m not super familiar with their niche and that kind of stuff or whatever beyond what they may have shared with us kind of in the introductions.
And you know, what we’ve learned along the way, sort of in that, early morning session, or excuse me, in the morning session. So then I asked for a couple of volunteers, and within like five minutes for each of those scenarios, we’re able to hop into the LinkedIn navigator. I can ask them some pointed questions about, like, some keywords and maybe how long they’ve been in the business and maybe the size of the particular business and location and, like, is the United States is a certain state within the United States, like a region and that kind of stuff. I can ask them certain demographic-type questions, and we go through and fill them out in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, so as I’m asking questions, they’re giving me answers. I’m putting that into LinkedIn Sales Navigator. I promise you, every single time that we do this, within five minutes, we go from like 31 billion people million down to a list of like 175.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Tailoring Your Message to Your Audience
And then the person who’s like first or second on the list, we click into that profile, and I ask, would this look like a right fit client to you? And they’re like, holy bananas, yes, that’s absolutely a right fit prospect for us, right? So, that’s possible because of demographics, right? And so if you’re thinking, well, I don’t, I don’t really know what the demographics are, go into LinkedIn. If you have a subscription to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, go into LinkedIn Sales Navigator and start using those fields as a way to start collecting or the way to start kind of sorting, if you will, the priority of demographics. So, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great place to start. Okay? So that’s the demographics piece. So now, let’s take and shift our attention towards psychographics. Psychographics are the things that you know about your Right Fit client that you want them to be able to match because this is going to help you then, essentially customize and essentially speak, their language in your content.
So here, here’s what I mean by that. When you think of your quote-unquote email list, I want you to actually not think of your email list as a thousand people or 5,000 people or 20,000 people or whatever the number is. I want you actually to think of the next email you send that is going to a person. So here, here’s what I mean by that, early on in the business. So, let’s think 2012, if you will. So what is that? 11 years ago, Eric and I had this opportunity to step into, mentorship, and also, he joined, so Darren Hardy, when he was the publisher of Success Magazine, joined our advisory board, for about 12 months. And we learned a lot of lessons from Darren around the avatar piece. And then he told me the story about what it was like at Success Magazine at the time, and I can’t remember the name of their avatar, forgive me for that, but so he said, he goes, when we’re sitting in our conference room and we’re thinking about who’s going to be on the cover, you know, next quarter or some of the big stories that we’re gonna write about and that kind of stuff, we actually look to one of the seats, at, you know, around the table in the conference room.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Connecting Emotionally and Logically
And they have this like, cardboard cut-out with like this photo of, you know, their avatar, their, their reader of success magazine sitting right there. And like literally, that person has, a seat at the table, a voice at the table, and they say like, okay, let’s ask Jackie, forgive me, I can’t remember, the avatar’s name. Would Jackie like that cover photo? Would Jackie like that headline? Would Jackie like that story? Is there something that Jackie would rather learn about in this particular issue than this? And that’s what we’re talking about with psychographics, that you understand your avatar so well, you understand their pain points, you understand their goals, you understand what they’re trying to accomplish, you understand what they’re afraid of, you understand the obstacles, you understand the daily challenge and grind so that when you are creating content, you can use the same words.
And that your avatar here at predictive ROI, we have Sally and then the male counterpart, Harry, because we like when Harry met Sally, that’s, well, I say we, but candidly, that’s my favourite movie, so, or one of my favourite movies. So that’s a little bit of my bias there. But, anyway, we think of Harry and Sally, we think of like, well, is this going to be super helpful when we teach this at the intensive? Like, how would Sally feel about that? Or when we send out this next email campaign promoting this and sharing this latest episode, is that something that Harry’s going to care about and that’s meaningful to Harry? So understanding the psychographics and why your right-fit client makes the decisions that they make is super important from a psychographic perspective because that then ties into the middle column. Okay? So let’s go there now emotionally and logically connect.
You’ll see that the two boxes are pain and pleasure. And then the next box is justification. Let’s talk about pain and pleasure first, and when we understand our psychographics, that makes pain, pleasure, and justification possible, right? So there is this nearness, if you will, um, in being able to understand psychographics because it feeds into the middle column of pain, pleasure, justification. It was Dr. Sigmund Freud who really took the pain, pleasure principle, if you will, um, you know, as, as far as he did in his research, but I think it was actually cited back in the 14 15 hundreds. I don’t forgive me, I don’t remember the original Discover’s name, but it was really Dr. Freud, Sigmund Freud, who, who kind of popularized it and really worked on that, as part of, you know, all of his work. So we make decisions as people, um, on one word, or let me, let me rephrase that, I didn’t say that correctly.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Understanding Your Audience
One word drives all of our decisions, and then we go back to pain, pleasure, and justification after those decisions have been made. So one word drives those decisions, and that one word is hope. That, my hope is that tomorrow is gonna be better than today. And my hope is, is that if I make this decision, whatever the decision is, that tomorrow’s gonna be better because of the result that I made the decision. And then this is what Dr. Freud’s work was around the heart. And then, um, the, the, the two different pieces of heart, and then we’re gonna work into the justification piece is that as, as people, we are driven by either the avoidance of pain, which is also felt in the heart or then the attraction to gain more pleasure. So we either run from pain typically, or, and I’m kind of an odd duck because I sort of run toward the pain, but that that’s maybe a solocast for a different time because I like to run toward the challenge and the difficult conversations.
But we either run from the pain or toward the pleasure typically. So it’s also, then, then logical to, to, to think, okay then if we’re, if someone’s making a decision and if hope is really driving it, as much as we like to think that we’re logical human beings, we’re making decisions based on data, the reality is, is that we’re making our decisions in the heart first based on hope. And then we come to the head of the justification piece, the, oh, I want to do this thing now I’m going to try and figure out all the different data points, head justification to rationalize that decision. So if you understand the pain, and you understand the pleasure, and you understand the justification, now it becomes really easy to create content that is incredibly helpful, that is speaking to the pain points that are speaking to pleasure.
Let’s call those goals, objectives, what they want to accomplish, all the visionary type of things in their business. And then you can reinforce that decision with the right justification, the things that they need in order to, you know, if you wanna call that, um, buyer is a buyer, buyer’s re remorse or cognitive dissonance. It’s all of those different types of things that we need after the decision to reinforce that we actually made a good, logical decision. Okay? That’s the emotionally logical connection. And your content needs to be seeded with that in spades because when you do your right fit client avatar, in our case, Harry and Sally are going to take that in and say, okay, not only are they speaking my language, but they’re actually speaking my dialect. It’s like almost, you know, the five, love languages. It’s almost like that it’s the standpoint in, in, in your content feels so much so personalized as if it is truly just for them, right?
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Navigating Niche Deep Dive
Because you understand them at that depth. So emotionally logically connected that’s column number two. Alright? Niche, deep dive, the three boxes in a niche, deep dive problems, stories, ponds. So this is really what is going to take us even deeper into the content piece. And then, where you share it. Okay? So problems and stories, these are the three, if you wanna call them problems, you wanna call them business issues, wanna call them challenges. I should also say that I didn’t mention this when I was going high level as far as creating the boxes in each of these three boxes, a niche deep dive. If you have the framework in front of you, you already see this and, know this to be true, if you’ve created the nine boxes on a sheet of paper in problems in that box, write 1, 2, 3, top to bottom, 1, 2, 3.
And then the same thing with stories. 1, 2, 3. And the same thing with pons. 1, 2, 3. Okay? So, in problems, this is where you’re going to identify the three problems, business issues, and challenges that you know your right fit client is dealing with on a day-to-day basis, and one where you can be helpful. Now, in last week’s March intensive, I shared this with the group, and then my business partner, Eric, jumped in with a really important clarification. And that was, he goes, Hey, Stephen, wait a minute, just a second. He goes, I think we need to add another piece here around the aspiration. And I’m like, oh, okay, what do you mean? And he said, you know, yes, if there are three problems that you’re solving today, yes, that that could absolutely go into 1, 2, 3. He goes, but he goes, maybe it’s one and two. And then three is reserved for aspirational that we don’t currently solve this business issue or challenge today, but part of the two-year or three-year plan for the agency coaching practice or consultancy is that we will at some point in the, you know, X period of time, I’m like, oh, okay, I like that very much.
So I want you to be thinking about that here, too, that maybe it’s three problems that you solve today, and it’s awesome. This also, as you can tell, hooks back into the niche. And then also maybe one of these is aspirational, right? So that the growth of the business and where the future of the business is going. Kind of like us eight years ago when we were producing thousands of podcasts, we were like, okay, this is fine today, but this is not the agency that we envision in the future. And then several years later, we started changing that, and now today we’ve changed it, and you know, we’ve got years and years under our belt and lots of content of having changed it. So it’s worked out well, but back then, it would’ve been aspirational. So feel free that number three could be aspirational for you, too.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: How to Share Success without Self-Promotion
Okay? stories next. 1, 2, 3. What are the stories that you can tell about solving those business issues and challenges on behalf of clients and prospects that really show in a non-self-aggrandizing way that you and your team really know what you’re doing? What are the stories that you can tell standing in front of an audience? And I’m gonna give you a litmus test here about the right audience in just a second, but what are the stories that you can tell that you can teach from? These are not stories about you. These are stories about the problem and how the problem was solved, and you are helpful in solving that problem. But these are not problems or these are not stories about you, these are stories about the problem and how your client overcame them, and you were a part of that mix. Obviously, these are not self-aggrandizing, okay?
So here’s the litmus test as far as audience. So Eric and I used to be a part of a group and we loved the group. It was awesome. And, and we thought, you know, it’d be really great to be able to stand in front of the group and deliver a presentation, like to be able to teach and kind of share and that kind of stuff or whatever. Um, and then we, and then, and then at one point, we got an opportunity to do that. And, but then later Eric and I were talking about like every time we were to step in front of that audience like we would think about, okay, wait a minute. If we’re gonna tell this agency story, and let’s say that there’s a bunch of, you know, non-agency owners in that audience and we tell this agency story, they may still be struggling with that same business issue.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Tailoring Stories for Your Audience
Okay? The issue itself is agnostic. The issue itself stretches across industries, many different businesses, and many different industries could be dealing with that Same with same business issue, which by the way, that’s ingredient, that’s y that’s ingredient number three in niche, okay? So, but if we’re going to stand in front of that audience and talk about, let’s say, an agency owner example and how we help solve X, and then we’re doing that in front of a bunch of non-agency owners about X, even if they’re dealing with X, will they feel like this is relevant to them or that they’re their own unique snowflake? And so what we just shared, because it was from the agency point of view, is actually not helpful. So I want you to be thinking about stories from that perspective, that what you share and how you share it matters in front of whom you share it with, right?
And when you start thinking about those different scenarios, if it’s like, oh, wait a minute, I need to kind of tweak that a little bit, because if I don’t, then the people who I’m sharing that story with are gonna be like, yeah, but okay, what’s in it for me? Like, how, how does that help me? And that’s where, again, stories are tied to niche. So this is another proof point. Let’s go to the next box underneath stories, and that’s ponds, right? So I sort of gave it away already when I was talking about this one particular group, and, that then was a powerful litmus test to Eric and myself of like, well, this is probably the not, not the right pond for us to be fishing in, right? It, it just wasn’t. However, then 180 degrees in the opposite direction, every time I teach alongside Drew inside, like, you know, at an agency management institute workshop, it’s the right pond.
We’re standing in front of agency owners teaching and sharing and all of that. I don’t have to change a single thing about our content. I don’t have to try to make, you know, this slide deck on point because that’s who we created it for, right? So it’s totally on point. We’re in the right pond, or when we step into us how to fill your sales pipeline Facebook group, which, by the way, if you’re not a member of our Facebook group, we’d love to have you join us. And there should be a link inside the, or in the show notes, for this episode when we step in front of, our Facebook group and we share, you know, Shera Tori’s latest podcast episode, when she was our guest last week on our podcast. do we have to sort of like sanitize that in such a way that it becomes the right fit for our pond?
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How to Find Your Ideal Client: Unveiling the WHO Framework for Success
No. Why? Because Sharon’s all about helping agency owners, you know, take their intellectual property and transform that into income streams. Amazing. So it is totally on point for our pond, right? When we write books, when we create all of that content, that’s why we’re super specific about who we’re helpful to because it’s important to get our pond correct when we step into, and we host the March intensive like we did last week, and we invite all of our clients and some guests to join us for those two days. it’s not, it’s not odd at all that we’re having a bunch of guests or some guests interacting with our clients because they’re all running similar types of businesses, non-competitive geographically and that kind of stuff or whatever. So all of that is, is fine, but the pond is intact because it’s, it’s, it, everybody is sort of, you know, in the same framework, emotionally, logically connect, it’s intact, define and identify it’s intact, right?
Nobody is stepping in thinking, oh, well, this two-day intensive isn’t for me because I’m so unique, and I don’t know why I said yes to this. The pond remains intact. Okay? So, that is the WHO framework. I hope that that was helpful. I probably went a little too deep with the baseball stuff, and I apologize in advance or not, I guess in advance, in retrospect, about that. I think I did at the beginning. If you gave me grace, thank you. If I annoyed you with all of the baseball references, I’m sorry. but hopefully, that was helpful in some way of illustrating the point about the nine boxes and strike zone and also, for or strike zone for both pitchers and batters and how that fits. So, again, I hope that that was helpful. I look forward to you joining us for our April 12th Q and A.
If you go to predictive roi.com/qa, like question, answer qa, you’ll be able to register for the April 12th q and a. and then after the April 12th Q and A is done, we’ll, kind of, um, revise the registration page and then you’ll be able to register for the April 26th q and a, but it’s always predictive roi.com/qa and those links will also be in the show notes. So thank you again for taking, the time to spend with me on this, um, what we feel is a very important topic. I hope that that was helpful. Any questions, drop me an email, or step into our Facebook group, and ask away, not just the predictive team will be helpful, but everyone in the group, you know, lots of people will jump in and provide their insights and wisdom. So until next time, onward with Gusto.
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