If you don’t feel like you enjoy working with your ideal clients, or you’re struggling to make sales, it might be time to consider that your ideal client is the problem.
Perhaps your client doesn’t feel onboard or committed, or you’re getting ghosted after sales calls, then you may want to look at your ideal client. It could be other reasons that are causing this but if you look at the people you’re targeting, you need to ask yourself some honest questions.
Does your ideal client care about the problem you are trying to solve and the transformation you create? Do they care enough to commit to working with you and help solve their problems? If someone doesn’t care enough they won’t be willing to spend any money on it.
When I first started coaching, I remember trying to get someone to part with £15 to let me help them. Even at that level, the biggest reason they weren’t willing to even spend £15 on my services is that they didn’t actually care about the problem I was trying to solve. Now, I’ve come a long way since that time and my current clients care deeply about the problems I solve and the transformations I create.
Often, I find that people who are targeting the wrong audience do so because they undervalue themselves. They are not confident in serving people at a higher level. Someone further along in their journey who has bigger problems. Or perhaps you are trying to solve too much of a general problem and you are not niche enough.
What are you saying to your ideal client? How are you positioning yourself? And when you look at this, is it something your ideal client cares about?
Does your client care about the problem?
For example, looking at the weight-loss market, if you target people who want to lose weight full-stop it’s very general. So you might find your conversions quite sporadic. Therefore, you might find one person becomes a client and another didn’t. It’s interesting to look at why they don’t want to commit and why they don’t care enough. And the person who did pay, are they a different demographic and psychographic?
We can look at different types of people who want to lose weight. You have high-performers who, stereotypically, want to spend a lot of time in the gym and put on muscle mass so therefore care about their appearance. Therefore you’d need to tailor your marketing to that specific person. They would care more than someone who says they want to lose weight but doesn’t make any changes.
Are you targeting the person who cares about what is going on? They don’t need to care positively, in my example of the gym-goer who wants to take it further, they want an ambitious outcome. They need accountability with someone with expertise to get there quicker. Someone else with a bleeding neck problem who needs to lose weight for their health, they are more likely to spend money with you. The problem is more urgent.
Scale of caring
I’m using drastic examples here. There are extremes. This is important when building an ideal client because you need to create a full picture of who you are targeting. On these scales of people, you’ll find people who are on their own scale of caring. You won’t always nail the perfect, committed ideal client every time. Even within a niche market, you’ll need to find the ones who are committed and use your messaging to market to those people.
Is the reason why you’re struggling to make sales that they don’t care enough? And do you need to nail down who you’re serving and what you solve so you can then explain their need for you?
If you’re having to convince someone then that’s a signal to ask if you have the ideal client. If it feels like you’re dragging people in to work with you, then that’s a sign to reconsider what else you can help with.
Match the product with the client
Using last week’s example of website building. You are either at a stage where your website builder looks after it for you on a monthly basis or they get it to a stage where you take it over. Or sometimes a hybrid of the two. Let’s say your business is teaching entrepreneurs how to build websites from scratch. Now, unless you are going to build websites for other people, would you want to learn to build a website from scratch? It’s very unlikely. What they were trying to teach and what people want to do doesn’t match up.
Startups that are short on cash will want to cut corners and do it themselves. The ideal client wouldn’t make much money and then spend a shed-load of time trying to teach your tech-illiterate ideal client how to do it when they just need a one-and-done solution.
A better way would be to teach entrepreneurs who build websites for other people or teach VAs new skills so they can offer this to their clients. This would be better than spending money on skills that don’t really matter.
You need to look at whether what you’re trying to do for people matches what they want. Otherwise, if you’re trying to convince people, it makes your life difficult. Then when you have someone onboard, they are not committed. You also don’t get the results and it makes you feel rubbish.
If this describes you, now is the time to redefine what you do and who you do it for. So you can create a perfect match where you articulate a problem and the solution that your clients want to hear about. Then you can get people coming to you rather than chasing clients down.
You need to get this right to make sales.
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