Sharpen your Prospecting Power with Ideal Client Profiles

Does your business run better with a shotgun? Or a laser?

When you want to hit something with a shotgun, you point it in a vague direction, and hope to hit something when you pull the trigger.

With a laser, you have to be precise.

Aiming at one specific point.

Most small business owners have a scattershot method of promotion. They go ‘blam, blam, blam’ all over the place hoping to hit some customers, and sometimes, they do.

Eventually, these shotgun entrepreneurs look at all the resources they spend to try and hit everything, and they realize:”I need to get specific.”

If this is happening to you, ask yourself….

Who is your ideal client?

(Don’t say ‘anybody,’ because it’s not.)

By getting specific on who you are aiming for, you can generate more referrals from your network, and make more money for less work. I’ll give you two examples:

1 –  The Ideal Client Profile Makes You More Money

A car insurance agent once told me, ‘Everyone is a prospective customer for me.’ Most people have a driver’s license, and are required by law to carry car insurance, so his Ideal Client, he told me, was – anybody.

There are two big problems with this:

1. Some customers are more profitable than others
2. Referrals don’t come from vague descriptions about who your clients are

After we worked together in a marketing consultation, he was able to specify who he was really looking for: drivers between 35 and 55 with a clean driving record and a college degree.

These were the people that made him the most money on a policy, and gave him the least amount of hassle. Now, he makes more money in less time.

2 – The Ideal Client Profile Generates More Referrals

A massage therapist I worked with used to say that she could “work on anyone with a body.”

When she said this in networking groups, nobody gave her any referrals.

After hiring me to write up her ideal client profiles, she now says, “I work on pregnant women who are losing sleep due to lower back pain.”

She gets referrals all the time, because anytime one of her colleagues talks to a pregnant woman who mentions lower back pain or sleep loss, they remember – this is someone’s Ideal Client!