10: Identifying Your Ideal Client to Accelerate Your Business with Seema Alexander & Kelly Lynn Adams

To niche or not to niche is a major question. People think they have to niche and niche and get sales in the door but it’s a process. Entrepreneurship is a journey and we learn as we go.

When you start a business and you may know exactly what you want to do you still need to validate your business idea and you still need to talk to your ideal client avatar. When you go broad it’s good in a way because it allows you the space to test and validate what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. You change as a person along the way so your business might eventually change or get tweaked. It’s good to be okay with where you are at right now wherever you are at because it’s going to evolve and change.

Five steps to understanding how to get your ideal client

1. Discover yourself and discover who you want to serve: Learn about yourself in the process. It’s a self discovery process of who you are right now and who you want to serve that will give you the best results. Connect the dots with your life to your own niche. Clarity is key and maybe right now you aren’t clear but if you give yourself time and space you might come up with an “aha” moment.
2. Identify your ideal client. Learn everything there is about them, the usual demographics such as age and gender etc. but also their characteristics. Where do they hang out offline and online? What’s their value system? Know their desires (What do they want? What’s missing for them?) Why have they not gotten there yet?
3. Create services and products that solve their biggest pain point: Pain points, frustrations or their desires and dreams. This is important but it’s also important to just lead with one. Focus on one pain point and the desired outcome and that will make them really pay attention.
4. Validate your product: The first year of entrepreneurship is exciting but also humbling because there is a lot you don’t know. Until you realize there is a lot you don’t know this won’t resonate with you. You probably have market research departments in your company and you don’t have that as an entrepreneur. You can do mini focus groups or (once you have identified your ideal client) maybe bring them over to your house, pop open a bottle of wine and ask them questions. Talk to them about their pain point and start to validate.

When you are thinking of your product or service make sure it’s not a niche to have, but a need to have.

Lead with the most relevant service your client needs right now, then as you become more successful you can open it up to the other multi faceted opportunities you are thinking about in your head right now.

5. Keep learning from them: You are going to keep testing and asking but sometimes your audience changes. People with the most successful businesses say that you need to have products or services that have a lifetime value of what they can keep learning from you. It’s easier to keep a client and “upsell” them or offer them something else that would help them than it is to get a new client.