How to win amazing clients with an ideal customer profile

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t make the same commitment. It’s not hard to understand why.

After all, when you understand your customers and what they really need, you can create the perfect environment to attract the best business.

The key to achieving this focus is an ideal customer profile. This helps everyone in your business to recognise what an amazing client looks like, how to attract them and what makes them happy.

How an ideal customer profile can help you to win amazing clients:

1. You can talk their language

An amazing client is someone you have a rapport with, someone who understands and appreciates the value of your business. 

You can get a headstart on this positive relationship by understanding how they speak. How do they describe their business challenges? How do they talk about possible solutions?

We all want to feel like we belong, and clients are no different – if your business talks in a way that feels relevant and familiar to the very people you want to work with, they’ll take notice.

What to do about it now

• Go through the raw testimonials you have from clients and look for patterns
• How do the clients you loved working with describe the benefits you gave them?
• If you have online reviews, look at these too, and spot the points that are repeated

2. You understand the problem you solve

As business leaders we are so close to our products and services that it is almost impossible to see them objectively. You can’t read the label from inside the jar.

We’re not the customer, so guessing why someone did or didn’t choose to work with us won’t provide the full picture, or help us uncover the true value of our offering.

If you fully understand the problem that customers are trying to solve you have a huge competitive advantage – most businesses look the same because they haven’t understood their customers.

What to do about it now

• Pinpoint five of your recent clients that represent the perfect customers
• Book them in for an interview and ask them why they chose you, and not someone else
• Ask about the problem you solved, and how they’d describe you to someone else

3. You know how they feel

Nothing attracts attention more than emotional marketing – in fact even in B2B, purchasers are nearly 50% more likely to buy when they see a personal benefit.

An emotional bond is stronger and more impactful than a rational one. When your emotional promise resonates with your ideal client, you’ll be easier for them to remember.

Emotional appeals also tend to put off troublesome clients who only want cheaper or faster alternatives, leaving you more capacity to sign up amazing people who value your work.

What to do about it now

• Think about the feelings that you give people, rather than the features or your service
• Identify an emotional outcome you can deliver – is it relief, elation, reassurance or so on?
• When describing the benefits of your work, make them as personal as possible

4. You know what amazing looks like

To get amazing clients you have to filter out the rubbish and difficult ones, and focus your attention on understanding how to appeal to that ideal customer.

This is difficult at first, because you have to make sacrifices. You must give up on selling your offer to anyone, anywhere, with any kind of need. 

But cutting out bad clients will raise your spirits, and make everyone in your business happier. And happy people are irresistable. 

What to do about it now

• Run a survey of your staff and ask them what working with an ideal client looks like
• Take an overview of your previous clients and combine it with the survey results
• Use both sources to draw up the attributes and characteristics of your perfect customer

5. You stand out from the crowd

In a sea of generic, me-too offerings, any business that stands out is appealing. Yet almost all businesses are talking about hygiene factors like quality, integrity and reliability.

That’s not how you make an impression. People love it when other people understand them, because it helps them to believe that you really care about their needs.

This matters because when people believe that you care, they’re more likely to trust you and your solution – they’re also more likely to recommend you to other people like them.

What to do about it now

• Share what you’ve learned from talking to previous clients in everything you do
• Use it in networking events, on LinkedIn posts and so on, and always invite feedback
• The feedback you get will help to shape and improve the raw material you have

6. You know where to find them

If you don’t know where your ideal clients are then your marketing is just shouting into the wind, and no amount of jumping on the latest social trend with help.

Facebook, TikTok, Clubhouse, it doesn’t matter how popular they are. No channel is a silver bullet, and creating content regularly for zero reward is hugely demoralising.  

But once you understand what your ideal customer is looking for and where they go to find it, you can focus all your efforts on that space and enjoy far greater success.

What to do about it now

• An easy check is age demographics – TikTok’s average age, for instance, is under 30
• Be relevant to your audience by identifying how they use a specific channel
• Use your Google Analytics ‘acquisitions’ tab to see where people are visiting from

7. They recommend you in their network

Awesome people know awesome people, and they talk about other awesome people too. Just like troublesome clients will typically only refer you to other troublesome clients.

Finding amazing clients is challenging, especially to begin with as you might only discover one or two at a time, but once you find a rich seam of connections the rewards will increase.

What’s important is that they have good things to say about you. Managing expectations is important, but what matters most is treating your ideal client in a way they would want to talk about.

What to do about it now

• Establish an onboarding process with clients, so it’s always clear what a project involves
• Dedicate a few brief slots in your diary every week to check up on clients personally
• Create ‘handoff’ packages for clients that make it easy for them to recommend you

8. You know what puts them off

Only targeting amazing clients will help prevent any difficult clients getting through, but it’s just as vital that you continue to observe and learn what makes those ideal customers happy.

Only 1 in 26 customers complain. The rest just leave, and you’ll never know why. It’s not enough to just convert people into clients, you need to build relationships that help improve your business.

This is the high wire act of working with amazing people – you can’t afford for a part of your business to put them off, because that flaw will outweigh the positives elsewhere.

What to do about it now

• When good clients leave, don’t be worried about asking them politely for feedback
• Talk to your staff about the complaints or feedback they receive most regularly 
• Use this to inform measurements, for example the average number of project revisions

9. You can predict what they need

Because we don’t come to our services or products from an outside perspective, there might be gaps or obstacles along the way that we can’t see.

Perhaps it takes too many clicks to perform a regular task. Or there’s a useful trick we’ve always known that might take a client a long time to learn. 

An ideal customer profile can help you to predict what people want from your offer or how they use it, so you can impress them with how much you understand their needs.

What to do about it now

• Call up three clients and ask them how you could make it easier to work together
• Use client feedback (point 8) to look for common frustrations or pitfalls
• Ask your newest staff about their first experiences with your product/service

10. You can create the ideal customer journey

Every step to working with you involves a mix of choices, opinions and reactions. An ideal customer profile gives you the best chance of making the right people do the right thing.

When you know what people need you can tailor how you talk to them – this will increase the likelihood that they will respond to you in the way you want them to.

This works in the whole customer journey. Use clear, accurate information to guide how to interact with a client and you’ll be able to build a process that gets the best results.

What to do about it now

• Revisit your website and ask what your ideal client would do when they arrived
• Influence their actions, for example by creating a button that resonates with their needs
• Use that knowledge, for instance by leading to a landing page about that specific need

How can we help you to win amazing clients?

At RDG Accounting we help a variety of businesses to identify and attract their ideal clients, from start-ups to sole traders or limited companies.

A reliable, professional chartered certified accountant is essential to both managing and understanding the health of your business.

By analysing and understanding your current business model, processes and systems, we help to evolve the way you work so your business gives you the lifestyle you want.

We can help with:

• Company accounts
• Business Start-up
• Bookkeeping services
• Tax returns
• VAT
• Sole trader accounts
• Payroll
• Cashflow planning
• Management accounts

If you run a small business and would like to start building an ideal customer profile, please book a call.

Alternatively, if you’d like to get started sooner you can call us on 0333 200 0714.

Book a call

References:
www.superoffice.com
blog.hubspot.com
business.linkedin.com