Defining Your Ideal Client

If your approach to cold calling is to pick up a random list of people and start calling then you're doing it wrong. The smart way to do it is to understand and describe your ideal client profile. You can then measure your prospects viability against these pre-determined criteria.

As I have mentioned before cold calling can be emotionally draining. Especially when you keep getting rejected. It can take us a few hours of slogging through a bunch of 'no's' to get a 'yes'. The key to getting more 'yes's' is effective research and cold calling. One of the key elements of effective researching and qualifying is defining your ideal client profile.

How To Define Your Ideal Client Profile

Use the following questions to help understand and define your ideal client profile.

Can you define your ideal clients demographics? Things such as:

• Job title - does your product work with the top decision makers or is it a better fit for a mid level manager?
• Age - perhaps your product fits with a millennial's requirements? Maybe it's because their decision making differs from Boomers.
• Gender - you might find that the way you work fits a male persona better, as they like your 'no nonsense' attitude.
• Income level - if your product is expensive then only the prospects from a large rich company or individuals earning a significant salary could afford it.

2. Think about some of the characteristics of the clients that you enjoy working with. What values and personality traits do they have?

3. Think about the answers to these more specific questions:

• What are the specific benefits your customer is seeking when buying your service?
• What is the geographical location of your ideal client?
• What happens in the client's business when they buy your product?
• What vertical markets should you focus on and why?
• What strategy does your ideal client use to buy? Do they call for meetings with suppliers? Do they send out a request for information (RFI)? Do suppliers need to tender for their business?

One of my customers does communications for large corporates. We produce conferences and other events for these companies. Due to the fact that this company puts in much more work than most their prices tend to be expensive. The expense is worth it once the customer experiences the quality that we produce. Since the product is expensive it is only really viable for the large companies in South Africa. The larger the company the more likely we are to be able to help them.

Based on the paragraph above my ideal client for this company looks like this:

Our typical client is a large company that has many white-collar workers. They employ more than 5000 people nationally. They have many branches around the country. They need to communicate with their staff on a weekly / monthly basis. Our work is typically project based with each project’s budget determined when the company does their annual budgeting. Our ideal client works in the banking / insurance industries in South Africa.

As you can see above this definition helps me understand what kind of prospect I am looking for. It gives me an objective measure to weigh each prospect I find against.

Now it's up to you. Define your ideal client profile. If you struggle reach out to me and I'll try and help you as you go.