Are you having difficulty attracting the right prospects for your product or service? It could be because you haven’t really clarified your beliefs.
Simon Senek says we need to Start with Why. I agree. 7 years before his book was published I read a book by Debbie Bermont called Outrageous Business Growth, where among other things she laid out a model for identifying your ideal client.
I like her approach. The outside ring is the market segment’s demographics and psychographics. You’ve probably already clarified that, right?
As you can see, each ring gets smaller as we narrow in on our target. The next ring is about our mission and why for being in business. Our why aligns with the problems our target market is experiencing. So identify the challenges and pain points that your ideal clients have that you solve.
Next, we take a look at our values, because our values and our ideal client’s values must be congruent. If you value family time and stopping work at 5pm, you aren’t going to want to attract clients that expect you to be available to answer their questions at 8pm, right?
Finally the bullseye – this is where you find your very best clients. According to Bermont this circle represents our Business Philosophy– What do you believe that they must also believe. Exactly what Simon Sinek is saying in Start with Why.
For example, one part of my business philosophy is that I believe that people create their own reality and being a small business owner allows us to practice doing just that…especially during challenging situations like we experienced with Covid…and as we work to create our own reality, we experience personal growth. So if someone doesn’t believe that or they aren’t interested in personal growth, they won’t resonate with what I offer.
The key is though, it’s up to us to make sure that our beliefs are apparent. Otherwise how will people know to be attracted to what we offer?? Have you been to Simon Sinek’s website…his belief is front and center.
So before we do any marketing we need to do the work to identify our own beliefs and then work through Debbie Bermont’s model to describe our ideal client…
When we have both of these things fully flushed out, all of our marketing copy, including our website, should be speaking directly to this defined market segment and the problems they are experiencing that we can help them with.
If you’d like a copy of the Ideal Client Target graphic and the worksheets that I’ve created to go along with it, use this link to download a copy.
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