Setting the Stage for an Ideal Client Relationship

As a small business owner, when you position your marketing to attract ideal clients on purpose, your profits...and joy... in your business increase.

clipped from incublogger.com Let Your Prospects KNOW You Every experience is an energy exchange. If you are focused on only what you can get from a prospect, your fear of not signing on the prospect or being withholding about the amount of time you’re spending with this person, your energy will be resonating at a very low level. This makes all the difference in the world when you are interacting with someone (actually, even more than the words you say!). You want to create a different energy when connecting with a prospect. You want it to be a co-creative experience. You and your prospect are coming to this meeting on equal ground. You don’t need to prove anything. You just need to meet together to connect. Now also think about this…do YOU want to rush into a relationship with a new client or customer without getting a sense of if they are your ideal client or not. (Think about any not-so-great client or customer relationships you’ve had in the past…want tons of those? I didn’t think so.)

Focus Your Marketing on Ideal Clients

Determine your target market and fine-tune it with a laser-focus on attracting your Ideal Client.

clipped from blog.cristinafavreau.com Who’s Your IDEAL client? Don’t mistake your Ideal Client with your Target or Niche Market. They may share some similarities, but the differences are important enough to make a distinction. Your ideal client is still in your target market, but now you’re making a distinction by identifying specific TYPES OF PEOPLE — personalities — that you PREFER to service. It’s those clients that you tell yourself “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.“ Why does everything you’ve heard about marketing your business say you MUST choose a target market in order to be successful? It makes your job easier by knowing where to concentrate your marketing efforts!

5 Simple Steps to Attracting Your Ideal Client

Here are 5 simple steps to help you attract your ideal client.

clipped from www.onlineorganizing.com 5 Steps To Ideal Client Relationships GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION It was through these experiences that I began to empower myself to find IDEAL clients. I learned to discern the types of individuals who were a good fit for me, to clearly define and communicate my boundaries, and to take charge of how I wanted to run my business. Soon, I began to ATTRACT clients whose personalities meshed with mine, who respected my time and appreciated my work. There are some simple steps to finding ideal clients and fostering these relationships:

Finding Clues about Your Ideal Clients

Find out as much as possible about your very best, your Ideal Clients.

clipped from www.ducttapemarketing.com What's on Your Refrigerator? The secret to really discovering what your ideal client wants A very well accepted practice in marketing goes something like this: Find out as much as you can about your very best clients, narrow your marketing focus and find more of the same. I often start out the creation of a marketing plan for my clients with a thorough analysis of their current and past clients, with an eye out for common characteristics among their best clients. The thought is, if you can really identify traits that seem to show up in your best clients, then the game becomes a simple process of finding more people just like them. Create a spreadsheet of your clients and add columns that represent as much information as you can: What industry, size of the company, # of employees, length of business. For individuals, note things such as: age, gender, education level, income and neighborhood.

Improve Your Business Odds: Target Your Market and Attract Ideal Clients

Target marketing and attracting ideal clients are powerful marketing strategies that position your business for explosive growth.

clipped from www.jonnthomas.com Identifying Your “Ideal Client” and Niche Market Most people start their business for a variety of reasons. Some are really passionate about something and they are committed to sharing it. Some want to improve the quality of their life and the lives around them. Some are just looking for a way to make money. Some just want to make a difference. No matter how they get started, most people decide what they want to offer and then go find the market to offer it to. This is the hard way! How do you improve your odds? How do you become one of the very successful thriving businesses? You do what they do! Do your homework first! Find out what the people in your target market really need! One way to approach building your business is to take some time and distinguish your “Ideal Client”. By getting clear about who they are, it becomes much easier to find them and present your offer. You want to identify Who, What, Where & Why…

The Classic Marketing Question: Who's Your Ideal Client?

If you don't know what Ideal Clients you want to attract to your business, you'll never get them to your business.

clipped from adverselling.typepad.com How to define your ideal client When I coach lawyers, I’ve been surprised by how few can easily answer the classic marketing question: who is your ideal client? Most are too busy to think about what they want. But if you don’t know what you want, you’ll never get it. So after you’ve defined your niche (see last week’s post), it will be helpful to get even more specific and define the characteristics of your ideal clients. You may even want to define an ideal portfolio, with several different types of clients. The description of your ideal client should be specific enough that it is easy to tell who qualifies, and who does not. Consider these examples: To define your ideal client, answer questions such as: • What industry or industries should you focus on? • What job categories? • What geographic location? • What annual revenue? • What other characteristics? • Should you look for several different types of clients to form a perfect portfolio?

Quick, Fun Ideal Client Exercise

Try this exercise to identify your ideal client.

clipped from www.nightingale.com Book Yourself Solid Tip: Choose Your Ideal Client Your clients are an expression and an extension of you. Many entrepreneurs and salespeople will work with anyone who has a heartbeat and a credit card. However, this method leaves you with too many challenging clients. Learn to live by the red velvet rope policy of ideal clients. By eliminating the painful negative energy and time spent worrying about challenging client relationships, you will dramatically increase your productivity, happiness, and client referral rate. TRY THIS EXERCISE: Identify specific characteristics that your ideal clients possess. Bring to mind your favorite clients — the ones you love so much you’d practically work for free. What are they like? Here are my top five. Bright (fun, lively, and expressive humans) Courageous (dream big and aren’t afraid to take risks) Resilient (come back for more even in the face of failure) Think big (have high aspirations and their projects benefit many people) Your turn.

No Ideal Clients?

What kinds of clients do you naturally attract?

Who do you enjoy working with most?

clipped from www.soulbusiness.com IDEAL CLIENT SKETCH: The term "ideal client" is truly a misnomer. So is the term, "ideal coach", for that matter! Over the past 20-plus years, I have worked with a wide variety of people dealing with an equally large number of personal, business and/or spiritual issues. In all that experience, no one -- including me -- has ever been "ideal". However, in order to give the reader a sense of the types of people with whom I best work and seem to naturally attract, I offer the following outline...

Getting Burned by UN-Ideal Clients?

Stop working with bad clients.

Learn how to attract Ideal Clients to your business.

clipped from www.freelancetipster.com Who is YOUR Ideal Client? How did I figure out who my ideal client was? By getting burned by UN-ideal clients! I don’t think un-ideal is a word but I can tell you I’ve received up to 3rd degree burns from baaad clients. So once again it’s FreelanceTipster to the rescue! [queue Supergirl music…] Below is a list of not only what I look for, but more importantly what I don’t look for - I’d encourage you to do the same. Personally, I’ve found that when I stick to my list, I don’t fret over the projects I turn down because I can feel confident it’s just not a good fit! My Ideal Client IS someone who My Ideal Client IS NOT someone who Who is YOUR Ideal Client? Personality Do they fit your niche? Project Size Show Me the Money Don’t Show Me Just Money

Join the Top 2% of Small Business Marketers

Dr. Doug's style is wacky and entertaining... and in-your-face.

In this article, he references the Pareto Principle. It's key to wrap your head around this concept as you determine your target market, position yourself as The Expert, and attract Ideal Clients to your business.

clipped from www.drdougdhp.com Success Principles of the TOP Money Making Experts I’ve also discovered that to be really and truly successful you will have to separate yourself from 98 percent of the rest of the world. Most of you are familiar with the The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity ). The principle states that, for many events, 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes. Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales comes from 20% of your clients."