Working with a couple of new 1:1 practice building clients and reading a lot of social posts in the past couple of weeks has shown me that people of all different types of business disciplines are tying themselves in knots trying to work out this thing called the IDEAL CLIENT – sometimes also known as a client AVATAR.
In this blog post I’ve condensed some real-life conversations I have had with clinicians in the past two weeks. I wonder if you can see anything of your experience in what follows?
What is the purpose of an Ideal Client?
Having a summary of an Ideal Client is useful for Marketing purposes. Knowing your preferred, ideal client allows us to be able to attract them to us because we know them, and they feel understood. It then makes us attractive to them, and the practice is that they will then want to know more about us, learn to trust us and like us enough to exchange their money for our knowledge and expertise.
However, I am seeing waaaayyyyy too many people trying to force this whole Ideal Client thing. It’s not helping anyone. It’s not helping you as the clinician and it’s not helping prospective clients. In fact, we may be stopping people from reaching out when they need intervention because we are getting this so confused in our heads.
What an Ideal Client exercise is not…
An ideal client is not a set and forget exercise.
It is not the ONLY thing you will need to learn how to market yourself effectively.
It is not the holy grail.
It is not the golden goose.
Just like a website, a Linked In profile and Facebook Page, your Ideal Client summary or profile will take time, energy and an investment from you to work out. Then, just when you think you’ve got it worked out, it will need refining and adjusting and changing. Because, PEOPLE CHANGE. And you change, yes, you – you will change.
You cannot just Populate a workbook or an activity to find your Ideal Client and then all of your marketing problems have been solved.
Therefore, if you are wanting to find the recipe for YOUR Ideal Client that will be the Ideal Client forever then I am sorry to have to tell you but that’s not going to happen, and you will be left feeling frustrated and wondering why your marketing isn’t working.
When is the WRONG time to be focused on finding an Ideal Client?
If you do not have enough client’s in your practice, and you are fearing lack as in I don’t have enough money to pay the bills, then focussing on getting your ideal client right, is the WRONG thing to be focused on. You need to be focused on getting client’s in your rooms. They might be “ideal”. They might not be. Chances are if you don’t have a steady stream of ideal clients coming through your door, there are a few more things going on than just the fact that have haven’t got your Ideal Client profiled yet.
But Jo, I hear/ read so many Private Practice coaches telling me I can’t market until I know my ideal client. My response to that, is actually, no we don’t. We say – Market to a person, or a person with a set of issue that you know how to address and help with. We say, market to a person’s pain points and help them see how you are the answer to their pain.
We say it’s helpful to know who your Ideal Client is and we will tell you that it’s going to make your marketing so much easier. We will tell you that it’s a growth tactic. We will NOT tell you that you can’t market until you know who your Ideal Client is.
If they’re not saying that, they SHOULD BE! Because this is EXACTLY what I tell my clients.
Have you found yourself saying this..? “I want to avoid all the mistakes others have made and just get it right from the start…”
Kudos to the clinician who was brave enough to start this conversation with me late last week.
However, as she spoke and as I coached her, we discovered, like pretty much every other clinician under the sun, that if it comes to being able to make financial ends meet or working only with her ideal client, then she would choose making financial ends meet.
The first thing you need to do to get client’s in your door is to ease the burden of worrying about not having enough money.
But Jo I hear/ read so many Private Practice coaches saying that I won’t FILL my practice until I know who my Ideal Client is.
Actually, no we don’t.
NOPE. That’s NOT what we say at all. We say that to build a business that SERVES YOU, where you are doing the work that fulfills YOU, whist working with the people you are best able to serve, then, then we suggest you profile your ideal client so you know exactly who it is you are looking for, so you can attract them to you.
You cannot give the time energy and attention to profiling, exploring and delving into your ideal client when all you really want is someone to pay you, so you can pay the bills. It takes a brave clinician who will say – “Jo, right now my ideal client is someone who will pay me and see me every week and refer 20 other clients who will pay me and see me every week”. THAT is a great ideal client to start with.
I CAN show you how to fill your practice.
I CAN help you profile your ideal client.
I CAN help you fill your practice with ideal clients BUT…
… I cannot help you to fill your practice with your ideal client if you are always freaking out about not having enough client’s to pay your bills, because you will water down your message and say – Please come to me anyone who will pay me.
So, do the right homework first. Work out how much income you need to generate, get that income happening then start working out how to create a service that attracts your ideal client.
As clinicians the way we enter the market is different…
You see we have a skill set that not everyone has – we can sell our clinical expertise. That is what we do first, then once we have our clinical expertise feeling like it fits well, we can see the types of client’s that we ENJOY using our clinical expertise with.
Once we combine our clinical expertise with the client’s we ENJOY working with and we see the ACTUAL RESULTS that this clinical expertise brings these client’s whom love to work with… THEN we can start profiling our ideal client.
Are we trying to run before we can walk?
We need to walk before we can run. If you are reading his blog post then chances are you will know enough about human development to know that if a child wants to run they first need to kneel, then crawl, then walk, then walk some more, then walk some more, then one day they are running. We DO NOT go from lying on our backs to running. Clinicians do not go from being a graduate with limited experience to a “I know who my ideal client is” clinician.
When you have your clinical expertise meeting the needs of clients you will see patterns emerging of the types of client’s you LIKE, and these will be the people you will be naturally wanting to see more of and more often. THEN you have the basis for starting to profile your Ideal Client. You can’t start to profile an ideal client if you haven’t put your clinical skills to use yet.
But Jo, I need to get my Ideal Client RIGHT…
There isn’t actually a RIGHT ideal client. Stop trying to get this right. You are working with people, your ideal clients are people, the point of this exercise is to help you speak to the people. IN FACT, even those who DO have an ‘ideal client’ sorted…the people who come to them are STILL hybrids of all kinds of people. Your ‘ideal client’ you outline might be 35years old and single…yet..you’ll have a 42 year old person who’s married come to you who YOU WILL LOVE working with! The ideal client is more about making your life easier when it comes to speaking to the people – aka marketing to them. That’s it.
You can’t actually get this wrong. They are your ideal clients -no one else’s. Sure, there may be other people serving a client group that you love to work with – but you are you, and the client’s are them – and we are all unique and different. THIS is what makes being a clinician so exciting, because we all add to the richness of human experience. No two clinicians are the same therefore no two clinicians will have the same ideal client.
Jo, just tell me who my ideal client should be…
So many people want the Ideal Client exercise to sooth their fears and heal their lack of confidence. Again, that is not the purpose of any Ideal Client exercise. However, seeing that so many of you have asked I thought I would create the start of the profile of the Ideal Client that would help us all to feel safe, secure and certain in our private practices.
This person will be:
- Someone who will pay your bills on time every time. No scratch that – they will pay BEFORE they see you without question.
- Someone who will do all of their homework after every session without question.
- Someone who will respect all of your boundaries.
- Someone who will refer another 20 people just like them to you, so you never have to market ever.
- Someone who doesn’t mind when you get sick or there is a crisis at home and you need to reschedule.
- Someone who doesn’t want to use their insurance or asks if you are government funded.
- Someone who is fun and has no issues.
- Someone who is in touch with their emotions and is completely self-
- Someone who promises to never relocate so they can stay with you forever.
- Someone who won’t ever make enough gains to be discharged from treatment, so you will never have to replace them.
Too many clinicians are stuck in this process of trying to identify their Ideal Client. They create a process and want to complete a task. This drive for task completion drains the humanness from their endeavour and it is repelling. Your prospective clients can smell desperation a mile away – and yes, I do think the internet has desperation smell-a-vision.
The last thing I want to state here is this
If you are not working with your ideal client, you have not failed.
If you are serious about experiencing the growth that comes with knowing who your ideal client is then you need to put the following into place:
- You need to know who you are first!
- You need to be willing to invest in someone who can help you craft the Ideal Client profile.
- Once your profile is created you will need to invest in someone who can show you how to use this profile in a leveraged, helpful way that actually brings client’s to your practice.
- You need to be prepared to learn, to become uncomfortable and to address the resistance that WILL come up in you.
Can I help you – I don’t know, why don’t we chat to see if I can?
