In my last post, I introduced the topic of creating one or more Ideal Client Avatars for your educational consulting business. It’s definitely one of the most important things you can do to focus your business growth efforts.
Many people start the process of trying to discover their Ideal Clients by taking everything they know about the people they want to serve and creating an Ideal Client Avatar from their head.
And this can work. But there’s a better approach: using a process for audience research that takes all the guessing out of the equation.
Why is using such a process important? Well, sometimes the people you think are your Ideal Clients don’t turn out to be so ideal.
And sometimes you’re surprised to find that people you don’t consider your Ideal Clients keep asking for your opinion or advice or even asking you to do some work for them.
When this happens, it requires some soul-searching and rethinking. And yes…audience research.
It could be that the Avatar you created from your head was on the money, and you just need to do a better job of attracting them. Or it could just be that the people who see you as the answer to their problems don’t fit the Avatar you created.
In my experience, this unfortunate and confusing scenario usually happens to early career educational consultants still trying to “dial in” their audience and offer(s).
And more importantly, if this is something you’re running into currently, what do you DO about it? Is it possible that you need to rethink who you’re planning on serving?
If this situation sounds familiar, try the following exercise to get some clarity. This comes from marketing expert Robbie Samuels (www.robbiesamuels.com) and his book Small Lists, Big Results.
Exercise: Identifying Your Ideal Clients through Audience Research
Step One: Make a list of 12-20 people who have come to you for support, advice, or services over the last few years. This can be a mixture of paying clients and non-client connections. Anyone who has asked for your help, advice, or expertise. Be inclusive.
And if you can think of more than 20, the more, the merrier; just keep listing until you run out of names. Try to get down the names of anyone who has asked for your help or advice on any topic.
You can either do this exercise on paper or, especially if you want to save the information, you can do this in a spreadsheet program.
Step Two: Once you have at least 12 people listed (hopefully more), add three more columns to your paper or spreadsheet. Label these columns “Expertise,” “Passion,” and “Impact & Income.”
Step Three: For each person on your list, think about why they came to you, then answer these questions:
- Did they seek you out for a topic about which you have expertise? If so, write “Yes” in the Expertise column.
- Is the topic they sought you out for one you enjoy so much that you’d be willing to give away your knowledge for free (whether you did so or not in that specific instance)? If so, write “Yes” in the Passion column.
- Is the value that you can offer on this topic and the impact you can deliver for the person so clear that they would be willing to pay you for it (if you asked them to)? If so, write “Yes” in the Impact & Income column.
Step Four: Next, add a fifth column to your sheet and label it “Pitfall.” Then, do the following:
- If you only wrote “Yes” in the Expertise and Passion columns, but not the Impact & Income column, write “Hobby” in the Pitfall column.
- If you only wrote “Yes” in the Passion and Impact & Income columns, but not the Expertise column, write “Trap” in the Pitfall column.
- If you only wrote “Yes” in the Expertise and Impact & Income columns, but not the Passion column, write “Burnout” in the Pitfall column.
- If you answered “Yes” in all three columns for a person, congratulations! You’ve found an Ideal Customer/Client! Highlight the rows for each of these people.
Definition of an Ideal Client
Our operating definition of an ideal customer or client for this exercise is:
“Someone who’s willing to pay you for your expertise in an area in which you’re passionate—and you know you can help them.“
Explanation of the Pitfalls
Now let’s dig into those examples where someone matched one or two of your criteria, but not all three–and what that means for your business.
Pitfall #1: Trap–If you have a passion for the topic and you’re getting paid, but you don’t have quite enough expertise to be able to know you can help them, this is a trap because you’re going to be spending a lot of time learning “on the fly” and feeling Imposter Syndrome.
I’ve seen many consultants accept work that they probably shouldn’t have accepted because it really wasn’t in their “sweet spot” of expertise (and I did this myself a number of times early in my career, so I’m not throwing any stones).
This almost always happens because the consultant in question needs the income, so they take the gig even though they know it’s not ideal for them. These gigs are usually stressful and not much fun.
Pitfall #2: Burnout–If you have the expertise in the topic and know you can provide value and you’re getting paid, but you have no passion for the work you’re being asked to do, this can easily lead to burnout because we can only do work about which we aren’t passionate for so long before we feel like quitting and doing something else.
Again, I’ve seen this happen often, and again, I’ve been guilty of taking jobs where the passion wasn’t there. When I was still doing a lot of workshops on language arts instructional topics, I really enjoyed training people to be better teachers of writing. I wasn’t nearly as jazzed about training about reading instruction topics, but when asked to do it, I often took the gig.
Pitfall #3: Hobby–If you have the expertise on the topic, you’re able to help people, and you love doing so, but you aren’t getting paid (or aren’t getting paid nearly enough), this is a hobby because in an actual business, you get paid for what your work is worth.
Being underpaid (or even asked to do some training for free) is another common problem for early career consultants–and even some more experienced consultants. So many excellent consultants out there simply don’t ask to be paid what their expertise is worth, and unfortunately many of these consultants go out of business because the income can’t sustain them.
Again, I know why it happens. Either the consultant isn’t confident enough to ask for fair payment or they’re afraid that if they do ask to be fairly compensated, they won’t get hired. But if you want to stay in business long-term, you need to muster your nerve and raise your prices. If you’re good at what you do and do a good job of marketing yourself, you’ll find the work you need.
Now, if you find yourself doing a lot of work in any of the three pitfall areas, all is not lost.
- If you’re in Pitfall #1, you can go to work to add the expertise you need.
- If you’re in Pitfall #2, you can take some of this work temporarily while you improve your marketing systems to bring in more of your ideal customers/clients, then cut the cord with the people who are asking you to do work on topics about which you’re not passionate.
- If you’re in Pitfall #3, you can raise your prices to represent the worth of your work.
But to return to the main goal of this exercise, let’s move on to…
Analyzing your Audience Research Results: Zeroing in on Your Ideal Client Avatar
Step Five: If you have at least two or three (hopefully more) people in your database for which you marked a “Yes” in all three columns, it’s time to analyze what they have in common.
These are all people who have asked for your help in an area about which you’re both an expert and about which you’re passionate. And they’re willing to pay you to do the work. Score!
So, for step five, look at what these people have in common. Write out in detail all the overlap you can see between their situations and what they’ve asked you to do.
Then hang on to this material for the next steps in our Ideal Client Avatar development process, as it will provide you with some objective, factual details that you can plug into your Avatar–details pulled from real life experience, not just guesses from your head.
I hope you found this exercise instructive and useful.
In my next post, we’ll start creating an Ideal Client Avatar for your business. Stay tuned…
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–If you’ve ever found yourself in any of the “Pitfall” areas described above in your consulting career and found a way out of the situation, I’d love to hear your story.
There are so many consultants out there struggling to make things work. The more stories I can gather from those who have successfully navigated a challenge, the more I can share with those who need to hear those stories.
So please, go to the Comments below and share those stories.
Or you can hit me up at willy@edconsultantmarketing.com.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Willy
