Next best, not ideal — Kelford Labs Weekly

When business owners, consultants, and service providers think about their ideal customers, I often find they’re thinking about a fantasy.

What I mean is, their ideal customer is rarely an actual person, an actual business, someone they know, someone they’ve heard of.

It’s usually a concoction of different types of client, or worse, a vague persona that they cobbled together into this artificial vision of who they would love to serve or work with.

They imagine the Fortune 500 business that finally comes down to talk to them and accepts their help, and they’re able to make a huge impact on a massive business.

Or they think about their competitors’ clients and how much they wish they could work with them. 

Or they imagine business owners like themselves and believe there’s someone out there exactly like them that needs exactly what they provide.

The problem with this, though, is that these aren’t necessarily their next best customers.

When we’re thinking about ideal customers, we don’t want to skip all the way to the end.

We don’t want to skip past the customers we’ll need to get on the way to those ideal customers.

Because in attempting to skip those steps, we’re actually trying to traverse a chasm we aren’t prepared for, that we aren’t equipped for. Instead, we need to take things one step at a time.

It’s okay to have a vision. It’s okay to have a “dream client.” I sure have them, too!

But we need to see them as visions, as fantasies. And if we’re going to achieve that vision, if we’re going to fulfill that fantasy, we need to follow the path there.

Which doesn’t start by going from the customers you have today to the customers you want somewhere out in the distant future.

It starts with identifying who are the best of those current customers, the ones most financially and emotionally profitable, and figuring out how you can get another customer similar to them, but slightly better.

Perhaps slightly more profitable, perhaps slightly more within your wheelhouse, perhaps slightly more focused on one specific offering or product.

And then you do that again and again and again, and you find yourself following a path you never knew existed but becomes clear once you're on it.

You start seeing, not just the forest that you want to traverse, but the trees in front of you that you need to step between and go past to get through that forest.

The idea here is to not strive for perfection, but to strive for progress.

To strive for a process that allows you to take one step at a time closer and closer to your ideal customers.

So here’s what I recommend doing:

If you feel that you need more profitable customers, or you simply need more customers, or you want bigger customers, the way to get there is not by trying to jump from where you are today to where you want to be.

It’s to find the next best step along that journey.

It’s to remain flexible, knowing that the path will branch, there will be more choices to make, there will be more opportunities to focus, more temptations to expand.

But if we start taking one step at a time closer and closer to the customers we want most, we’ll find ourselves making progress toward them.

Instead of becoming increasingly frustrated that we’re not getting anywhere at all.

If you want to learn more, or ask questions, about how to find your ideal customers by finding your next best customers, join me tomorrow for a Linkedin LIVE with fellow marketing consultant Alison K:

Register here.

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