I was wrong about my ideal clients: The risky mistakes I made early and how you can avoid them

Our story begins on a brisk Tuesday afternoon.

This wasn't just any Tuesday, the winds of change were upon us. I was driving north towards the mountains in the San Fernando Valley when something told me I should take the next right. I pulled in to a small strip mall. I looked up and in front of me was a coffee shop named after the book, Moby Dick. As I pushed the door open, I noticed not many customers. I looked behind the counter and I saw the owner of the coffee shop come from the back. I approached her with caution, ready to share my pitch for how I would get her business out into the world. I spoke slowly sharing piece by piece what I was offering her small business. In my mind, I thought this was a sure sale, but when I looked up, her eyes met mine and she said, nothing is cheaper than me doing it myself. In this episode, I'm going to share a little bit more about why I was so wrong about my ideal clients early on, what I did to course correct and how you can avoid my same mistakes and find your actual buy ready clients.

I'm Lex Roman. I help creatives make smarter marketing bets, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show. 

Before we get into today's episode, I want to make sure you know about my upcoming webinar with Pathfinder, SEO on the impact of AI on SEO strategy. Whether you've relied on Google in your business or you offer SEO services to your clients, you're not going to want to miss what Pathfinder has to say about the changing landscape of SEO. It's free to join us Friday, October 27th at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. Find the link to register in the show notes. 

I tell this story purposely as a cautionary tale to help you avoid selling the wrong people on your services. In a world where we're always getting sold to, it can be easy to fall into this trap of feeling like if I can just get out there and sell as many people, some of them will buy. But the reality is that we all have easier and harder sell. And so when it comes to what I did wrong, one of the big things I did wrong is that I focused on people that were harder to sell first. I should have figured out who in my market was easier to sell around the same time as a coffee shop moment, I had another conversation with a pizza shop owner who was actually looking for a website, but she was already shopping around. She had a really small budget.

She required a lot of convincing and wanted me to come back to the store several times. It was the mix of these experiences that helped me realize that I was barking up the wrong tree that I was trying to sell people who weren't shopping for solutions as a solo shop, which I was at that time, and even as a small studio, you just don't need that much volume of work, so you don't have to pitch like a big company would pitch. You don't have to go wide. I knew there was an audience that was already looking for what I was offering and I needed to find them. The second mistake I made was that I went too narrow early on. Now we talk about the idea of niching as a strength, right? There's a phrase that's like there's riches and niches, but I think there's also a strength in exploring a wider array when you're just starting to find your customer picture or if you're pivoting your customer picture and not going too narrow, embedding the whole house on one market. 

If you don't know exactly who your people are yet you're going to want to spend some time with polarizing sides of your market with very different people, and when you do that, you can get a sense of whether these people are easier to sell than those people are. So for me, I wish that I had taken a wider lens at that earlier on and that I had looked at different parts of that market of small business owners instead of going so narrowly into restaurant businesses. Third mistake I made, and this one's really ironic because of my depth of experience in agency work, was trying to sell a market that needed a lot of education about my services. So the market that I picked early on was one that was not going to be very tech savvy, and I did that kind of on purpose, but I sort of had forgotten how hard it is to sell people who aren't as aware of the value you provide because they're just not familiar with that space, especially if you're operating a B2B business. 

When you find businesses that are already well familiar with your industry, with your craft, with your services and your offering, they're easier to sell. They're easier to partner with than businesses that have no familiarity with what you do, and that is a huge mistake that I made where the folks that I was talking to, they just didn't value digital marketing because they had no experience in it, and I think this is a mistake that many of us are going to make for years to come. We really want small businesses to succeed, and so we want to be there for them with the level of service that we can provide them. After going through this experience, I realized why restaurants are always closing. You can't learn on behalf of others. You can't force people to see things the way that you see them. So if people don't already value what you bring to the table, it's going to be a long road to get them to see things the way that you see them. 

That moment at the coffee shop was a real wake up call for me, and I ended up going home and setting up an experiment board in my office where I could figure out who my real buyers for this business were. I set up columns like channel, audience, message and offer, and I wrote out all the different things that I had tried and things that I thought about trying at that time, and I started to arrange them into experiments so that I could learn a little bit faster, who my people really were. Not everyone in a certain population is going to be a buyer, even if you're correct about your audience. So you have to decide, have I struck out enough where it's time to pivot who that audience picture is? Am I just wrong about my ideal client or have I just been talking to the wrong people? 

For me, it became clear after about a hundred conversations that I was going to continue to strike out and that I simply had an easier path forward with another buyer. I knew that there was an appetite for the digital marketing services I was providing because there's a lot of businesses that provide those services. There's a lot of people who are already purchasing those services, so what I needed to figure out was out of all the people who need what I was offering, who was I going to focus on serving best? If you've been listening to the show or if you've been working with me on Growth Trackers, you know that I don't focus a lot on the idea of ideal client avatars because I don't think it's helpful to continue to think about this in a silo. For me, what happened that turned the ship around is that I started running channel tests that led me to a new audience, and so I started testing things like Upwork and Squarespace's Expert Marketplace, which were online platforms. 

That led me to the online business owner space, and what I realized is that small business owners who didn't have a storefront who were not brick and mortar were more buy ready because they had to rely on digital marketing to get their business out there, so they were already looking to solve that problem. For me, the mix of testing channel audience and message has always been a winning combination has been the fastest way through uncertainty in my business because I'm able to test channel and messages that I think will work even when I'm unsure about the audience, and now that I'm sure about my audience, I'm able to test channels that I might not have tried in the past. Learning from those online business owners, getting on the phone with them, hearing about the way that they think about this problem, what they've been looking for was how I started to validate that I was onto something with a new ideal client picture where I was heading in the right direction with who my ideal audience should be, and as I talked to them, I was able to capture how they were verbalizing their problem, how they were thinking about the solution, what they had been looking for, what they had been Googling, what they were looking to achieve in their business, and here's the most important part. 

They were already shopping to pay for a solution, so the question was not, am I going to pay for a solution? The question is, is the solution Lex? And that's how I knew I had found my buyers, and once I had found those people, then I could shape my channel and message strategy around them. I could reshape my experiment board to focus on, okay, how do I find more of these people now that I know that they're my buyers? Where else are they? How can I take the language that they're using when they're saying the things that they're facing, the things that they're trying to achieve, and turn that into my messaging. 

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Buyer is an operative word there because we want to make sure that people will buy a solution for you. Your ideal audience is a buyer of a solution, not just someone that you want to work with. I like to say wallet open, credit card out. Buy ready buyers to avoid the dangerous missteps that I made. You want to validate both the problem and the solution. This framing comes from Ash Maurya's book Running Lean. If you haven't read that, I definitely recommend picking it up. I've been recommending it for over a decade, and it is a great breakdown of how to validate that your ideal customer knows that they have the problem and is interested in a solution starting with the problem. 

What you want to understand there is how aware is this ideal person of the problem that you think they have? You want to poke around the situation and scenarios that you're working in that you're trying to solve for or create a solution in. You want to understand how they think about that. You want to see what is their day-to-day behavior? How does this problem fit into their lives? Is it a big part of their life right now? Is it not such a big part of their life? Are they talking about it? Are they surfacing it? How are they talking about that problem? Have they tried to solve that problem? Are they actively trying to solve that problem? It's critical that you get in front of these actual people and you actually ask them about their problems and situations and what their day is like and what their week is like, what their month is like, so you can figure out how big of an issue this problem is for them if it's a kind of problem that's worth paying money to solve. 

You can do this by the way, in really casual ways when you're at networking events. If you do go door to door, you can ask people when you're chatting with them, you can talk to people in coffee chats, you can even email or DMM questions like these to figure out is this person problem aware? Are they thinking about this problem and how strongly do they react to a question about that problem? Is it like, oh, yes, this is a huge issue for me, or is it like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe I would solve that if I had some time. One thing to do here is also to pay attention to what they're not saying. You want to look for emotions, body language. You want to get a sense of how this person is actually reacting to this conversation, and you also want to understand their actual behavior and situations, so you want to anger in things that they've already done, things that they're currently doing, you want to steer them away from hypotheticals. 

You want to steer them away from projecting what other people might do. Sometimes people go into what I call focus group mode where they'll just try to pretend they're giving consumer attitudes and we don't want that, right? We want to know what do you think, right? What are you doing right now? How are you approaching this? You might even be able to catch these people in a scenario, so depending on what your business is, it's possible that you could actually approach them when they're in the midst of this problem. A quick example of that is when I worked with the team at Toyota, we went to gas stations to intercept drivers who were mid commute and we could talk with them about their commute. We could talk with them about what it was like pumping gas and having to stop at the gas station in the middle of their commute. 

We did something similar with the team at Macy's where we intercepted people in the store. They were already shopping, so we knew they were looking for clothes. If there's a relevant location for your business where people would be actually in the act of doing something around the problem or solution space, that can be a great way to find those people to talk with, and what you're looking for here as you talk with those ideal clients is an awareness of the problem. How aware are they of the problem? How big of a problem is it to them and are they actively trying to solve it? Moving on to the solution when you're talking with them about the solution, you want to avoid pitching your solution first. You want to ask questions that validate that they are actually solution shopping. People are really agreeable and they will try to say things that make you feel good about yourself and your business. 

Even if they don't mean them, they'll say, oh, yeah, I would buy that. Oh yeah, I would come to that, and they're just going to shine you on, so you really have to be careful. What you want to do here is not pitch your solution and get an affirmation. Instead, you want to ask about how they're approaching solving this problem. Are they actively solving this problem? Are they looking for someone to solve this problem for them? Have they spent money on this problem in the past? What kinds of things have they tried? Have they paid for those things? What's the timeline? Are they actively solving it this week? Are they looking this month, this quarter, this year? How urgent is it to solve this problem in their mind? You can also ask about what aspects are important to them when it comes to the solution. 

Questions like what's the most important thing when it comes to X? What are you looking for when it comes to Y? When does this need to get solved by? What makes this the right time to solve this? It can be easy to hear what we want to hear in these situations, and I'd really encourage you to go mind wide open about how people are actually feeling, how they're actually behaving, what they're actually looking to solve. As you have these conversations with who you think your ideal client is, you'll start to surface whether or not your ideal client is actually a buyer. You will start to understand how problem aware they are, and you will start to understand if they are actively solution shopping. If you surface that your buyer is not problem aware that your ideal clients, the people that you want to help are not aware of the problem, it's time to move on to a new ideal client. 

If you find that your ideal client is problem aware, but not quite solution shopping, what you might be in is a space of DIYs, and this is where we see people convinced with blogs, newsletters, webinars, that you should not just do it yourself, but you should do it with me. You should get expert help in this space. Those people can take longer to sell. What you really want to look for is people that are not only problem aware, but they are solution shopping. So if you do not see both of those things in your ideal client conversations, if you don't see people saying, yes, I know I have this problem, and yes, I'm looking to pay for a, it might be time to move on to someone who's a little bit more buy ready. All of us have a spectrum of these folks in our business, people that are going to be more biready, people that are going to be less buy ready, but it's important that we have a slice of our audience that is buy ready. 

And if you find over and over again that you're trying to sell to people who are not buying easily, who have not budgeted for this, are not keen on paying for a solution to this, or if they're still coming around to the problem, you might have an easier crowd to sell. It simply comes down to that. How much work do you want to put into selling people? Sure, maybe these people are great and you would really like to work with them, but if they're hesitant to spend money, if they don't quite see the solution the way that you see it, it's just going to be a longer road. And instead, I would encourage you to think about who are your easier selves? Are there people that are way more problem aware and solution ready? If so, those people are going to be faster to sell, they're going to be easier to sell. 

Those projects are going to go easier. You're just going to put your business in a much better spot than if you try to sell people who are not interested in a solution. That's where you get into use car salesman territory where you're forcing people to buy something that they don't really want to buy, where they're not ready to buy in that moment or they wish they had more time to think about, and you really don't want to be in that space as a service provider. You want people who are willingly shopping for a solution and who just need to meet you and trust you and know that you have their back in that solution and they shouldn't go solve that somewhere else. 

Understanding who your buyers are is a business long journey. It is something that we are always evolving and improving in our businesses, and as the market changes, as the world changes, these pictures change too. Customers get savvier, industries evolve needs change. Agencies I used to work with are now offering something completely different to a totally different client than when I worked with them. You're going to hear a little bit more about that in some upcoming episodes of the show. This experience of being wrong about my buyer and tragically wrong about my buyer is what led me to create Growth Trackers, my marketing experimentation program for creatives who are finding their buyers in repeatable ways. One of the main things we do inside Growth Trackers is we laser focus on your buyers, and we ignore people in your audience who are not going to buy. We figure out where your buyers are, how to talk to them, and what to offer them. 

If you're striking out like I did and you want some support, as you run experiments and find your actual buyers, you should grab Growth Trackers. Guest Pass, and check out what we do inside. There's nothing more expensive than learning Slow, so come Be Right Faster with us. We have a couple super useful episodes coming up on the show. These next couple weeks, we're going to hear from Philip Wallage about how to productize your services so you can move away from custom scoped work and towards things that are more efficient with your time. And I interviewed Abhishek Kumar who runs a market research agency about how he learns to find his buyers in the wild catch up on the show using the Low Energy Leads playlist on YouTube, and until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.