Most of the time the first thing you’re taught when you first start your business is to create an ideal client avatar.
This vision of your ideal client is supposed to guide everything you do, including pricing. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to charge start-up coach ad much as you can the CEO of a Fortune 500 company).
If you look at the pain points the start-up coach isn’t worried about shareholders or even perhaps the colour of your logo.
Hence its good to have to take a look at and think about where your ideal client may be on their entrepreneurial journey.
So in this case you may spend a few hours considering things such as:
- Mindset
- Age group
- Income levels
- Demographics and Psychographics
- Family status
- Education
- Lifestyle goals
- Location
You even write up a story about your ideal client. You give them a name, a couple of kids, a husband/wife who just doesn’t get it, and a load of student loans. You may know quite a bit about them in details, you think.
But you could be wrong, and if you stop there, you may be missing a huge piece of the puzzle—and losing out on the best clients because of it.
Personality Mismatch
Here’s something that’s rarely considered in the “ideal client” equation, and it’s arguably the most important part: personality.
If you’re snarky, sarcastic, fun-loving and loud, then a quiet, middle-aged mom who spends her time volunteering at the local community call may not a good fit for you. Sure, she might need your help, and she might love your products, but for one-on-one coaching, this match-up could be a disaster. Either she will be uncomfortable with your style, or you’ll be miserable trying to reign in your natural exuberance. So in some cases it may be better to pass the mom on to a coach who is a better fit for her personality-wise and problem wise.
However if you can understand personality types and adapt then you might be ok. If not then you may struggle.
Its advised to study personality traits as this will help you overall in both business and personal life. A good one is DISC you can find out more here at Inspired University.
Drive Determines Success
This one can be difficult to calculate from the start, but once you recognise it (or the lack thereof) it’s worth paying attention to. The client without the drive to succeed will—more often than not—only end up frustrating you both.
Better to end your relationship as soon as you see the signs of this than to waste your time going over the same material and exercises again and again with someone who simply won’t do the work.
If you look at your current and past coaching clients, you’ll begin to see patterns. You can easily look back and see what made some clients a joy to work with, while others were a struggle (Again this may be linked to you not understanding personality types). Think about what those differences are, and add them to your ideal client profile. Then compare any new potential clients to this ideal profile so you can make an informed decision on how you work with them.
If you can or would prefer to work with certain personality types just because you get better results with them there is no problem with this, in fact its the best thing you can do as you can getter better results. In situations where you cant work with that personality type you may want to reach out to others who could work with them.
The DISC online assessment is a resource for all types of individuals and organisations – public or private; large or small. DISC teaches users powerful behavioural profiling skills which can directly improve performance and increase productivity in a variety of settings and professional frameworks. Learn to positively persuade other people and drive sales, build “A” teams for special projects, improve hiring & selection, empower management and much more.
Many of the world’s most forward thinking and successful organisations have relied upon our DISC expertise to provide them distinct competitive advantages.
In simplest terms, our DISC is an invaluable behavioural profiling system that teaches users how to identify— and use to their advantage— the predictable aspects of communication. Based on the research of Dr. William Moulton Marston, DISC is the most widely used behaviour profiling tool of its kind, supported by decades of research and continuous validation.
Find our more here at the Inspired University
A past interview on psychometrics that you may want to listen to:
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