When I first started my business, any client was a good client. If they could fog a mirror, I was in. I had good intentions. I was smart, and I thought I could help anyone. I’ve learned the hard way that this isn’t always the case. I've gone from willing to work with anyone to being increasingly selective about the companies we’ll take on as clients. 

Let’s Get Selective

In the example below, I will break down our strategy into the following areas: problems we solve, goals we support, firmographics, buyer committees, buying personas, and psychographics. After reviewing this breakdown, you should be able to spot the perfect potential client for Paige Black. 

Remember, you will need to be this selective and clear with your own client choices. This exercise can even be turned into a one page that you can share with referral partners. 

To help you create your own Target Market & Buyer Persona, I’ve put together a list of questions for you to consider at the end of this article.

Problems Paige Black Solves

• Uncertain of what to spend in the current economic environment: Should they invest more or less? What are the available opportunities?
• Not hitting revenue goals: Is this a brand or messaging issue? Or are they suffering from poor channel selection and poor marketing execution?
• No cohesive system in place to measure results: They are tired of long reports that don’t actually relate to their KPIs and business goals.
  

Goals Paige Black Helps Clients Achieve

• Developing a brand they can be proud of: People make split-second judgements on how they regard your brand and your price point within moments of encountering your marketing.
• Building marketing systems to reach revenue goals: Our custom systems are designed to help middle market companies scale and reach their target revenue.
• Creating a measurement plan that is tied to revenue or other business goals: When you can tie your marketing initiatives to revenue or other desired outcomes, you can be confident in your marketing ROI.

Firmographics
Paige Black’s target market is middle-market companies. Our ideal clients’ revenue is between $10M to $250M, and they typically will have 50 to 250 employees. In looking at industries, we are somewhat agnostic. We work with companies who have healthy margins and have the capital, time, and desire to invest in strategic marketing.  

Help note:
Firmographics simply means company demographics or size, industry, or other data point. These are important because they allow you to spot the firm from the outside. You want to use these in your referral process communication to help your network disqualify leads that aren’t a good fit.

Buying Committee
While we ideally start an engagement by working directly with the CEO, we need to have a broader set of relationships. Ideally, we’ve communicated with any other partners, owners, and marketing, sales, and finance leaders. We work on developing personas for each of the buying team’s personas. To aid in this process, HubSpot offers this free buyer persona generator: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona

CEOs
Most CEOs care about their business and how it is perceived in the marketplace. But they also value results, as no business can run for long without profit. They want their teams to see the ROI in different initiatives as a testament to their leadership. They may have invested in other marketing initiatives in the past that failed. Or they may have encountered other marketing firms that promise the moon and deliver cookie-cutter results. As a result, they may be hesitant to invest more energy, time, and capital into marketing.

Revenue leaders: These individuals have the most at stake. Sales leaders want to generate leads and grow sales. Marketing leaders want results to show the importance of their work. They also suffer the most if an initiative fails. 

Operational leaders: They want to see the company grow but are also concerned about fulfilling any promises that sales and marketing make. They are most concerned about alignment. Can they deliver on what was promised?

Finance leaders: These leaders want to see financial outcomes. They view the finances as a measurement of the company's performance; to them, the finances tell the story of the company. They struggle with investments that don’t show a more immediate result and may object to large projects that center around branding and messaging. They will be more comfortable with investments in performance marketing, where it is easier to tie initiatives directly to revenue growth.

Marketing Leaders: Their title may vary from marketing director to marketing manager to marketing specialist, but they are looking to step into their authority and directly impact the business outcome. They want to learn and expand their skillset, but they may struggle with the accountability that comes from leadership to demonstrate an ROI for every investment. This can lead to frustration and a challenge in selling brand initiatives to leadership. 

As new leaders, holding their team, an agency, or others accountable may be a challenge. As an agency, we need to have the difficult conversations early and often. This helps them address performance issues.

Help note:
We list the problems/triggers and goals/aspirations intentionally. Note that they are opposite sides of the same coin. Research shows that 70% of purchase decisions are based on overcoming challenges and 30% of purchase decisions are based on reaching goals.

Help Note:
As a business coach, your primary contact will likely be the CEO. However, if you support team members who are struggling, your primary contact might be in Human Resources.