Ideal Client Story vs. Ideal Client Profile

Often I receive poorly targeted messages from companies selling specific solutions to a niche market. They must have found me on a generic list of "business owners with 11-50 employees".

In consulting with clients, I've often seen a desire to rush into prospecting and marketing without having first taken the time to establish a clear Ideal Client Story. I say "Ideal Client Story" as something distinct from "Ideal Client Profile".

Typically people describe their Ideal Client Profile in terms of industry, company size, job title, and geographic location. That is often not good enough to get results.

In contrast, at Wigler Group we use the term Ideal Client Story to mean: the situation in which your ideal buyer finds themself such that your solution would solve their problem. To achieve the best result, this situation should be fleshed out in full narrative detail.

For example, a hypothetical Ideal Client Story for Wigler Group might go like this:

Johnny Prospect is the long-term Vice President of Sales at a 50-year-old, privately-held firm that provides management consulting services to the HR departments of large employers in California. He has 5 sales people reporting to him who mostly spend time in the field meeting with current clients and prospects. The firm has a VP of Marketing with a $250,000 budget for lead generation, which is spent on LinkedIn ads, Google ads, and business conferences and events. Lots of potentially qualified leads are being generated by the marketing efforts, but the sales people are too busy meeting clients in the field to follow up on leads that aren't ready to make a decision any time soon. Perhaps there is a gap between marketing and sales that Wigler Group could fill.

Now, the exact details of the story will vary from prospect to prospect. But with this story, we have encompassed the general nature of a problematic situation that Wigler Group is equipped to solve.

Based on this story we can craft a prospecting message that will appeal to those VPs of Sales who find themselves in a similar or related situation to Johnny.