October 24, 2023

Build Your Ideal Client Profile From Your Own Wins

Most firms describe their ideal client from instinct, and instinct tends to favor the last engagement. A better starting point is the record of work you won, delivered and would happily do again.

Begin with engagements, not industries

Industry labels are easy to write and hard to act on. Start by listing the last fifteen to twenty engagements you were glad to have. For each, note the size of the client, who bought, what triggered the purchase, and how the relationship began.

Include the cases where the firm lost money or lost patience. A client profile built only from happy stories describes an ideal that rarely walks through the door. Ask the engagement partners what they would have wanted to know before signing.

Separate profitable from merely busy

Some clients keep a team occupied and still leave little margin. Mark the engagements that were profitable, well scoped and easy to staff. This is a judgement exercise, and a finance colleague can help you check it against the actual numbers.

If you cannot separate profitable from merely busy, that is itself a finding. Some firms do not track engagement margin at all, and the profile exercise is a good reason to start. A rough view by client is better than none, provided everyone agrees it is rough.

Look for shared traits you can observe

A useful profile uses traits you can check before a first call: headcount range, ownership type, a recent leadership change, a regulatory deadline, a merger. Avoid traits that need a conversation to confirm, such as culture or openness to advice.

Traits you can observe also let you build lists efficiently. A public filing, a press release or a change in the leadership team can be found without a call, and they are precisely the kind of facts a research assistant, human or automated, can collect for you.

Where AI-assisted tools help

Reading through engagement letters, notes and proposals to pull out common features is tedious for a person and reasonable work for an assisted tool. Keep it to your own records, and have a person check the pattern it reports. A summary is a starting hypothesis, not a finding.

Give the tool a clear boundary: only your own documents, only the fields you care about, and a request to quote the passage each finding came from. Quotations let a reviewer confirm each point quickly and expose any place where the summary went beyond the text.

Write the profile on one page

State who you serve, what usually triggers the need, who buys, and who is out of scope. The out-of-scope list is as useful as the target list, because it lets the team decline work without a debate.

Share the page with everyone who talks to prospects, including the people who answer the first enquiry. A profile that lives only in a partner's head cannot guide a receptionist, an associate or a marketing coordinator deciding whether to pass an enquiry along.

Revisit it twice a year

Your book of business changes, and so should the profile. Set a reminder to compare new wins against the page. If the last six wins do not fit it, either the profile or your outreach needs work, and it is worth finding out which.

When the profile and the pipeline disagree, do not simply defend the profile. Sometimes the pipeline is telling you that a new kind of client is emerging. The goal is a document that reflects the firm's real position, not one that flatters its intentions.

A brief example of the method

Imagine a mid-sized advisory firm that lists twenty good engagements and finds that fourteen began with a regulatory change at the client and were bought by a finance director. That is a hypothesis about triggers and buyers, and it suggests where to look for the next conversation.

It is only a hypothesis. Test it by checking whether the last few enquiries fit, and by asking two or three clients why they called you when they did. Their answers will refine the profile better than any internal debate.

VIPMarketing Editorial