If you’ve been in business for more than a second you know that you need to determine who your target market is. Look around the online business space and many will tell you that you find your target market by completing market research and then taking your findings to complete an ideal client avatar or persona.
While this approach works to help you get a general picture of who you might be trying to reach, it often leaves online service providers, coaches, and other practitioners with much less clarity than they actually need in order to take intentional steps to grow their business.
This is because, on its own, all an ideal client persona can really do for you is give you a general concept that there is a human on the other side of the screen, reading your emails, watching your Reels, listening to your podcasts, etc. Unfortunately, even the most complex and in-depth personas don’t tell you anything about whether that person is actively looking for your work, let alone whether they’ll reliably succeed in/with/from your work. Which leaves you feeling like you have to educate people on why they need your work (you don’t), attracting prospective clients who tell you that your work is “too expensive” or have some other objection that shows that they probably aren’t actually ready for your work (yet!), and even working with clients who require you to go above and beyond in order to “make sure” they see the success you said was possible through your work.
The truth is, you need a more complete picture of your target market than what the average (or even above-average) ideal client persona worksheet will give you. You need to understand which version of this ideal client persona has the characteristics and past experiences that position them to succeed in your work, which version of that person is actively seeking out a solution to their problem/s, and which version of that person is in a physiological state that empowers them to do the work required to see their desired outcomes or results.
The combination of these foundations creates your Right Fit client, and when you identify who is a true right fit for your work, you’re able to build everything else in your business in such a way that it naturally attracts this person (and repels those who are wrong fits or not-yet-Right-Fits!).
What makes a Right Fit client?
There are four foundations of a Right Fit client. These are:
- Ideal Client
- Best-positioned to Succeed Client
- Purchase-Ready Client
- Ready-to-Transform Client
Each of these foundations builds on top of one another. We start broad by determining a general understanding of your target market by completing a very basic ideal client profile. From there, we take that understanding and ask: which version of that person is best-positioned to succeed in or with the help of my work? From there: which version of that person is actively ready to buy, right now? And finally, from there: which version of that person is physiologically ready to transform?
Let’s take a closer look at each of these foundations of a Right Fit client.
Step 1: Who is your Ideal Client?
With the Ideal Client, we are asking, in its broadest sense, who you most want to work with, serve, and/or support. We start with the ideal client because gathering some basic demographic information can essentially help our brains to understand that, “yes, there is another living, breathing human being that I am trying to speak to through this screen.”
However, where I see a lot of online business owners get tripped up with the ideal client is that if someone doesn’t match or even come close to the demographics, they think, “I’m not supposed to work with them.” A past client got really caught up in this when they had an assigned male at birth (AMAB) human want to join their program, but their ideal client persona was someone who was assigned female at birth (AFAB). It was clear to this business owner that this AMAB client would still do really well inside the program and very likely see the intended results, but since they didn’t match the ideal client persona, the business owner felt like they were doing something “wrong” by bringing this person into their program.
The reality couldn’t be further from the truth: there’s nothing wrong with serving and supporting people through your work who are likely to be well-served and supported by your work, whether or not they match a specific set of demographics.
What matters about your clients is not what gender they are, how many kids they do or don’t have, what kind of car they drive, who they follow on social media, or whether they like pineapple on pizza (side note: YUM.). Even many of the psychographics that a normal ideal client persona worksheet includes—e.g. hopes, fears, current difficulties—are often too broad to use as defining or influential factors of your offers, messaging, etc.
Seriously, take a moment to think about it for yourself: what, if anything, from your ideal client persona impacts their ability to achieve the intended result or outcome of your work? Most of the time, the answer to that question is: nothing.
What actually impacts a clients’ ability to achieve the intended result or outcome of your work is the next three foundations of your Right Fit client: are they best-positioned to succeed? Are they purchase-ready? And are they physiologically ready to transform? The ideal client simply provides us an entry point from which we then get to explore who is truly a Right Fit client for your work.
Step 2: Who is best-positioned to succeed in or with your work?
In order for someone to achieve the intended outcome or result of your work, they likely need to have a set of characteristics, values, and/or past experiences that would position them to really get the most out of working with you.
I like to think of the best-positioned to succeed client through the lens of compatibility in dating. You could go on a date with someone who you find attractive, who you feel really great around/brings out the best in you, but who wants kids when you don’t want kids. In some ways, that person could be an “ideal match.” But in the ways that actually impact the long-term success of your relationship, you’re not compatible, and pursuing that relationship will likely only cause pain to one or both of you over the course of the relationship.
To give a really simple example, I’m the type of coach, consultant, teacher, strategist, whatever you want to call me that wants you to really understand how to build, run, and grow your business on your own. I believe—I might even say know—that in order to do that, I have to share information with a lot of nuance, which often requires me to be verbose. If someone was to join a high-touch, comprehensive program with me, they would therefore need to be the kind of person who wants to expand their own business-building acumen (as opposed to being someone who wants a 1-2-3 step “tried and true” formula, e.g. “this is how I did it, so you do it this way, too”). They’d also need to be the type of person who appreciates that expanding their own business-building acumen requires depth and nuance, and though they might appreciate individual learning chunks to be short and sweet (I try to keep training videos ~10 minutes or less where possible!!), they’re ok with there being a larger amount of training content in said program.
Someone who thrives in depth, nuance, and building their own embodied understanding of business-related topics is best-positioned to succeed in my work. Someone who is looking for a fast path to success or who just wants me to tell them what to do without coming to their own conclusions about my recommendations is going to get mighty frustrated working with me—and I, them—and they’re not best-positioned to succeed.
That’s a really simple example, but the point in all of this is to say: some people are going to be better-suited to your way of leading, teaching, working, etc than others. That doesn’t mean that they or you are wrong/right, it simply means that you need to decide who is best-positioned to succeed in your work and build out each of the elements of your business to attract and serve that person.
Step 3: Who is your purchase-ready client?
We now get to refine which version of your best-positioned to succeed client is actively purchase-ready. To continue the dating analogy I shared above, you could find someone attractive, feel really great around them, and y’all could even be compatible! But if that person isn’t looking for a serious relationship right now and you are, then pursuing that relationship likely won’t work. (I know how easy it is to get delulu, though, thinking you’ll be the one to change their mind 😅)
A purchase-ready client is purchase-ready because they, themselves, have already determined that they have a problem worth solving. You don’t have to convince this person that they have a problem worth solving, they already know it, themselves, and are actively seeking out the solution.
Where a lot of business owners get tripped up with this foundation is that there are some prospective clients who will pay you money even though they are not actually Right Fit clients. In fact, there are four primary “archetypes” of purchase-ready clients, but only two of them are Right Fits.
The four archetypes of purchase-ready clients are:
- Problem Unaware Client
- Solution-Oriented Client
- Searching for a Savior Client
- Transformation-Ready Client
The Problem Unaware Client, quite simply, doesn’t know they have a problem. If someone doesn’t know they have a problem, and rather have to be convinced on the fact that they do have a problem, they are not best-positioned to succeed in or with your work. You’ll often see this archetype in prospects or clients who have objections about the time, energy, or money investment (e.g. “It’s going to take HOW LONG?”), who want to skip over steps (even if you’ve explained why those steps are necessary to achieving their desired outcome), who sign up but then don’t utilize inclusions, and more.
To get a clearer picture of this Problem Unaware Client, imagine someone were to knock on your door and say, “I think you should paint your house, and I’ll do it for XXX dollars.” You’re likely only going to entertain their proposal if you, yourself, have already been wanting to paint your house. If you don’t think there’s any problems with your current house color, at best you’ll take their card and file it away for one day when you do decide you want to paint the exterior, at worst you’ll tell them to f*ck off and never return. The only way this person could maybe get you to pay for their services would be if they stood there and tried to convince you of the merits of repainting your house. That’s likely to be a lengthy process and maybe even several conversations, convincing you that your house needs to be repainted. Once you’re convinced, you’d then have to spend money that you probably didn’t need to spend—at least not in that moment—for an outcome that you, yourself, don’t intrinsically value. Which means you’re likely not going to be very motivated to do the things you need to do to prepare for them to come and paint your house. You’re investing in an outcome you’re not actually sold on needing, while the business owner who convinced you that you “needed” that outcome has now invested—or, wasted—a TON of their time, energy, and maybe even money on getting you to say “yes” yet not even be certain of your yes. All while your neighbor next door might very well already be looking for someone to paint the exterior of their house, which would have been a much simpler sales process for this business owner.
You can get a Problem Unaware Client to buy, but why would you invest your resources into doing so when 1) there’s so many other people who are already problem-aware and already seeking a solution, 2) someone who has to be convinced of needing the solution is likely going to continuously need to be convinced of needing that solution, even after paying for said solution, which is absolutely draining as the business owner, and 3) they’re not intrinsically motivated to engage with the process, and likely won’t see the results or won’t appreciate and/or be able to sustain the results. Let me save you the misery and say: you just don’t want to do it. It’s not worth it.
Our second purchase-ready archetype is the Solution-Oriented Client. This person realizes they have a problem and begins seeking out a solution. However, because this person has only relatively recently uncovered that they do, indeed, have a problem, they don’t yet fully comprehend the complexity or extent of the problem. They tend to see the problem as being relatively straightforward and/or singular, and begin seeking out single solutions that will solve that singular problem.
Unfortunately, while the single solutions they find might create progress or even breakthroughs, they’ll almost always highlight a new problem (either a new layer of the same problem, or a totally different problem). This leads to our Solution-Oriented Client trying lots of different single solutions, each time getting a better understanding of what their real problem is and/or what the real solution could be.
I’m going to come back to our third purchase-ready archetype in a moment, but next let’s talk about the Transformation-Ready Client. The Transformation-Ready Client is someone who is looking for a holistic solution to what they now understand to be the “core problem” underneath all of the “symptoms” of the problem (that they tried to solve when they were a Solution-Oriented Client). In fact, if you look at the four archetypes of a purchase-ready client, you’ll see that they create a cohesive journey. Here at WholeCo, we call this the Transformational Journey, and we believe that every person in every transformation goes through a version of these four “stages” of purchase-readiness.
Both the Solution-Oriented Client and the Transformation-Ready Client are best-positioned to succeed—they know they have a problem, and they’ve decided it’s worth solving!—and are also maintaining responsibility for their success, unlike the Searching for a Savior Client, that third purchase-ready archetype.
The Searching for a Savior Client knows they have a problem—meaning unlike the Problem Unaware Client, they’re best-positioned to succeed in that regard—and have likely tried all sorts of solutions (when they were a Solution-Oriented Client). Where they are now, however, is in a space of frustration, overwhelm, anger, etc that nothing they’ve tried has fully solved their problem. Thus they do the very normal human thing to do and begin to believe, “I must be incapable of solving this problem on my own; I want/need someone to solve it for me.”
This person is very easy to extract money from because they are, frankly, a little bit desperate. I say this with absolutely zero judgment, especially because this is a very normal phase of any Transformational Journey. And though many people wouldn’t consciously say this is true, a lot of us in these moments of desperation feel that if we throw money at a problem and/or get someone else to deal with it (which often necessitates throwing money at the problem), we’ll finally break through it. However, this person is not ready to transform, our fourth and final foundation of a Right Fit client. Let’s look at this final foundation, now.
Step 4: Who is physiologically ready to transform?
Finally, we refine our ideal client, who is both best-positioned to succeed and purchase-ready, down one more level to someone who is also ready to transform. And not just ready, on a mental level, but truly ready on a physiological level.
I’ve heard it said by some marketers that when someone’s house is on fire, you don’t want to come and sell them a new house, you want to sell them the ability to put out the fire. The logic makes sense on first glance, but only until you think about the physiology of someone whose house is literally or metaphorically “on fire.”
Someone whose house is actively on fire when you are selling to them is not physiologically ready to make informed investing decisions. On a literal physiological, body-based level, they are focused on surviving. When you are in that survival physiology, you are only capable of making near-sighted decisions, exclusively based on “what will help me survive this very moment.” From this survival-focused physiology, you cannot make decisions informed by your values, by your priorities, by your dreams, by the things that actually matter and that actually are indicators of and contributors to real, lasting transformations.
As mentioned above, this person is very easy to extract money from since they are in a space of desperation. Unfortunately, a lot of the methods typically used in this online business world are done in such a way that they unconsciously attract and sell to these “looking for a savior” clients. We’re then taught to use these methods, as well, because to an extent, they work, if your definition of “working” is solely “making money.” Because let’s carry this out: if someone invests out of desperation, that desperation will only be able to carry them so far and sustain them for so long. Eventually they’re going to burn out, break down, or eventually come to the realization that they’ve been building or growing or transforming in a way that is misaligned with their actual desires, and they’ll need to burn everything down to start again.
Except for in very rare cases where you are trained and have specifically opted to work with people in this survival-focused physiology, you only want to work with people who are relatively physiologically ready to transform, and in the area of life you support them in. I add nuance to that sentence (“relatively” “in the area of life you support them in”) because the truth is, in this day and age, everyone is dealing with the after-effects of T/trauma. Therefore everyone is constantly dipping in and out of a ready-to-transform physiology. You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who is 100% “physiologically ready-to-transform.”
As an aside, this is why I’m a huge believer that all business owners who are working with humans—whether you’re developing a website or coaching them through a relationship transition—needs to at least be trauma-aware. Trauma affects everything in our lives, and so many of the “difficult” client experiences I’ve personally experienced or coached another business owner through can likely in some way be related back to that client having entered an “activated physiology” (aka where they are in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn), often triggered accidentally by the business owner. I, myself, am not a trauma educator, but some of my most-recommended resources if you’re looking for further information or training are:
- Book: Your Resonant Self by Sarah Peyton
- Teacher: Holistic Life Navigation
- Teacher: Applied Depth Institute
- Teacher or Support for Yourself: Somatic Experiencing International
How to Identify Your Right Fit Client
Identifying your Right Fit client is a simple, yet comprehensive process. Essentially, you start by creating an ideal client persona—an exercise that realistically needs to take you 15 minutes max. (If you spend any more time than that on your ideal client persona, you’re very likely falling into a pattern of resistance that’s holding you back from accomplishing what you need to accomplish.) Once you have a human-feeling “persona,” you now want to get really clear on: what does someone need in order to be best-positioned to succeed? Which purchase-ready archetype am I looking to specifically attract? And which version of that person is physiologically ready-to-transform?
There are very specific exercises you can do for each of these four foundations that will help you to identify your Right Fit client on paper and preparing to identify them in real life situations and scenarios! Some or all of these exercises are included in our core programs here at WholeCo: The Aligned Niche, Marketing Magnified, and EXPAND.
Learn more about each of those programs at their respective links.
Handy Links:
hey!
I’m Carly Jo Bell.
(Though you can just call me Carly.)
Carly Jo Bell is a business strategist and mentor, and fonder of Whole Co media. Through her courses and programs, podcast, and one on one coaching, Carly helps pulled-in-every-direction entrepreneurs create a business that brings in as much joy as it does revenue — by cultivating deep self trust, and solid foundations as the first step.
For more from Carly, and to learn about her signature “looking external for inspiration, and internal for answers” approach, join the conversation by signing up for her weekly email series, Carly's Couch.
