In my last blog post, I talked about taking the five-year challenge to help you get clarity around your ideal clients are. Narrowing down the age group of your ideal clients to five years helps you get more specific with your messaging, understand what motivates them, know why your ideal clients make certain purchasing decisions, and so many other things. If you haven't read or listened to that post, I'll leave the link below so you can check that out later.
If you did attempt to take the five-year challenge, but may have gotten stuck because you were wondering how to do that if your clients are businesses rather than individuals. We're going to talk through that today.
Using the Five-Year Challenge Concept
If you are operating as a B2B business (Business to Business), here's how you can take the five-year challenge concept and use it to understand your ideal clients. With the five-year challenge, we take a group of 24 to 55-year-olds, for example, and narrow them down to five years...30 to 35 years. But if you're working with businesses instead of individuals, you can think about what stage they are in their business, how long they've been operating, and what their next steps are to grow their business.
For example, if you're a service provider, your ideal clients might be businesses that are just starting out, or maybe they've been in business for two years or less. Maybe they're five years in and feeling like they've hit a ceiling and need strategies to grow their business even more. Maybe the businesses you work with are making seven figures, but now they're looking to make multiple seven figures or even eight figures.
Your Ideal Clients at Different Stages of Business
There are different stages of business, and each stage has different needs. So depending on where your ideal client is in their business, can help you understand what they need, how much to price your services, what to offer, et cetera. If you're a business strategist and you're helping businesses that are just starting, there are a lot of different offers you could provide specifically for startups.
As a business strategist, you can help your clients figure out which market to serve, and how to develop their processes and standards. Maybe you can help them set up an action plan on how to develop their business ideas or even craft a pitch to get people to fund their business ideas. If you're serving businesses who are maybe in their fifth, sixth, or even seventh year in business, you could help them streamline their processes, help them focus on what actually makes them money in their business.
Maybe you can help your ideal clients implement some new strategies that will help them make seven to eight figures, maybe create a more complex marketing plan to reach even more customers or even offer to help develop and implement an exit strategy. So that's the five-year challenge concept in a nutshell.
And this is the B2B version. Hope this tip has been helpful for you. It's been so beneficial for my clients and even for me to get more clarity in our business, which helps us create a more powerful brand.
That's it for now.
Until next time,
Happy Branding!
