Do you know how to choose a target client?

When I'm working with clients, especially on a one to one basis,  I encouraged them to choose four industries per year to target -one in each quarter - because it's just quite a nice, easy number and doesn't allow for too much flitting around.

So normally, when I open up the field to them, they go a bit wild, and give their absolute dream industries they'd like to be working with, they forget where their experience lies, where they have the most contacts, where they have the highest profile, where they've got the most confidence, where they've got proven results, where they've got established revenue come in, and already. In essence all the things that might lend themselves to being excellent target clients.

That's why wanted to run through that list today. Some of it is going to sound really obvious. And if you've got your targeting down, which I know many of you will have, then it will serve as a reminder

However, while I don't want to be patronising, this affects a lot of people. And I think it's really important to reconsider every once in a while, as you'll always come up with other areas that you might have previously been missing out on.

The list

•  budget
•  experience
•  contacts/ how you win work
•  confidence
•  authority
•  passion
•  trends/ knowledge

So today, I am going to start with budgets: how to choose a target client based on budget, thinking about who you've worked with in the past, and who has the appropriate amount of money to pay you.

Lots of clients say to me, 'Oh, we love working with small family businesses, we really love effecting change.' But then they also tell me that they need a high proportion of those clients to keep paying the overheads within their own agency, as they're charging the very little per client. They don't seem to understand the correlation between the budget those prospective clients might have who are in startup mode or bootstrap mode, versus how their own agency is performing.

I think it is really important to have this frank conversation internally. It's great if you love working with small companies, I do too and I love seeing the change that happens. But I really have to limit the number of people that I work with who are have a limited budget. Otherwise, I'd get dragged down in the same challenges that they have in terms of overheads been higher than the income.

If you feel this isn't your strong point, it's really important to reduce that down have a look at your finances, potentially with a fractional financial director within the agency space, and they can help review your finances with you to see where the majority of your income has come from previously, and which were the most profitable clients to be working with are at a size, age and industry level

The second is experience. Of course everybody wants to venture out of their mainstay client areas at certain points, they might feel they've got really bogged down within a certain industry and they need to expand beyond that. But I'd encourage you to take baby steps with this move. I find that people and this especially on a freelance basis when people decide they've had enough specific area, such as packaging design, and they want to move into another area, say information design. They might throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak and just cut off completely cut off ties with the previous previous area they were working. But it actually takes them back to intern level at in the new area that they want to establish experience that.

So again, a bit like budget, you need to really proportion be strict with yourself and reduce down the amount of work that you accept in new areas until you've got testimonials and results that you're able to use to gain more clients within that area of expertise.

I think it's really important as well to look at contacts and how you currently win work.  Often clients will come to me and say, 'we need to do cold lead generation', I say, 'Okay, well, where does the majority of your work come from right now?' And they might say, 'oh, three strategists bring us a lot of the work that we work on'.

My first question will be, 'Well, have you done anything to scale that up? Or to find some way of accelerating? As much as I'd like to take your money and work together, if you've already got something that's working, why don't you consider how you can scale that and do something with it?'

So in that case, it might be about creating a paid referral scheme with the strategist contacts that they might have. Or it might be about having a frank conversation with them and say, 'Look, we really love the way we work together, we really love the kind of projects that you bring our way, we'd love to have a discussion about how we can facilitate more of those projects and work together more closely in the future'.

And of course, it works two ways, it might be that you have clients come in, who actually need the help of a strategist (you could replace strategist with any other role that you might be working with: copywriter, production house) and have a discussion about having a symbiotic relationship where you both share work with each other. Really consider thinking about that first, before you start looking at cold new business.

When you're thinking about your target clients I think it's really important to think about where you're confident, where you're an authority already. I think those two really go hand in hand.

For me confidence is established when you have happy clients behind you: you have testimonials, you have really proven results commercial effectiveness evidence that the work that you does genuinely move the needle for the clients you collaborate with.

And once you have those results you are able to announce them to the world and that positions you as an authority, becoming easier to win more clients. It is super important, regardless of whether you're trying to work in new industries, or just really firm up your position within the existing industries that you operate within, to get testimonials and evidence of commercial effectiveness on all the projects that you work on.

It might not always be about revenue, profit increase, it could be expressed in other ways. And there are a couple of other podcast episodes/ blog posts that I'd refer you to around how to get results, but I think about 5% of that advice is actually around sales results. There are so many other things that you can measure, it's just we've become so focused on money, when we're looking at results.

It goes without saying you need to have a passion to the area.

And although I don't think that trends are the most important thing for most creative agencies. But I think having an awareness of trends and knowledge within a certain area is super important. In the previous agencies that I've worked in, I've seen a bit of a Cinderella situation where the agency has tried to force the glass slipper on because a exciting new business opportunity has come in, but they know that it's not their specific area of knowledge, they know that it's going to take a lot of learning before they can operate in the way that is likely to land that project or to make it profitable once it's inside.

So I think you need to be really honest with yourself as well about where there are knowledge gaps. And if you are looking to broaden out, you're offering to other areas of experience, that you need to know that it's a it's a learning curve, that you're going to have to be undergoing yourself before you're going to be in with a chance of winning projects within the area.

Let me know how you get on by sending me a video message on this page, or an email [email protected]