What do you feel?
Excitement? Dread?
So much of figuring out your Ideal client profile comes down to this question, because we have a natural tendency to want to broaden the circle to encompass as many people as possible. But we won’t actually feel excitement when a lot of those folks call.
A consultant recently shared that her “niching” strategy hadn’t been very successful. Her niche includes business owners and executives. Millions of people. Most of whom have no interest in her services, even though she “could help them”. My guess is that only a small fraction of those folks would invoke excitement if they called.
Narrowing down your niche (“niching up”, as Ellen Melko Moore would say) is hard, but remember that the idea is to make things easy. You know the difference between a “sales” process that isn’t really a sales process, more of a scheduling process, versus a slog of a sales process, overcoming objection after objection, only to (occasionally) “succeed” in landing a client who ends up being a big pain, and not someone who makes you feel excitement when the phone rings.
Does this test help you refine your ideal client profile? (Make sure to check out the Cask Strength Positioning workshop replay.)