49: How to Identify Your Ideal Client with Lorraine Ball

Andrea Liebross |

www.andrealiebross.com |

Episode 49

Speaker1: [00:00:09] You're listening to the Time to Level Up podcast. I'm your host, business life coach Andrea Libros. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly gain confidence. Make your time productive. Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. And finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career. And best of all. Live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's time to level up.

[00:00:57] Let's do this.

Speaker1: [00:01:07] Hello. Time to level up, listeners, welcome back. So this week I have a guest expert, Lorraine Ball, who if you are from Indianapolis, may know that she is a legend. So I looked up her bio to help kind of do this intro, and the first line in her bio is ringleader, head honcho, top cat. Take your pick! After spending too many years in the corporate world, Lorraine was tired of bureaucracy, the sameness and the bad coffee. So she sounds like a woman I would love, and I do love her. This is not my first conversation with her. We've had several. I've actually been on her podcast, but whenever I talked to her, I just leave the conversation feeling jazzed and juiced up about marketing and all of my clients, whether they are entrepreneurs or corporate climbers or professionals. We all have to pay attention to marketing because we are either marketing ourselves or our business or both. So I guarantee you will walk away with some golden nuggets from this conversation. So get out your notebook. Buckle up. Sit back and listen it to my conversation with Lorraine.

Speaker2: [00:02:28] Hello. My time to level up, listeners, welcome back to the podcast today I have with me Lorraine Ball and I am going to let her introduce herself. She's been around a while, so I'm sure she's introduced herself before and she probably will do it way better than I am.

Speaker3: [00:02:46] I said, well, Andrea, it is so nice to be here and yeah, giving me a chance to talk about myself, I love that now. I am a digital marketing strategist. I love all things digital marketing. I ran an agency for a number of years and these days I am focused mostly on my podcast and on the digital toolbox, which is my online training platform, helping businesses use digital tools to grow.

Speaker2: [00:03:17] I love that and every this is something that everybody, no matter who they are or what they do, write needs even. I've even found that non business owners, so people that are working more in a corporate role, they are marketing themselves all the time.

Speaker3: [00:03:34] Absolutely. You know, part of that is and you don't really think about it, but you may be marketing yourself for your next job or your next opportunity, or even if you want to stay in the same company. And this goes back to my corporate days well before social media. If I wanted to get promoted, I needed to have a strategy to put myself in the right places and on the right teams and present myself in in a way that made me an appropriate candidate and the natural choice for whatever it was I wanted to do.

Speaker2: [00:04:09] Yes, because you don't want them to question who you are right and what you're about and what you stand for.

Speaker3: [00:04:17] I actually went into my boss's office one time with my resume, but I took my name off the top of it and I slapped it on his desk and I said, Here's the deal. This person is the best choice for the job that you currently have open. Look at those credentials x number of years in the industry, x number of years outside the industry. This this this. You want to hire that person. And he's like, Well, that's interesting. I said, that's my resume.

Speaker2: [00:04:45] Did you get the did you get the promotion? Did you get it? I did. That's that's a good story. I love that. I love it.

Speaker3: [00:04:56] It's about marketing, and it's about marketing is about presenting information in a way that makes your product or your service attractive and real to the person you want to buy.

Speaker2: [00:05:11] Totally true. Attractive and real to the person you want to buy. Ok, so. What if you had to tell someone, give someone maybe three things about marketing, what were what three tips would you give?

Speaker3: [00:05:26] Number one, I would absolutely say that marketing starts with your customer. It does not start with you and you have to pick an ideal client and everyone is not your customer. I know you think, well, these people and that people. There is a huge difference between the people that write you checks and the people that really are ideal clients and. Until you understand that it is impossible to do marketing because you don't know who you're talking to.

Speaker2: [00:06:03] And I'll figure out the ideal people.

Speaker3: [00:06:05] So there's a couple of ways around it and I'm going to talk about professional services because I think a lot of your your listeners are probably in that realm. What I would recommend that you do is make a list of your clients and now answer this one question if I could only do business with three of these customers. Who would I pick? And when you get that list of three, then what you want to do is you want to ask yourself why. What is it about those three customers? What do they share in common? Now I used to do this with the agency team, and it was always a really fun conversation because not all of us agreed. And so there was some really interesting things that kind of came out of that. No one. The common thing for us across the board over and over again, we saw customers that valued what we did and valued our expertize. Customers that were willing to invest both their money and their time in the process. And then we had some where we didn't agree, and that was actually also really helpful because we actually did some reassignments. Everybody hated working with Irene, except for Raven. She liked Irene. So raven. Congratulations, you're the new accounting set for Irene, right?

Speaker2: [00:07:37] Why not?

Speaker3: [00:07:38] Yeah, why not? But we also that conversation also led us to understand, you know what? We enjoy the customers were good at. Well, what? What is it that makes it good? Well, sometimes it's an industry. We discovered we were good with professional services, bad with E commerce, we were good with home services. We struggled with sometimes some certain types of life coaches because it was too soft and fuzzy and we were a more literal business. And so when we started doing that and we started dividing people into categories now, we started to pick a picture of OK. This seems to be the kind of customer that's a good fit for me. It's certainly the customer I enjoy working with. The next thing is, am I making any money with them, you know? But OK, let's assume that you've picked customers that you like working with you. Enjoy the work that you're doing. You're good at it and it's profitable. Now you want to start looking at how do I clone these people? How do I find more people like that? Where did these people come from? Were they a referral? Did they take a seminar again? Look at all your marketing and figure out what drove you, and then the other side of this is equally important. As you look at that list of your customers. Who do you want to fire? Oh my God, you're going to get rid of a customer? Yeah, sometimes sometimes it's OK.

Speaker3: [00:09:21] And and do the same exercise. Why do I want to fire this client? And sometimes it's because you, you and they aren't on the same path. I had a sales coach at one point that gave me this really nice sort of bell curve from. Acceptable, typical ideal and kind of too big. Mm hmm. And that line moves as your business grows, as you get more focused. You know, when you first start your business, somebody comes up to you and says, Can you paint the house red? You're like, Will you pay? Yes, I could do that. But as you get into your business and you have more clients and you get more selective, you have these legacy clients that maybe aren't really what you want anymore. Well, you certainly want to stop attracting more of those. And then there is that moment where you have to say, OK, is this still a good fit for where my business has gone so that the deciding, you know, and you can do the demographic and you can do the psychographic and you can do all the classic marketing things. But the really especially if you've been in business for a while. Start with what's working for you, who you like working with and who you don't

Speaker2: [00:10:46] As you were talking, you said something that really struck a chord with me. They're invested, they've invested their time, they're invested in the process, so they're invested time and money, but they're invested in the process. And I think for me, that's huge because if they're not invested in the process, it's probably not the ideal client or a long term client

Speaker3: [00:11:09] For a lot of us in professional services. You wake up one day and you realize that you care more about the outcome than a particular client. And that's bad. Yes. Now when I was in corporate, we had huge budgets. I came to understand that a lot of times people just wanted something so they could check it off their list, and my team was fulfilling a lot of that kind of work. And when I said, OK, I understand that's what we're doing. And I'm OK getting paid for that, so we're good. It's not my ultimate happy place, but that's the job. This is the client. I can do that. But I'm also not going to invest myself in the process. You're not going to get my best work. You can't. So from a from a marketing standpoint, you know, figuring out what are those rule breakers for you? You know, what are those those lines that if somebody is on the other side of it, that little red flag goes up and then figure out, how do I keep those people away? How do I change my messaging? Mm hmm. And that's that's the second thing is, you know, the first thing is, who do you want to work with? The second thing is now you've got to figure out, how do you talk to them? And what do they want to hear? What did they want to read? What do you want them to know about you? Right? What is it? Yeah, so so that that's the second piece of it is sort of your unique selling proposition. What makes you uniquely qualified to solve their problem?

Speaker2: [00:12:58] Yes, that's the thing solving their problem, right? And figuring out what that is and talking to that. Yeah. And I think a lot of us are in businesses where we could solve lots of problems. But again, then that kind of goes back to number one. But who's the what's the problem of the ideal customer?

Speaker3: [00:13:16] Right? Yes. You know, and I used to say you, you want to think about the center of your circle. You can work with a lot of people and you can solve a lot of problems. But right in the center of that circle is that small group of ideal people. Now, if some of these people show up and you've got bandwidth, you're going, you're going to do business with them, but you don't want to spend any of your resources. And the example I always give is love of soap. Ok. It's it has a very specific purpose. If you do any kind of repair work, you have a container of like WD 40 in your home. Ok, it's magic. It lubricates everything. It also does not come off your hands. True, it doesn't, except if you use lots of soap. Now, interesting side note Lava soap is actually made by the company that makes WD 40. You.

Speaker2: [00:14:14] Isn't that interesting, I didn't even know that.

Speaker3: [00:14:17] But they're marketing. Who do they target? They target the blue collar worker who's coming home from work covered in grease. They they target the what I call the blue collar hobbyist, the white collar worker who on the weekend works on the cars, fixes the lawnmower. Ok. But there is a characteristic that may be a little bit less, but not really is that their audience is male. They are still very much a man's product. About the last group of people, they might target some women, but the last group of people that they would target would be a middle aged white woman with an MBA. I mean,

Speaker2: [00:15:04] That's not their target.

Speaker3: [00:15:05] It's not their target. But my friend Denise loves to work on cars, and she's been doing it since she was 20. And you know what? She buys love of soap. And so I know that's a really long winded story. But the point there is they're not going to spend a nickel trying to find my friend Denise. She's going to find them. Yes. Yes. So when you were thinking about your marketing, there are you have your core and then you got the Denise's. Denise will find you.

Speaker1: [00:15:43] Very true, very true, so true. Hey, time to level up listeners on November 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I will be holding a free masterclass. The I've got this master class will meet for 30 minutes each day. And yes, the replay is available to talk about how you can stop feeling like you're in a game of dodgeball where things are always being thrown at you. Where boom, there's another whammy sick kid dogs vomiting boss change the deadline covid. All the things. Learn how to adopt the mindset of I've got this. Go to w-w-what Andrea Libros got this to register see on November 2nd.

Speaker2: [00:16:42] All right, so talk to me about measuring things.

Speaker3: [00:16:47] Oh, that's that's my third. You know, like when you said Lorraine, three things. Would you hire somebody, give them a desk, a computer and a paycheck every week and never check up on them? Now. How many business owners do you think spend about the same amount of money on their marketing? That they do on an employee.

Speaker2: [00:17:14] Quite a few. Yeah, I would say a lot.

Speaker3: [00:17:16] Yeah, yeah. I mean, thirty thousand a year sounds like a lot of money, but if you're doing AdWords, if you've got somebody doing digital marketing for you, if you've got any kind of marketing budget or if you're realistic and you're doing it yourself and you're billing it at your hourly rate, you're still spending 30, 40 or more on marketing. If you don't measure, if you don't know what's working or not working, it's like hiring an employee and never checking on their work. Mm hmm. I mean, and I think when you put it in those terms for business owners, they're like, Yeah, I I probably should. Yes, you probably should. You're probably now when it comes to measuring, you can make yourself crazy. You can have a dashboard that has a hundred metrics and you're always looking at the numbers and you'll never get anything done. What you need to do is you need to think about your sales process. Obviously, you're going to look at sales. But sales is the end of the line. So what are the key performance indicators that you can look at? That are further upstream. So, for example. Back in the day before the pandemic when people actually went to live events.

Speaker3: [00:18:38] If I could put six people in a classroom. I would get one customer out the other end if I had an opportunity to spend an hour with six business owners who'd come to hear me speak six and one. So the number I tracked was registrations for my classes. And when I started doing more digital, the ratio is very different on webinars. It's it's way you might have 10, 15 or 20 to one. And so again, a lot of your coaches and consultants have to be realistic. And right now, the performance on because I track this and I've tracked it for a decade, I can tell you the conversion performance on webinars is way down because people are people are zoomed out. But I know that so I can make adjustments, how do I change the course? What do I need to do to tweak to get more people to register, to get more people to attend? But if I'm not tracking it? Sales at the end of the month is a surprise, right? I look at web traffic. But the thing I also look at is where's the traffic coming from? Because that's what really tells me, what should my marketing is working?

Speaker2: [00:20:03] Mm hmm.

Speaker3: [00:20:04] I like to tell businesses that your organic traffic should be twice as high as your direct. Why? Because organic traffic is traffic that is coming to you from people who don't know you by name, but they are looking for what you do. That's how they found you. Yeah. Direct traffic is great. Don't get me wrong, I love direct traffic, but that's people who already know you. And so, you know, you've already got them in your circle, they may already be on your email list. They may already know you on social media, so I'm not discounting that. Don't get all excited about that. You want to know is organic and then and then also look at where social media is. And right now, social media. Oh, I have a love and hate relationship with all the social media platforms because they're all playing games with the algorithm, and there they are.

Speaker2: [00:21:07] It seems like it's very different than it was even a couple of months ago.

Speaker3: [00:21:11] Yeah, yeah, Facebook was one of the first they stopped. They cut your audience down by about 90 percent unless you advertised. So there was that, OK? They penalize you if you use links in your post, and now LinkedIn is starting to do that, too. They are de-emphasizing video that is not coming through. The live so wanted live is more important than ever. If you do not have LinkedIn Live yet, you need to apply. You need to apply every damn day you just keep. I'm sorry that's not so ladylike, but but you need you need to apply and they'll be like, Well, we'll be back in touch in two weeks. Great. The next morning you apply again. Well, we'll be back in two weeks. Greg, you'll fly again. Hey, I've been applying for the last two weeks. I haven't heard from you. How am I doing? Because if you are not. Using LinkedIn Live and you're just posting videos, nobody's seeing them. Right, right, and it's a game we have to play and the rules change, yes. And so that kind of a side note. Ok. All of the social media, all the platforms, all the networking everywhere you go. Is all secondary to your website. It is the only place that you hold all the cards. It is the only place where you can deliver the message you want to deliver in exactly the way you want to deliver it without interruptions. And so your website, you're right.

Speaker2: [00:22:54] Interruptions.

Speaker3: [00:22:55] And and your email newsletter. That's that's gold. Everything else is designed to drive people to that because the rules can change. The new iPhone operating system is going to limit you have the option when you upgrade to the new system. Do you want to allow this app to continue to monitor you? And the opt out rate is like 80 and 90 percent. People are like, No, go away. Right? And so without that, what that means to me is an advertiser. The game has completely changed because I rely on that information on people like this. What are they looking at? Are they here or are they there? Can I do geographic targeting? Guess what? No, not anymore. Because that privacy wall is coming up, so what that's going to mean is your ads are going to be more expensive and they're going to have to be more generic because you won't be able to focus as tightly as you want, which is why building your email list and driving traffic to your home page has to become your first obsession.

Speaker2: [00:24:08] And that's hard, and that's hard. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:24:13] Yeah, my my friends that do Facebook advertising and Google advertising are just, I mean, we've known this is coming. It is not a surprise. Right? But you're still like, Oh my God, this is and we'll get over it and they'll be the next thing. And but at the end of the day, if you've got a good website and you are consistently adding good content that you can then share and promote and send out, but you are building that home. In the long run, you will succeed in a way that building your entire empire on Facebook will work.

Speaker2: [00:24:55] That that is definitely true because the rules change too fast.

Speaker3: [00:25:00] I always tell people it's kind of like going to a singles bar. You're going to go, you're going to meet a lot of nice people. You're going to have some fun conversations. But your end game is to bring a date. Home and home is your website. Home is home is home is is your email newsletter list, right?

Speaker2: [00:25:17] But it's interesting because a way to grow email lists are Facebook ads and things like that. So it's also intertwined. But yet if Facebook isn't cooperating, then it's

Speaker3: [00:25:27] You use the ads to grow the list, but then you've got to move the conversation somewhere else. You've got to get people, you've got to give people a reason to stay connected to you. And even that I'm noticing I am looking at my email newsletter schedules and I'm looking at formats and things that worked two and three years ago, which again, it goes back to measuring. Yeah, it's changing and changing.

Speaker2: [00:25:53] Well, it's a lot to keep up on, don't you think?

Speaker3: [00:25:57] Yes. And I don't think that you have to be an expert in everything. I think again, you pick a few things and you do them well. And what? I always. What I always do is maybe once a year kind of review not just my social media platform, but also my tech stack, because this is this is that insidious $2 a month, $5, $10 a month. I have a running list of every software product I subscribe to. And there was, you know, when I was running the agency, you know, it was easily a thousand fifteen hundred dollars a month. Yeah. And I would do that every year and go, you know what, we don't use that tool anymore. We got that for that customer or that project, and we're paying 50 bucks a month. Zip. Hello. Six hundred dollars. Yeah, yeah. And I interviewed somebody once, and she said, the rule with your tech stack is before you add. You have to figure out what it's going to replace, and it's only if it's only replacing one product, is it worth the learning curve if it's going to take the place of two or three products? Now, now it's worth considering.

Speaker2: [00:27:25] Oh, that's a really good rule of thumb. I like that. Yeah, I look at mine every month, actually when I go through my bookkeeper. And a lot of times she'll say where I'll buy. Like you said, ten dollars. I'm like, Oh, let's let's try this and be using this. No. You know,

Speaker3: [00:27:42] The ten dollar ones are the most insidious because you just sort of leave them.

Speaker2: [00:27:46] Well, you also you get the seven day trial. So then you forget and the seven day trial is over. Yep. So, OK, so how should my I don't want my listeners to forget about you? So how can they find you? And what's your tell us about this? Your digital

Speaker3: [00:28:04] Digital toolbox? It is Digital Toolbox Dot Club. And it is an online resource for business owners. We have webinars. We have white papers and workbooks. It's a membership community. There are a lot of free resources you can kind of plug around and figure out what you like. Eventually, we do ask you to join, but membership is pretty affordable. It's twenty four point ninety nine a month and I know I just talked about all the other stuff that you get rid of.

Speaker2: [00:28:30] If it's replacing things, then it's worth it, right?

Speaker3: [00:28:32] If it's yeah, and you always have some introductory webinars that are free to kind of get you started. And I'm really excited. We are launching a new learning management system. I have my first course built where instead of doing a webinar because as a teacher, what I what I know is you can't master a subject in 30 minutes, but what you can do is take that 30 minutes and break it up into five pieces of six minutes each with an assignment that allows you to practice what I'm talking about and then go on to the next one. And so that is actually where I think all of the digital toolbox training is going to go, but it at a minimum go to Digital Toolbox Dot Club. Sign up for the newsletter, check out some of the resources and then if you just love listening to me, I mean, if that if that really is your thing and I hope that it is more than a few words is a marketing conversation. And Andrea, you were a guest. I was, and they're short. They're little ten minute conversations. You can pop them in your ear, listen to two or three as you go out for a walk because the weather is still beautiful and we we need that outdoor gear we do.

Speaker2: [00:29:54] Well, it has been a pleasure. As always, you are a wealth of knowledge. I love talking to you every time I do. Oh, that was good. I should remember that or put that into play or do something with it, right? So and if you're listening, all of Lorraine's contact info will be in the show notes and go, go subscribe. Or I guess now it's called. Follow her podcast. There's no subscribing anymore. That's another whole thing. They changed it to follow on Apple Podcasts or iTunes. Anyway, go find her info at the bottom of the show notes, and hopefully we will get to chat with her again soon. Thank you so much.

Speaker3: [00:30:30] Thank you.

Speaker1: [00:30:32] Isn't Lorraine a wealth of knowledge and just fun to listen to? You know, one of my biggest takeaways from that conversation was when she was talking about your ideal or best client and that ideal or best client is the person or the company that buys in and is engaged in the process. And I find that so true in my own business. The people I love working with and I think the people that gain the most from coaching are the ones who are engaged in it to the process. It's those people that see the results. So. Follow the rain if you want more. Amazing marketing tips and really think about how you are marketing yourself or your business. I am here to help you. I'm here to show you how it's always time and it's always possible for you to upgrade your life and your business and level up. I can show you how. Let's do it. See you next week. Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up podcast with me, your host Andrea Libros. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Ok, now what about you? You've listened to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade, you then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call right there on that call. We'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.