The Ideal Client Profile: How Coaching Businesses Attract Their Most Successful Clients + How You Can Too

Imagine your sales pipeline is stuffed with clients who “get it.” You know who they are—and what they need from you. Your marketing efforts attract more and more of these people because you know how to target them. 

It’s the dream, right?

Sometimes, less-than-ideal clients happen. However, your ideal clients are more easily attracted, nurtured, and closed when you’ve done the work to build an ideal client profile (ICP). Here, we’ll dig into how to build an ICP and how you can use it effectively.

You Can’t Be All Things to Everyone—Here’s Why You Need an Ideal Client Profile

If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. (Per Justin Goff.) So, who are you trying to appeal to, anyway?

An ideal client profile (ICP) describes a fictional person who you actually want to coach. They have the qualities and characteristics of clients that best succeed with you and your services. And you succeed with them best, too.

In other words? The ICP works like a dating app filter at a corporate-client level. It helps you identify people who value what you do and whose “journey stage” aligns with yours. You just “get” each other, and can confidently turn down the people who don’t match your standards. 

An ideal client profile helps you to:

• Understand your clients. Get to know their needs, values, priorities, and challenges.
• Create your unique selling proposition. How do your services match their needs, values, etc.? Build a niche to bring in more of these ideal clients.
• Target your outreach. Use targeted messaging on the right channels at the right time to attract and close ideal-fit clients.
• Conserve marketing and sales resources. Since you’re no longer broadcasting to the entire world, costs will go down (and ROI will go up).
• Increase revenue. Better targeting = better clients = better value, long-term business, and client satisfaction.

When you know who your ideal client is, that information feeds back into what services you provide, in what way, and how you present it. Now you know what markers to look for and can signal these people that you understand their unique challenges—and can help with solutions.

An ideal client profile provides clarity, and message clarity inspires action. 

It builds confidence in potential clients that you—you—are the one they want to work with. Those are the clients who will respect your work, follow through on coaching directives, and succeed with your program.

So, who is your ideal client? Dive in. 👇

The Framework: How to Create Your Ideal Client Profile

Want to see how to put it all together at a glance? This framework isn’t rigid, and your process won’t be linear, but it’s a good starting point.

• Step 1: Get the data. Investigate the key qualities of your successful clients and target audience through interviews, surveys, and observation.
• Step 2: Understand their journey. Learn where they are, and what they expect from you. See point two under “Key Information your ICP Should Include.”
• Step 3: Describe your clients. Demographics. Psychographics. Geographics. (Oh my.)
• Step 4: Figure out your focus. What are you trying to solve?
• Step 5: Fill out the ICP. Write it all out for posterity and team-wide use. 

That’s the general creative framework. All right, you ready? Now let’s dive in … for real. 

To Build an Ideal Client Profile You Can Actually Use, Start with the People

Did you ever have an imaginary friend? The companion that knew all about you—and you, them—with zero effort? The kind you could dream up and bend to your imagination without consulting reality? 

Yeah, clients aren’t like that.‎

Your ideal client profile starts with real people. It isn’t built in a vacuum—or in your imagination. It’s based on real data gathered from real-life conversations with real people. Talking is how you learn to understand them, their pain points, and their challenges. 

So, to build an ideal client profile you can actually use, start with the people.

Look at Your Most Successful Clients

Your most successful clients are the ones that get the most value from your services. With your help, they can (or have) reach(ed) their goals. And they love you for it. 

Odds are, these clients have a lot in common. They may have similar goals and demographics like gender, age, location, or occupation. If you coach other businesses, they likely have comparable team sizes, budgets, or company roles. 

Feelings, motivations, and values are also involved. These inner-world qualities often have just as much influence on behavior and coaching outcomes as the more quantifiable ones.

An example? You might find that your clients need to have a project manager on their team and $X amount of funding to effectively follow your coaching directives. They may also need deep team-wide values of growth or collaboration to endure the process. 

Identifying those prereqs for success sets you both up to win and keeps you out of day-to-day admin for clients.

The commonalities between your most successful clients help to signal whether future clients are a match for your services. Ask yourself, “What about them correlates to success with you?” 

For answers? Go to the people.

Find People in That Audience You Can Talk to

You can’t create this fictional profile without talking to real people. Clients are human, and humans are complex. To dig deeper into those winning characteristics—beyond superficial analysis—find people in your target audience who are willing to chat.

Your to-talk-to list can start with your most successful existing clients. Reach out personally to ask if they would be willing to answer some questions in an interview or survey.

Find more people via Facebook groups. Read through Reddit, Threads, and Instagram. Visit TikTok. Scour LinkedIn. Identify your audience—wherever they are on socials—and engage. 

On sales calls, ask a few key ICP questions to get to know your audience better. This might even reveal the divide between who you think you attract—and who you attract.

Are there specific places in your community where your audience hangs out? Any events or workshops? Local groups or organizations? Where are these people IRL?

Found them? Great. Now keep the conversation focused on who they are, where they struggle, and how they feel. Clarify their challenges and desired results. This isn’t about you—or what you do. It’s an ideal-client-profile-data-gathering expedition, not a sales pitch. 

One-on-one conversations help you build three-dimensional ICPs. Talking unearths “the why,” uncovers important motives or mentalities, and leads you to other key information—like 👇.

Key Information Your Ideal Client Profile Should Include (+ How to Get It)

Your ideal client profile needs to hit some key points to round out that three-dimensional fictional client, and provide actionable marketing and sales insight. Get this information via targeted questions throughout your interviews and research. ✍️

1. Identify Common Pain Points You Can Solve

Where does it hurt? The common pain points of your most successful clients are also their top priority. They may have 99 problems, but this one has their attention, and they are willing to invest the time and resources to solve it. That’s why they’re successful. 

So, what is the problem? Ask things like:

• What is your goal, and what holds you back from achieving it?
• What significantly disrupts your life (or business)?
• What causes you the most stress or worry?

Pain points are at the top of the pyramid. They influence common goals, values, feelings—and so on. Learning these pain points puts the rest of your ICP efforts into perspective.

Perhaps you coach lifestyle fitness, and your clients’ primary pain point is excess body weight. They are driven by the values of health and self-improvement. They currently feel helpless and overwhelmed but want to feel strong and capable.

As they achieve their goals to lose weight and take charge of their futures, their values are lived out—and they feel strong and capable. It all ties back to the pain point. 

So, identify the common pain points and see how they relate to your coaching business and current services. How can you show up for them? How can you speak to clients about what’s going wrong, empathize with how they feel, and offer them a better way forward? Craft marketing materials that use the right language and approach to target those pain points.

2. Understand Where They are in Their Journey

You aren’t equipped to support every moment of your client’s journey. So, you need to understand where they are in two different journeys:

• First, in their journey towards their goals
• Second, in their journey towards deciding to work with a coach

For example, an aspiring entrepreneur dreaming up a business in their 9-5 cubicle is oceans away from the small business owner who turned her side hustle into a business three years ago. They’re in very different stages of their journey towards their goals, and their needs and pain points couldn’t be further apart.

Think about your most successful clients—when they came to you, what was their situation? At what stage in their personal or professional journey does your coaching make the most impact?

How do you understand this stage of the journey better?

• Ask questions! Learn from the people you work with already or those you’ve coached in the past.
• Draw from your personal journey. If you’ve built a coaching business around your own experience, you can empathize with the different stages of the journey and identify the thoughts, feelings, and struggles they’re facing daily.

Secondly, you need to understand where ideal clients are in their customer journey. Do incoming clients realize they need a coach? Have they already worked with other coaches in the past, or is this the first time? Are they willing to put in the necessary time to see results? Knowing where your clients are in your own pipeline is key to knowing how to reach them.

So, to sum up, (1) what is the problem? and (2) how does it show up for them? 

3. Find Out Where They Consume Information

Where ideal clients get their information offers clues into whether or not they’re a good fit for your services. Are they searching for the answers you have?

If they attend Startup Grind events, follow Steli Efti, read Zero to One by Peter Thiel—and you coach budding startup entrepreneurs—you may have a match.

What they consume also reveals whether or not they are taking initiative, doing the research, and putting in work to achieve their goals. And if they are—where you can reach them.

So, what are these information sources? Consider:

• What podcasts do they listen to?
• What books and magazines do they read?
• Which blogs, websites, or online forums do they frequent?
• Who are the gurus or influencers they follow?
• Where do they engage on social media?

Ask your best clients where they hang out. What inspires them? Where do they learn? Who do they trust? Then, you can work backwards to establish those sources as signals for an ideal customer.

At Close, we have ideal customer profiles. One of our ICPs is for people like you! (Yes, we’re about to get meta with it.) It identifies where coaching leaders might consume information, like Master Coaching with Ajit or the books and podcasts of Brené Brown. You may belong to iPEC Coaching or rely on Coaching.com.

This insight is just one piece of the puzzle that helps us understand what type of coaching business we can serve best with our CRM. (Honestly, if we got even one of your info sources correct above, that’s worth checking out our free trial, right?)

Of course, this information helps beyond simply identifying ideal clients. It helps you market to them, too! If you want to reach the right people? Go where those people are. 

4. Know What They’re Willing to Spend on Your Services

The right clients will be willing to pay for your services. They won’t beg for discounts, or constantly come up short on cash. 

They will buy into your unique selling proposition (USP) because they know your services are designed for them, and are better for them than anything else on the market. And they will pay you for it.

Of course, the price you set should reflect your clients’ perceived value. And your clients’ perceived value is influenced by your USP—how well you show that your services can help them succeed—and by proving it’s worth the investment.

How do you know what they’re willing to spend? Look at the data. Look at existing clients, and any hesitancies to pay full price. If you are constantly met with “can I get this for cheaper,” you have either massively overvalued yourself, or more likely, are dealing with non-ideal clients. 

It’s your job to value yourself—and your time—and set a price that’s worth it. 

When you know your value, you can set the right price, for the right clients. 

5. Consider How Much Time & Resources are Required

Cash isn’t the only resource clients need to succeed with your services. Also consider the time commitment and any other resources they need to truly succeed.

A prospective client could hit all your other boxes, but if they can only commit an hour to the program per week and your most successful clients commit five hours? That’s a mismatch.

Clock-check your clients. Discover how much time is required—on top of coaching sessions—to achieve consistent success.

Then look at their other resources. Above and beyond your fees, can they afford to implement your suggestions? Do they have the right staff or team structure?

What do they need? And if they don’t have it—is it a dealbreaker? 

Stop Rooting for the Anti-Hero: Why You Should Build a Non-Ideal Client Profile

Now that you know alllllll about your ideal clients, it’s time to meet the enemy: your non-ideal clients. ‎

These are the clients you do not want to work with because they won’t succeed with your services, and they might destroy you in the process.

Now, we get it. New coaching businesses often struggle to stay financially solvent, and thus, any amount of offered cash—even if you are coaching baseball and they want to learn golf—is hard to turn down. 

But at no point in your coaching journey—even the uncertain start—should you lock in non-ideal clients. We did that with some early-stage customers ourselves, and it nearly killed us. They drain resources, frustrate team members, and always, always fall flat.

That’s why you need a non-ideal client profile, so you can actively market against and turn down these kinds of clients. It helps your team identify—and circumvent—temptation.

To avoid your non-ideal clients, look out for these markers:

• You have to chase them down for their business. Just stop.
• You must overly convince them of your value, because they don’t understand or value your expertise.
• They don’t complete their homework. Coaches offer guidance toward successful outcomes, but clients must always do the heavy lifting.
• They can’t pay full price for your services. And discounts cheapen your value.
• They struggle to communicate their progress barriers. What mental, physical, emotional, etc. barriers are creating the holdup?
• They aren’t willing to move beyond those barriers, aka, they don’t think it’s worth it, because this pain point isn’t a priority for them.

Like your ICPs, the NICPs include information like:

• Pain points, and how those manifest
• Budget expectations
• Team size (if applicable)
• And more

But instead of “find these people and sign them up,” the NICP tells you who not to sign up. This will keep you focused on your ideal clients, and building your ideal coaching business. ✌️

How to Turn Down Non-Ideal Clients

Develop marketing that rejects the initial wave of non-ideal clients. For example, don’t say: “We help entrepreneurs develop key business skills.” This appeals to wayyyy too many people.

Instead, say: “We help bootstrapped startup founders develop key marketing skills to launch their business.”

This tells real estate, finance, and XYZ-non-tech entrepreneurs that your program is not for them. It also highlights what you help startup founders with—getting their brand out there. 

When non-ideals get through the marketing gauntlet, just say: “Sorry, we serve X type of client with Z pain points.” When you say, “I don’t think we offer the coaching services you need,” people will remember you. And they’ll like you. Transparency does that.

Turning down business tells them who your ideal client actually is, which builds trust and leads to referrals with people in their network who match your ICP—all while saving yourself one giant headache. 🤯

Final Thoughts: How to Use Your Ideal Client Profile in Your Coaching Business

Your ideal client profile was never meant to be created and then abandoned. This hard-won client knowledge is intended to guide your business decisions in marketing, sales, and beyond. 

Now you can:

• Choose language and angles for your website that show you (1) understand their challenges and (2) can help
• Target email campaigns to each unique profile and pain point
• Craft posts on socials that engage ideal clients where they are, how they are
• Discover new marketing channels (their trusted sources) to reach more ideal clients
• Adjust your services to better accommodate and serve ideal clients
• And so much more.

This ICP is your compass and reference point, so it should be updated regularly. Your clients evolve, and so do you. Pay attention to new trends in their goals, team sizes, or motivations to stay ahead of how you can best serve—and attract—your ideal clients.

Ideal client criteria are helpful with the sales process, too. Ask qualifying questions—based on what you’ve learned—to sort through leads and find potential clients that match your ICP.

The answers to those questions can be codified into your CRM. Custom Activities in Close can record leads’ responses and qualify—or disqualify—them as ideal clients. That saves you tons of time and streamlines your message targeting. 

So, why not give Close a try? 👊