Interviewing Your Ideal Clients

[0:06] Hey there, welcome back to your fun and profitable online business. This is Episode 6. I’m Wendy Muzzy, a money coach and business strategist, and I help women entrepreneurs stop spinning their wheels, start making money, and have way more fun doing it. If you’re ready for some fresh ideas, smart business moves, and a little bit of confetti, you’re in the right place. Today, we’re diving into one of the underrated business strategies, interviewing your ideal client. If you’ve ever struggled with how to attract the right people, create offers that sell or write content that resonates, this one’s for you. 

Why assumptions about your audience can limit your business success

Talking directly to your ideal client is one of the fastest ways to unlock your words, problems, and desires that’ll make your business click. All right, let’s get into it. Now, first of all, let’s talk about why this is important. I’m going to be honest here. We’d all love to read some minds out there, but we can’t guess our way into success here. A lot of business owners fall into the trap of assuming they know what their audience wants. But unless you’re literally reading minds, which I haven’t figured out how to do it. If you have, high five, keep it up. I haven’t figured out how to do it. You’re probably leaving things on the table by guessing instead of asking. When we talk directly to our ideal clients, we figure out what their struggles are, what their goals are, and what their desires are. And we get to learn their own words. And this makes it easier to create offers that actually people want to buy and market to him in the way that actually speaks to him. It also helps us write copy that feels like we’re in their mind.

[1:36] This is really hard. And sometimes we want to be careful here. But we want people to read our content and be like, oh, my goodness, they get it. They understand where I am. And sometimes we can do it because we’ve been there before. Totally, we’ve been there before. But other times we need to understand a little bit of different language that we may use that they don’t use. This is a really common example that I use whenever I talk to clients about this with money mindset, I used to use financial security and financial freedom interchangeably. For me personally, they were very similar. I thought that financial security was being completely and totally debt free, no more house payments, no more car payments, no more payments of whatever. That was my ideal financial security and also financial freedom because I was free of all payments.

[2:24] What I found out though, through my client interviews, is financial security was something totally different. Maybe for some people, it was having a certain amount saved. Or maybe for others, it was just to meet their monthly goals. But well, as financial freedom meant they didn’t have to worry about work anymore. So through these client interviews, I learned to use my language a little bit differently. And I got to connect to my clients better. This was not luck. This was research. I got these golden nuggets that made my messaging more conveyable and my connections deeper by talking to them, by asking them direct questions. There were no more struggles to come up with what to say. It was all right there for me, straight from the source.

How client interviews reveal the exact language and pain points of your ideal customers

[3:06] Finally, this leads to more sales without feeling salesy. When we really understand our audience on a deeper level, selling becomes easy, almost natural. We’re not trying to convince people what to buy. We’re simply showing them how our offer solves their problem, because we understand what their problems are, and we understand how they speak about them. They no longer feel like they’re being pushed upon. They’re like, oh, this is exactly for me. So it makes it really almost seamless. Now that we’ve talked about why this is important, from sales to connection to just understanding our people, let’s talk about how to actually conduct an interview.

A step-by-step approach to conducting effective ideal client interviews

[3:45] Step one is to choose the right people. You may not know exactly where your ideal client sits today, but you might have some demographics. You might know they’re women between the ages of 30 and 50, and they run their own business. Let’s just say that’s your ideal demographic. Given that, you can probably find your ideal client out there. And then we ask them, we ask ourselves, do they have a problem that I can solve? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. We might have to approach them and see. And then also, are they willing to be open and honest with us? These are generally ideas that you can get just by a coffee chat or a conversation, or maybe you have a friend who can point you in the right direction. But you get what the ideal client demographics would be. And then through your interview, you can understand if they’re more suited for what you’re looking to address. We don’t need a huge number here. I say three to five are a solid interview number, and we can get some really good insights from that.

[4:45] Now that you have your people, the next step is to actually conduct the interview. Here, we’re going to ask open-ended questions. We’re going to get deep, thoughtful responses, not just yes-no responses. Some great questions to ask would be, what’s your biggest challenge right now when it comes to whatever your niche is? How do you feel when this problem happens? What would solving this problem look like for you? Here, we want to let them do the talking. We’re not rushing to fill the silence. We’re asking the question and letting them respond. The longer they talk, the more gold you’re going to get.

[5:20] Step number three is to record and review the responses. Hopefully, you’re recording during their interview, but if not, let’s make sure we put up the step previously. But we get their permission and record the interview so we can really be fully present while we’re having this conversation. And whenever you review it later, I’d suggest transcribing it. We want to look for repeated words and phrases, or strong emotional language, or unexpected insights. Here, we’re going to get the exact language they use, the exact content, and we’re going to plug this into our sales pages, and we’re going to plug this into our conversations. I would have missed so many points throughout my entire money coaching process had I not done these key interviews. And luckily enough, now with my business strategy, it’s a natural extension. Like I know what those stages are. I know what the thoughts are. I often know what the language is. I’m immersed in the world. But if I don’t, I’d go back and go do those interviews again.

How understanding your audience deeply leads to more natural, non-pushy sales

[6:19] All right, let’s talk about your action steps for this week. Schedule one ideal client interview. Reach out to someone in your network or your audience and ask them if they’d be open to a quick 30-minute chat. Use open-ended questions to guide the conversation, record it with permission so you can be fully present, and when you review the recording, take note of those key phrases they use and compile a list of common pain points.

[6:43] From there, you can start to get some offers that come from those. If you’re not sure what to ask, I put together an ideal client interview guide where I walk you through it step-by-step and I give you some sample questions to make it super easy. You can grab it at wendymuzzy.com/interviewguide or find the link in the show notes at wendymuzzy.com/6. Please know talking to your ideal client makes marketing so much easier, selling smoother and your offers more irresistible. Please don’t skip this step, please. If you love this episode, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your biz bestie who definitely needs to hear this too. And if you’re ready to go deeper into your ideal client interviews, grab that guide at wendymuzzy.com/interviewguide. See you next time and happy interviewing.