Ep 108 — Why Smart People Attract the Wrong Clients

Hey you guys and welcome to Morning Cup of Brand Spark. Today I'm joining you from the super warm Netherlands, And I want to talk to you about a specific kind of exhaustion. I'm not talking about burnout. It's not overwork. It's something a lot more precise than that. It's actually the exhaustion that comes from doing good, good work.

For the wrong people. And when that client relationship is fine, nobody's being difficult, nobody's being a nightmare, right? But something you can feel it, it's slightly off. So the work, it might feel like a negotiation instead of a collaboration. You maybe you're finishing projects and you feel relieved rather than satisfied or proud of the project.

Maybe you notice yourself explaining things that you really shouldn't have to explain anymore at this level. So if that's familiar to you, I want to offer you a reframe today. Because most people in that specific situation, well, you think your problem is that client, or maybe it's the market, or it's that you had bad luck. But usually it's what your offer is. So we've talked about voice and proof.

In the last two episodes, we talked about how your voice needs to reflect how you actually think, like how you really think, and how your proof needs to show the work behind what you claim that you do. Now, today we're gonna go one level further down, deeper, and we're going to go into the thing that most brand conversations never actually get to. The offer itself. Because an offer is not just a service description. It's not your what you do. It's actually a statement. And it's a statement about who you believe your clients are. And it's a statement about what you believe they're capable of and what kind of relationship you think is worth having with them. And when your offer is built from a mask instead of a mirror, we're talking about mask and mirror a lot now. When it's designed to appeal to the widest possible market, I'm talking broad, rather than the specific people it's focused toward, then it would attract accordingly. So wide appeal gets you a wide range of clients.

And that might be right for the kind of work that you do in your business. Some of them might be perfect, but a lot of them will likely be wrong. And there is no way to tell the difference until you're already standing in the room with them and you're working together.

Your offer is a filter. The question is whether it's filtering for the right things. So I want to talk about how your offer language can actually become a mask for you as well. And here's how that usually happens. And I want to be very specific here, like hyper specific, because I've watched it play out the same way enough times that it's basically a pattern now. You start your business. We all do.

But you need clients. So you write an offer that sounds credible, that covers all the bases, that doesn't necessarily exclude anyone unnecessarily. Because at the very beginning of your business, you probably can't afford to exclude anyone just yet. And that's not a mistake. Let me say that right here. That's surviving at the very beginning of a startup.

But then you got a lot more experienced in what you're doing and delivering to your clients. And you got a lot more clear on what you're actually good at and the value that you bring. And then you got really clear on which clients produce your best work, your best self, and which ones produce your worst or make you feel horrible inside as you're doing it. That kind of work. You develop opinions.

Strong ones. You really start to know within that first conversation with the person whether or not something is going to work. Now, of course, whether you still say yes, that's another story for another episode. But your offer, you've learned all of this, but your offer stayed the same. Because likely changing it feels a little bit risky, it feels scary. Because what if you narrow it down too much? What if you start to chase people away with it?

What if you turn them away, people that could have been fine and could have been an ideal fit for you? What if the simplicity costs you revenue or it costs you actual growth of your business?

So this is the crux, right? You keep your broad offer, and the broad offer keeps attracting broadly. And you spend a significant portion of your time and your energy managing clients who aren't not necessarily wrong exactly, but they're also not perfect. They're not your ICP, ideal client profile. And over time, that gap between who you've become and who your offer says.

your fork that gets wider and it gets wider and it gets wider until your offer is basically a mask in itself. It's a functional, professional, and completely inaccurate mask of who you are right now and what you do and what you provide. So this offer that you wrote when you were figuring it out at the beginning of your business is not the offer you should have now on your website or in your offering or in your proposal. And there are three failure modes here, or three offer failure modes as I like to call them. They're three patterns. Because apparently this is how my brain works, I like threes. And the first of these three is the everything offer. You do strategy, you do implementation, and you do training and you do advisory and you do speaking and you do consulting and maybe you also do some coaching.

And maybe you make some e-learnings as well. So the list of services feels like you have a massive menu at a restaurant, which is exactly the problem. So if you're creating a capabilities deck and saying I am capable of all of this huge menu of things, yet a capabilities deck is what you show to someone who doesn't know you yet. But your offer is what you show to someone who's trying to decide if they should work with you. Those are two different requirements. They're two different things. One is coverage and one is clarity and conviction. And if your offer looks like coverage, your clients, or your potential clients, can actually figure out what they want to hire you for.

So they either don't hire you at all or they hire you for the wrong thing. I've had that happen to myself before.

And the second one is the safety language offer. Every word in your offer has been polished to the point that it's smooth, like baby butt smooth. Nothing is polarizing. Nothing is specific enough to exclude everyone. For example, something like I help leaders to communicate with impact.

Or I work with organizations to drive meaningful change. The language is potentially, it's technically 100% accurate in what you do. But it's completely indistinct. It doesn't say what you actually provide. It could describe 15 other people in your field immediately. And that means when someone reads it, they don't know if you are the right fit.

Why you over those other fourteen? So they go look at the fifteen other people. They look at all of them and they pick whoever seems more specific or seems like they could vibe with in a professional way. Or they could deliver the kind of results they're looking for. They pick who is not you in that sense. And then the third one, the aspirational offer. You've written the offer you want to be true, right?

This is slightly ahead of where you are right now. The client you're describing is maybe slightly more sophisticated than who you're actually attracting at the moment. And the result is really subtle, but it is a misalignment. And it's at first contact. Clients arrive expecting one thing and find something a little bit different when they meet you. It's not a bad thing. You're not doing anything specifically wrong here.

It's just that it's not what they thought. There is a gap, and that gap is where trust starts to erode down from what you are providing.

And that gap happens when you haven't even had the chance to earn it yet.

So an offer that doesn't reflect who you are and who you're actually for, that's not a positioning problem at all. It's a mirror problem. So let me walk you through a little bit of what a mirror offer might look like. So when we apply my framework and my methodology to this. So a mirror offer is specific enough to repel the wrong people. And that's not a side effect to it. That's intentional. That's the point.

It's repelling, it's working correctly. It names the client clearly enough that the right person reads it and thinks, ha, that's for me. And they don't think that could be me. And they don't think huh, I guess I might sort of fit there. They think that's me, exactly. And I have been looking for this and I've been looking for this person to help me.

It describes the problem in a language that the client would actually use. Not a category name for the problem. I'm talking about the way that it feels from the inside. Because people don't necessarily search for, I'm looking for a strategic communications expert or solution. They search for things like, why the hell does my team always misread me? Or they might search for something like, Why do my pitches keep falling flat? Or Why do I feel like I'm speaking a different language than the other people on my team or in my board? Your offer needs to meet them where the problem actually lives. And it needs to make that transformation specific. Not communicate with more impact, like the example from earlier. It's more like, what does that mean, right? What does more impact mean? How is that measured? By what?

And how specific is it? Your board stops misreading you. That's the impact. Your pitches got you funding. That's the impact. You stop having to say the same exact thing three different ways in order to get your point across and hoping that one of those sticks.

Specific gives someone something to want, like really want. Vague gives them something to maybe nod and then pass on by. So the right clients, they don't need convincing. They need to recognize themselves. See the mirror here and what you're saying. So when you're doing the offer check section of the mirror check, there are three questions here. Three questions.

Question number one. Read your current offer out loud, like with your mouth, your voice. Does it sound like something that would actually come out of your mouth? Does it sound specifically you? Does it sound the way you talk about your work when you're excited about it or when you met someone at a conference? You're standing in a pub. Is that how you explain what you do?

Or does it sound like you've professionally written it or watered it down and made an approximation of who you are and what you do? If it's the latter, you're wearing a mask in place where people come to find you and decide whether or not to hire you. And the second question look at your last five clients. Really, go do this. Take a minute and think about this. Are they the clients you would have?

Designed for if you were intentional about it? Like would you have picked them out of a hand-picking pile, for example?

Are they the clients the offer happened to attract? Or are they the ones that you would hand pick if you could do it again? There's useful information in that list. Categorize them. Go even further back than your last five clients. It's telling you what your offer is filtering for, and it's telling you what you think it's filtering for. And then question three.

Is there anything in your current offer that would make the wrong clients self-select themselves out? So any specificity, any stated requirement, is there any clear this is not for you if signal? And if you're not, if the offer is all inclusion without any edges at all, you're also not filtering. You're hoping the right one still slides on in.

And these questions, they're harder than the voice and the proof questions for you. Because changing your offer often feels really risky because it is part of how you make money, right? This is the commercial side of your business, this is your revenue. But keeping the wrong offer is already costing you something, and it's something that you haven't measured yet. Keep that in your mind. It's costing you energy, and it's costing you the work.

You actually want to do and that gives you the energy. And it's costing you the clients who would have potentially been absolutely perfect for you if only your offer had been specific enough to find them. So if this inspired you at all, go ahead over to mirrornotmask.com and take the mirror not mask diagnostic. This covers all four of these areas voice, proof,

Offer and visibility. And the offer section is particularly useful because this tends to produce the most uncomfortable results. It is the place that people have been avoiding the longest. It's the hardest one to change. Sometimes this discomfort is the one that's most useful because you haven't actually gotten this information or thought about it this way potentially in years.

So you can take the diagnostic there. It takes you five to ten minutes. It's super quick, free, and easy. Next week, We're gonna finish off the series with visibility. This is where everything we've covered either compounds or it collapses. And then the week after that, season three is actually starting. And I've already got guests lined up for season three. If you're interested in being in one of the future episodes,

Season three is kicking off the unlearn series. So would be happy to have you on. There is a link at, and there's a brand new website for the podcast as well. It's at brandspark.show. And there on the top right, there is a link where you can click and from that directly apply to be on the show. And in essence, it would be 15 minutes where we talk about one single thing that you had to unlearn in order to get where you are today.

So if you have any questions, you know you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. I am Gina Dunn, that's D-U-N-N on LinkedIn, and I will see you next week. See ya soon.