Business Development: Building Your Ideal Client with AI

Artificial intelligence, as it stands today, is not a complete solution. It’s a great starting point. When people refer to AI, that usually means a large language model (LLM), like ChatGPT. This type of AI can generate and refer to text, quickly linking relevant text together.

Most people are looking for a quick fix with easy technology to automate their mundane activities. Unfortunately, being a human and building relationships is one of those things you can’t automate, and you’d be better off picking up the phone and calling your clients than trying out a new tool. However, being able to utilize a LLM to give you a starting point to gather insights about your best clients and where to focus your time is awesome.

To quickly and easily gain an understanding of your ideal clients and the problems that they are facing, you have to start with the right prompts. This will allow you to prepare better for meetings, have better conversations, and focus your efforts on what actually matters — your clients, their problems, and how your services help them.

Getting to Your Ideal Client Profile

Sharing client insights with partners is a big deal. BD and marketing professionals need to make sure partners are enabled to the best of their ability to perform BD activities. Building out a starting point of an ideal client profile (ICP) is a great first step. An ICP answers the question: What attributes make the best client for myself (or my firm)?

Once you have answered this question, you can then build your ideal buyer persona (IBP). This is a profile of who is hiring you or your firm and what they care about. It’s your unique selling proposition (USP), that thing that differentiates you from your competition. (Spoiler: It’s not your dedication to client service or that you are “fun.”)

ICP -> IBP -> USP

To build out your starter ICP, you can use an LLM of your choosing — Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. Regardless of the tool, the prompt used to generate your ICP and relevant accompanying information are of paramount importance.

The Starting Prompt

With your LLM tool pulled up and ready to go, enter this prompt:

I am a [professional] at [company]. We provide [services] to [example of types of clients – major industries served, size, geographic concentration]. We need a summary of an ideal client for our firm.

Please look at our company [company name] and determine:

 – likely competitors

 – geography

 – likely clients

 – industries

And then provide a one paragraph summary of our ideal client profile.

It’s important to note that you will likely have to adjust and provide guidance to the application. For example, – if it provides wrong industries or size companies, redirect it with prompts like:

We do not serve non-profits, so please exclude those. Is there another industry that might make sense?

Or

We serve the lower middle market mainly with $1 million to $100 million companies. Please provide those as baseline examples.

Building Your Industries and Examples

Once you have a base for your ICP, you would want to learn more about your industries and potential ideal clients. The next step would be to understand the qualities and characteristics of companies in your ICP. You could use this prompt:

Could you expand on all the example industries providing industry insights such as growth, challenges, and opportunities, and give specific companies based on the parameters above as examples?

Building Your Ideal Buyer Persona

Once you have expanded the parameters, you need a baseline to understand the daily challenges, as well as the overall goals of the people that are making the decision to work with you. What this really allows you to do is focus on empathy — where the person is coming from and what they care about in their profession. Use this prompt:

Based on the above parameters and groupings, who at these companies are making the decisions about hiring the public accounting firm? Please provide the titles, challenges, opportunities, and what they care about daily.

Building the Complete Picture

Now, you want to put it all together and look at specific companies, their services and make some assumptions about their status. Use a prompt like:

Based on the above, can you provide example companies, the person at the company that fits the profile above, and this company’s: services provided, types of clients they serve, opportunities, and challenges. Please provide it in rows and columns format.

The Bonus Prompt

To get some ideas on how you could position yourself differently, you can ask:

Based on everything you have provided and understand about [our firm], what are some examples of our unique selling proposition? Why would these companies and buyers hire [our firm]?

By seeing how generic some of these responses will be, you can eliminate them from your options! If everyone can say it, it’s not a differentiator.

Applying What You Generated

You should now have a good sheet of assumptions (that was the easy part). Here’s how that information is practically applied.

There are two main reasons why this is a valuable exercise.

1. To get new hires up to speed quickly on industries and ideal buyers
2. To help partners keep up to speed and focused on what matters for their clients

If one your industries is manufacturing, your final generated text should look something like this:

Manufacturing

• Company: Machine Solutions Inc.
• Decision-Maker: Controller
• Services: Designing and manufacturing custom automation equipment for the medical device and pharmaceutical industries
• Clients: Medical device and pharmaceutical companies requiring specialized manufacturing solutions
• Opportunities: Expanding into new industries, developing innovative automation technologies, increasing market share through targeted marketing
• Challenges: Managing complex supply chains, maintaining quality standards, staying ahead of technological advancements in the industry

Turn Data Into a Conversation

As a marketing or BD professional, you want to take this along with your manufacturing client list and present it to the partner, the industry leader, or a practitioner who does most of the work for those types of clients. You’ll want to ask that person:

1. Are these the parameters for a good manufacturing client?
2. What insights or questions can we provide to our manufacturing clients based on this information?
3. With this information, how do we grow our relationships with our clients and then use it to think about referral sources that have clients like this?

This conversation, and the exercise that leads to it, will help you get more focused on providing valuable insights and building strong relationships by showing your knowledge in a specific industry. Providing these insights is not just part of the job, it’s what allows the best marketers and business developers to rise to higher levels of their professions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Neil Barrow is a business development expert with 15 years of experience in sales and business development. He is the founder of RevOps Advisors, helping firms build or enhance their business development function. He has worked in two different large, local accounting firms overseeing strategic sales development, community engagement, and go-to-market strategies.