Now that you’ve articulated the pain for each of your potential ICPs, take a step back and ask yourself: which of these are urgent?

When you design a client service around a non-urgent problem, it’s like adding molasses to your pipeline:

• Prospects will be slow to book initial consults or follow-ups...
• You’ll need to convince them they even have the problem you’re hoping to solve for them...
• Even if successful, they’ll have to fight internally for budget to proceed
• They’ll likely apply downward rate pressure...
• Then perhaps kick out the start date...
• Even if you do start an engagement, they may be slow to engage with you due to more pressing priorities or projects...
• Even if you do complete an engagement, they’ll be sending you referrals to other low-urgency prospects...

Each of these chips away at your profitability, and before you know it, you’re left with a slate of a few low-value clients after quite a bit of frustrating work.

So, the service design stage is the perfect opportunity to mitigate this risk, and simply remove the potential ICPs without urgency.

Then, you can focus on crafting a service hypothesis where time (or the lack of it) works in your favor.

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For more on this topic, see "911 - what's your client's emergency?"​

💡

-Wes

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