Build an anti-persona to attract better clients

There's one question I ask every client before we start working on their brand strategy:

"Who do you want to lose as a customer if we get this positioning right?"

As a founder, that's not an easy question to answer.

No one likes losing revenue. It feels like a punch to the gut when trying to grow your business past low seven figures into high seven or low eight figures.

But I love it ask it, and I live for the uncomfortable silence that follows.

Because that question assumes you've been attracting the wrong customers, which most B2B businesses are; they just don't want to admit it.

Why That Question Matters

I started Shft by accident without a strategy.

I was creating content on LinkedIn to try to land a new marketing role. But a crazy thing happened — B2B founders started DMing me asking for marketing help, and I made the biggest mistake of all:

I said YES to everyone.

Facebook ads. Landing pages. Messaging docs. Facebook company pages. Google ad campaigns.

If you wanted it done, I could do it, which led to a giant mess.

Shft started by attracting people I didn't want to work with. None of those leads could tell me who their ideal customers were, why they should choose them, or even had a decent enough website for any kind of marketing to work.

And trying to get them to build that foundation was impossible.

So I did something then that I teach my clients now:

Decided who we ARE for
And who we are NOT for

Once I got clear on our customer and anti-customer personas, the business basically doubled overnight.

My content changed. Our messaging changed. Discovery calls changed.

I stopped taking $200 Facebook page projects and started landing $5,000-$13,000 brand strategy projects.

Clients who understood the value of building their foundation, moved fast, and didn't drag me through endless rounds of "we need to think about it."

That's what knowing who you are not for does.

Determining Who You Are NOT For

Answering that question is vital to building a solid positioning strategy.

Founders who can answer that question quickly already have an idea of their positioning, even if they can't articulate it yet.

But those who can't answer the question? We have a lot of work to determine how they should show up in the market.

Because if you can't name who you're willing to walk away from, your positioning ends up trying to speak to everyone.

And everyone is not a strategy.

Airline Segmentation Exercise

The easiest way I've found to help clients determine who they are for and are not for is to run the Airline Segmentation Exercise.

It's fairly simple:

Pull a list of your existing and past clients
Sort them into three categories

First Class

These are the clients you want to clone.

They pay fast. They don't micromanage. They buy quickly and make decisions without dragging you through five rounds of "we need to think about it."

Build your positioning around attracting more of them.

Economy class

Your TAM (total addressable market). This is anyone who could buy from you.

You'll probably take the money, but you're not building your brand around them. They likely don't buy the full offer, need a bit more education to buy, and take longer to decide.

Banned class

These are clients you'd fire on the spot if you could go back.

Scope creep. Slow payments. No payments. The ones who wanted you available 24/7. The ones who were condescending to your team. The ones who disappeared after you delivered. The ones who were too small and never got real value out of what you sold them.

Write them all down.

Knowing who you never want to work with again tells you exactly who you do want to work with.

Build Your Anti-Persona

Take what you found and build an anti-persona: a description of the types of clients you are not for.

Consider:

Persona name: makes it easy to notice and qualify.
Profile: 1-2 sentences about their defining characteristic
Logic: why they are an anti-persona
Detection Question: one question you can ask in a discovery call that instantly qualifies them as an anti-persona

If a lead displays those qualities, you bounce, even when your founder brain is focused on the revenue.

I built an anti-persona section into our Customer Profile Template — the same one we use when building brand strategy for clients.

Grab a copy here for $0.

Download it. Fill it out. Use it.

The right people find you faster when you stop trying to hold onto the wrong ones, boo.

Until next week,

#SassyJason out.

✌🏼