Episode 280 with Catharine O’Leary: Understanding and Listening to Your Ideal Clients

I am excited to share my conversation with guest Catherine O'Leary, owner and founder of Client Intelligence Agency, on this episode of the Ready Yet Podcast. Join us as we dive into the crucial role of understanding and listening to your ideal clients, using Tupperware's recent bankruptcy as a cautionary tale. Discover how failing to adapt to consumer needs can spell disaster, and learn actionable insights to stay ahead of your competition. 

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Catharine O'Leary, known as the 'Quiz Queen,' is an expert in client engagement. With over three decades in market research and consumer insights, she specializes in attracting ideal clients and boosting revenue. Her approach uses questions to foster strong client relationships and grow businesses. Join her mission to harness the power of curiosity to connect with your ideal clients.

Learn how to create and launch your first or next quiz for free here:  https://yourfreequiz.com

https://catharineoleary.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/catharineoleary

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Transcript

Episode 280 with Catharine O’Leary: Understanding and Listening to Your Ideal Clients

Transcribed by Descript 

Erin Marcus: All right. Welcome, welcome to this episode of the Ready Yet podcast, where my guest today, Catherine O'Leary, just gave me sad news. Sad news. But I think it's it's important news, especially if you're my age. But it's important business news. So the sad news, before we get into the sad news, why don't you tell everybody who you are and what you do?

Erin Marcus: Thank 

Catharine O'Leary: you, Erin. Thank you for having me. And I'm sorry that I gave you sad news. I'm Catherine O'Leary and I and am the owner and founder of the Client Intelligence Agency, which helps business owners really understand their ideal clients through consumer insights and through asking questions and continually being connected with their clients.

Catharine O'Leary: Always getting that feedback because as we're about to talk about, if you don't, if you don't listen to your clients and you don't listen to your customers and even your competitors, then you could be left out in the dark, similar to what is going on right now. With Tupperware, and if you haven't read yet, Tupperware has filed for bankruptcy.

Catharine O'Leary: And there are several reasons, I know 

Erin Marcus: Tupperware parties, right? I, we even at F put it this way at family holidays. Our family holidays are run B Y O T style. Bring your own Tupperware, right? 

Catharine O'Leary: It became such a brand name, like Kleenex, where that, store and go, compartments were Tupperware.

Catharine O'Leary: Like whether it was Tupperware brand or not, it was Tupperware. And where Tupperware, I think probably, lost the plot was they didn't listen to their consumers. As more competitors came on, things like Ziploc and other glad and other competitors started to create cheaper.

Catharine O'Leary: Not better, probably not even not even close. Not even close. 

Erin Marcus: Not even 

Catharine O'Leary: close 

Erin Marcus: to better. 

Catharine O'Leary: But cheaper and, disposable in the real sense. One of the things that I remember as a kid, I don't know about you, but, Lord help you if you lost that Tupperware thing at lunchtime, when you were at school because it was a 25 lunch thing.

Erin Marcus: Even as an adult, the reason our family holidays are bring your own Tupperware is because my mother got fed up with not getting her Tupperware back and she tried the version where you didn't get, you had to bring back her Tupperware in order for her to refill it, but that meant you left with it again.

Erin Marcus: So we had to switch, bring your own, bring your 

Catharine O'Leary: own. Because it was expensive, right? And the quality was there, but here's the thing. If consumers don't think the quality is a benefit, it doesn't 

Erin Marcus: matter. Because what's the goal? Just to go deeper into this as an example, what's the goal? The goal is to keep the food in, from leaking all over the refrigerator, and keep it safe to eat for a couple of days.

Erin Marcus: And there's cheaper ways to do it. 

Catharine O'Leary: Cheaper ways to do it, and those ways, if they get lost, it's not that big of a deal. It doesn't break the bank. If your 12 year old doesn't bring it back, you don't care. Exactly, right? You just, you go and buy another five of the sandwich holders, right? Or whatever it is.

Erin Marcus: Yeah, this is such a common situation, and we talk about Blockbuster. We talk about Kodak. We talk about the leaders in these industries. literally going out of business. And here's one of the things that always frustrates me. And maybe it's because it rubs up against one of the things, like if someone says this to me, that's it.

Erin Marcus: I tend to not pay attention to them ever again. It's good or bad, but. If I hear from someone, that's the way it's always been, I check out. That's 

Catharine O'Leary: the signal. That's the signal. That's the signal that it's about to change. 

Erin Marcus: And the tax, I live in Chicago big taxicab, very expensive to get your medallion and all that thing.

Erin Marcus: And they were pissed when Uber and Lyft. And the real estate industries don't like Zillow and realtor. com. None of this iteration happens when consumers are happy.

Catharine O'Leary: BlackBerry is a perfect example, right? I was at BlackBerry when all hell broke loose and. It was, it was a little bit of a perfect storm. There's a lot going on. Consumers, what consumers wanted, BlackBerry didn't care about. What competitors were doing, not Apple so much, but Android BlackBerry ignored.

Catharine O'Leary: And, what employees were saying, BlackBerry just chose to, continue on. And, where are they now? They're an enterprise software company. They don't even have smartphones anymore. It didn't have to be that way. It didn't. And these are big examples, right? I was gonna 

Erin Marcus: say that.

Erin Marcus: Break it, I don't, they're big examples because it's easy to, I think the mistake a smaller company or even a solopreneur would make is to say that's a big company, that's why it happened. 

Catharine O'Leary: And actually, I find a lot of solopreneurs and, smaller businesses have never taken the time to do the market research that they should be doing on their ideal clients.

Catharine O'Leary: So if you don't have. a solid understanding of your ideal client. This is where you have to niche down. This is where you have to get into their heads about their 3 a. m. question and, what wakes them up at night in their language, right? It can't be, don't be clever, be clear, right?

Catharine O'Leary: Nobody wakes up 3 a. m. with all the flowery marketing conversation in their head, other than maybe me and you. How am I going to 

Erin Marcus: allocate my resources? That's right. Nobody said. Nobody says 

Catharine O'Leary: that. Nobody says 

Erin Marcus: that. 

Catharine O'Leary: People say, how am I going to pay my mortgage? 

Erin Marcus: Exactly. That's what they say. And I think what happens for solopreneurs and smaller businesses is the owner goes into business because they love doing the thing the business does.

Erin Marcus: They don't love sitting and trying to figure out what their ideal client is worried about. They just want to go do the thing. Which, 

Catharine O'Leary: if you build it, they will come is done, that's dead. Don't that's not a thing anymore, right? It's not that's just not gonna work. Which is where Blackberry was, oh, we're just gonna build more more of these, QWERTY keyboard phones. We don't care that people want apps, and we don't care that people want video. And video screens, and we don't care that people wanna play on their phones. We we care about business, we care about security.

Catharine O'Leary: We care about the fact that you're, it's a closed loop system. Guess what? Consumers didn't care about any of that anymore. They changed, right? And when they change and you don't keep up with them, then you start losing. For solopreneurs and for, small businesses, if you don't have the right language, it doesn't matter that you have the perfect solution for them.

Catharine O'Leary: If you can't say it in their words and you can't say it so that they You know, attached to it and they, they feel like it can help them as a solution, it's not going to matter. You'll never get 

Erin Marcus: past the gate with them. 

Catharine O'Leary: No, because they're just going to 

Erin Marcus: go scrolling on to the next thing.

Erin Marcus: Or what are some leading indicators? One of the things that I learned over the years in business is there's a difference between waiting too late. Like I see, I missed the writing on the wall. So now I'm trying to catch up. What are some leading indicators? How do we know that it's time? 

Catharine O'Leary: Wow that's the million dollar question, right?

Catharine O'Leary: And I think that if you are in a continual state of always being curious and asking your clients questions, you'll never have to answer. That's a great point. Ask, that's a great point, right? If you're continually in a feedback loop of, making sure, like what's coming up for you, what's 'cause this is it's a day-to-day conversation.

Catharine O'Leary: Who knows what the next big Uber is gonna be. Consumers can't even tell you that. They didn't know what Uber was. Like, they didn't know what the thing was. Everyone was just like that's just how things go. It's tax season. It's expensive. But that's 

Erin Marcus: what isn't it Henry Ford?

Erin Marcus: If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. It's not gonna necessarily The answer's not gonna come from them. However, to your point The struggle. The struggle starts to you'll hear about the struggle. 

Catharine O'Leary: If you are not able to connect with your ideal clients and understand what they're now going through, because you might've solved, maybe you've solved the first problem, but you've created a second problem, right?

Catharine O'Leary: Often as they go through your course or as they go through your program or as they consume your product, you've now got a second problem, probably and so you either solve that problem or you have a partner that can solve it for them, however that works. But if you don't understand that, then how can you serve them?

Catharine O'Leary: You gotta ask. And they can't tell you what the answer is. They can't tell you, all they can say is, You know what, it's a pain in the butt to, to clean my hardwood floors. Swiffer. It's just, they listened to what the problem was and then they figured out the innovation. That's what your job is as a business.

Erin Marcus: I think that's where so many small business owners get it wrong. They says, I tell people put your little safety bubble on because I get real blunt. Your business is not about you. No. And so many, again, people start their business because they love doing the thing and they go on and on about how good they, if they get brave enough to talk about how good they are at the thing and they go on and on because they're in love with the thing, half of the people who hire you don't even what you do for a living, they just need to solve a problem.

Erin Marcus: Your business is not about you. 

Catharine O'Leary: If you go onto your website and you do a control F, a control find, and you type the word I, like for me, like I or me, And if it comes up even twice, it's too many times, right? Like it's not about 

Erin Marcus: you. It's, and here's the thing I tell people, give yourself a break, but don't let yourself off the hook.

Erin Marcus: Give yourself a break. This is the way our brains work, but don't let yourself off the hook. You can learn to speak in a different format. 

Catharine O'Leary: And you were once that person. Yes. Remember it from that side, right? Because the thing is that once you get to the other side of the problem and you have the solution and you're actually providing the solution to other people, the way that you talk about it is completely different.

Catharine O'Leary: Because you've solved it, right? You're not in the weeds anymore. You gotta get back into the weeds and understand what people are talking about now in order to connect with them. And the best way to do that is by, asking questions and making sure that you are keeping up with, what the conversation is.

Catharine O'Leary: So why do you think more people 

Erin Marcus: don't do this? What's the, somehow I'll just say, okay, doing what you do for a living and running a business are two different things, and maybe you just don't know. That's fair. I think a lot of people are terrified to find out that the thing that they wanna do isn't something other people wanna buy.

Catharine O'Leary: That's a bigger problem, right? If you've started a, how to knit underwater, underwater basket weaving, yes. We've got a different conversation going on. I think that people don't know how to connect with their ideal clients. Everyone seems to think that I have to phone somebody up and actually, have a conversation.

Catharine O'Leary: God forbid, talk to 

Erin Marcus: a human being. 

Catharine O'Leary: God forbid, talk to a human being. Always the best way to go, by the way. Always. I'm always going to suggest in person or, live interviews or anything like that. But we have a wealth of information at our fingertips. And if you're really struggling with what your ideal client looks like and thinks and the pain points and I have a tool for you that you can go and you can use and it's free and it takes all of my market research, corporate work and puts it all into A couple of quick questions and we'll get you started at least because there are lots of ways that you can be connecting with your ideal clients and making sure that you have the right messaging, the right offers, the right positioning, like it all, it has to come back to your ideal 

Erin Marcus: client.

Erin Marcus: One of the things I love about this topic, aside from the fact that my MBA focused on marketing, and so I'm total geeking out, I love marketing stuff, is. I think once you get over, once you say, okay, I have to do this in my business on a regular basis. Okay, fine. And once you get over the fear or whatever, stopping you, you can become very happily addicted to this process.

Erin Marcus: And it's. Fun. If you truly have a business because you want to help other people, you can very quickly realize that these type of feedback loops are your best bet at helping more people. 

Catharine O'Leary: And the really fun part, I find, is that there's golden nuggets in there. There might be a new product or a new service that you're like, Oh, hey wait, I can do that very easily.

Catharine O'Leary: That's what they're asking for? That'll take me the weekend. Or yeah, we can do that. Or maybe that's a VIP day. Or, geez, a lot of people are asking for this support. Maybe I do a mastermind. They if you get Enthusiastic about what's going on? What, like, how can I better serve?

Catharine O'Leary: How can I meet my clients where they're at? And you come out at it with like curiosity and fun and excitement. Like ideas and innovation will jump out 

Erin Marcus: at you. Yeah. And it's not, and realizing their feedback is not about you as a human, right? We have to, one of the things that I highly recommend is. And so one of the things that I've learned with clients is, the business's money is not your money because the business is an asset.

Erin Marcus: The business is the business. And Aaron, for example, is just one of the assets that conquer your business. So that way I don't get so attached to the money that when I think I'm paying for something, they're taking my money. It's the same thing with looking for feedback. It's not about you as a human.

Catharine O'Leary: It's about their It's about us. 

Erin Marcus: There's 

Catharine O'Leary: also There's also no way a business gets any better if it doesn't know where it's falling down. So along your customer journey, if you don't have touch points to see where, where things are going or how things are going, you don't know what to improve, right?

Catharine O'Leary: And at the end of the day, yeah, and at the end of the day, it takes five times as much effort and resources and money to, attract a new person into your community or into your, your sphere. than it is to retain a client. And we don't spend enough time trying to make sure that we're keeping people satisfied once they're in our, our environment.

Erin Marcus: And here's a perfect example of that. So we rented, before we finally bought our house because we finally decided where did we actually want to stay, we had rented a couple houses in a row. And one of them was from a large nationwide company does that. And whenever we would have a maintenance call, they would.

Erin Marcus: Send me a one question survey, right? And this is what used to piss me off about this. And to the point where I moved. And this was one of my reasons for let's just buy our own house. They would send me a survey that said, how likely are you to recommend the gentleman, the woman, whoever the contractor took care of that problem.

Erin Marcus: And the contractors are always great. The plumber, they're like the salt of the earth people. They're always great. I hated the company. I hated all their, like the way they ran their company was horrendous, but they would send me this one question survey to ask me if I was okay with this guy that came and fixed my lock.

Erin Marcus: And I stopped responding to them because they would then take that information and say, look, these people all recommend us. That's not what. You, right? It's you gotta be careful how you are phrasing and asking your questions. 

Catharine O'Leary: There is a, an art and science. to question asking, especially if you're going to be using the data on the backend.

Erin Marcus: Yes. 

Catharine O'Leary: You don't want to be making data driven decisions on, it's garbage in garbage out. Yeah. So if you ask crap questions and you're going to get Like data that you shouldn't be, making decisions on. So that's, yeah, that's an art. I see a lot of like quizzes and surveys out there that it's wow, that's a leading question.

Catharine O'Leary: That's a question that is no, like just not answerable. And it's a, it's like I said, it's. An art meets science. I spent, 35 years. How did you get into 

Erin Marcus: this? It's such a niche and I absolutely love it. Like how did this become your thing? 

Catharine O'Leary: So I studied economics and so I have a master's degree in economics.

Catharine O'Leary: And as an economist, I could do one of two things. I could sell insurance. I guess three things go to a bank. And work as an economist, or I could work in market research and really understand consumer behavior. And that was a lot more fun to me. That, that problem of you've got two cars in a lot, they're exactly the same.

Catharine O'Leary: Exactly the same. One's black, one's red. The red one, you can actually charge more for. Isn't that great? Why? Because there's a reason. Because people put a utility, they actually will, they value it more. That's the kind of work we would do for Apple, and Pepsi, and Adobe, and HP. And now that's the work that, that I want to make sure that smaller businesses can do without having a market research firm and spending, two million dollars on a, on an engagement.

Erin Marcus: I think that's the ultimate question. Why do people do what they do? 

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, what's driving them? And it's a struggle. It's this it's either the struggle or it's some sort of a perception, right? The red car is faster. The red car is, makes it's a class above. It makes it look like I'm more, off or it's a branding thing.

Catharine O'Leary: Like brand is all about. Like how much utility is attached to an Apple brand versus an Android brand, a lot more. You can charge more just because you put Apple on it because that's the way they built it. Backing, backing that up a little bit is really at the end of the day, though, Apple does a very good job of understanding its ideal clients.

Erin Marcus: Right. 

Catharine O'Leary: And knowing exactly what they need next and talking to them in a language That they understand, not talking over them, it's not all about the product features, it's not anything about the product features, actually. That's such 

Erin Marcus: a perfect example, because who in their right mind, when we grew up, would have thought that in our childhood, a phone was something you bought once.

Erin Marcus: Period. And I am old enough to where we used to lease our phones and used to go pick them out at the aging. That's a whole different topic. I don't know if it was like that where you are, but they effectively have people buying iterations with minor adjustments for thousands and thousands of dollars.

Erin Marcus: Just because it's an iteration and they've created a brand and a community around that brand that

Catharine O'Leary: means something. And it means, but it doesn't mean something to Apple. It does, but that's not the point. It means something to the individual carrying an iPhone. That's what it means, right? Individual carrying a at the time, carrying a Blackberry, it was all about status in the business world.

Catharine O'Leary: Oh yeah. I remember . It was all about the next new, phone. Because that meant your company was doing well. Yeah. Or that meant that you were high enough up on the c-suite to get the ne the newest thing, the 

Erin Marcus: company. Yes. 

Catharine O'Leary: But, when, I remember standing beside the Chief Marketing Officer at TD Bank, and in Canada the banking rules for privacy are massive.

Catharine O'Leary: They're really strict. And I remember him handing his iPhone over to the IT department and said, Make it work. I don't care. Put whatever you need to put on it to make it secure. I want to use this. And I thought, oh crap. Holy cow. Blackberry's in a lot of trouble. Talk about a paradigm shift.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah. That's a big problem. And again, Blackberry is a really big, conversation. Yeah. Tupperware is a really big, Tupperware missed the boat in changing their distribution, right? They could have gone e commerce just as easily as as they, they had the marketing.

Erin Marcus: Right, and now we don't know how to 

Catharine O'Leary: communicate and be 

Erin Marcus: together anymore. 

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah. Or you weren't allowed. And like they, they weren't listening to their consumers and if you're not going to listen to your consumers, honestly, so here, let's flip this around. If you do listen to your consumers, you're going to be so far ahead of your competition that they're going to be in the dust.

Erin Marcus: I let's leave it there. I think that's brilliant. I think that's. Thanks. We can talk all day about what happens when you don't, but I think that's the absolute truth. You're going, how do you become a category of one? How do you stop, right? How do you stop competing? And this is one of the key pieces.

Erin Marcus: So tell everybody again, like, how do they find you? I know you have that really cool free tool. We'll make sure that we have the link so that you are one click away from everybody. But tell me again what that is to help people get started. Yeah, so 

Catharine O'Leary: if you go to Client Intelligence Agency, all one word, dot com you'll become an agent, you'll be in the community, and you will get access to the Ideal Client Profile Toolkit.

Catharine O'Leary: You can use it freely, you can use it multiple times, if you've got clients that you want to help and they want to use it, you can, give them access to it. Very liberally. But it's all about really let's get the first like foundational stone laid of you gotta understand who they are.

Erin Marcus: Love it. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. This is fun. I always love chatting with you and it's okay. My childhood, lots more has changed, not just Tupperware. 

Catharine O'Leary: I 

Erin Marcus: know, but 

Catharine O'Leary: it was a 

Erin Marcus: little sad. I had a moment. I had a moment. I will have a bit. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for spending time with me today.

Erin Marcus: Thank you, Erin. Bye everyone.