Here’s a question that most B2B professional services firms struggle to answer with confidence: What types of clients do you want more of?

The knee-jerk response? “Well, we’re agnostic—we can help everyone.”

I’d argue that’s misleading and it’s strategically dangerous. Not every company makes an equally valuable prospective client. Think about it: you’ve had great clients and some truly awful ones, right? And plenty in between. They’re definitely not all created equal. So if that’s the case, how do we actually determine who we want more of? Who are our Ideal Clients, and more importantly, how do we find them?

The answer isn’t out there in market research reports or demographic studies. It’s sitting right in your client history.

Your Client History Is a Strategic Gold Mine

Understanding your client history isn’t just a walk down memory lane—it’s full of important intelligence. Individual data points can be helpful, sure. But when you start to see patterns? That’s when you can fundamentally shift your business strategy.

Most firms are sitting on years of valuable data and doing absolutely nothing with it. They know they’ve had good clients and bad ones, but they’ve never systematically analyzed what makes the difference. This isn’t about gut feel or intuition. It’s about extracting actionable intelligence from your own experience.

Start by Collecting the Right Information

Before you can spot patterns, you need to gather consistent data. Here’s what actually matters:

• Who are your clients: What industries and subsectors are they in? Don’t just say “technology.” Get specific—is it SaaS? Fintech? Healthcare IT?
• How did they find you: Did they come through networking? Marketing? Referrals? Inbound leads from your website? This tells you which channels actually work.
• Why did they hire you from their perspective: Not which services you sold them, but what they said when they hired you, in their words. This is crucial and often surprising. More on asking “why” here.
• What services did they purchase and revenues gained: Are your most profitable clients buying the same services? Or are they completely different?
• What impact did you have on their business: Quantifiable results matter. Did you save them money? Increase efficiency? Help them enter a new market? (Are you tracking this information?)

Basic stats on size: Annual revenues, number of employees, geographic location. These help you identify your sweet spot.

Decision makers vs. day-to-day contacts: Track titles, age groups, and gender. Understanding who makes buying decisions helps you target more effectively.

For example, one accounting firm I worked with thought they served “small businesses.” When we actually analyzed their client base, we discovered their sweet spot was $5-20M revenue food & beverage manufacturers with founder-led CEOs approaching retirement. That’s not “small businesses”—that’s a highly specific, targetable market segment.

What to Look For: Finding Your Patterns

Once you’ve collected this data, the real work begins. You’re looking for patterns that answer critical strategic questions:

Who Is High Performing?

Start with the obvious question: which clients are actually valuable to your firm?

• Are they revenue producers? Not just big invoices, but consistent, predictable revenue streams.
• Are they profitable? Revenue doesn’t equal profit. Some high-revenue clients are resource drains.
• Are they a great client and why? Do they respect your expertise? Pay on time? Provide referrals? Value your strategic input?

Then dig deeper: What are the common attributes of these high-performing clients? Maybe they’re all in growth phases. Maybe they’re all dealing with a specific regulatory challenge you solve brilliantly.

A management consulting firm discovered that their best clients all shared one surprising trait: they had recently brought in change management operations executives from outside the industry. These executives wanted to make their mark quickly, had budget authority, and weren’t wedded to “how we’ve always done things.” Armed with this insight, the firm completely refocused their prospecting strategy to target companies making these specific executive hires with great results.

Where Do Your Best Clients Come From?

Understanding the drivers that brought these “best fit” clients to you is marketing intelligence you can’t buy. Are they finding you through thought leadership? Industry events? Strategic partners? Word of mouth from existing clients?

If your best clients consistently come through one channel, that tells you where to double down your investment. If they’re coming through channels you’ve been neglecting, that’s a massive opportunity.

Who Is Low Performing and Why?

This is where firms get squeamish, but it’s just as important as identifying your best clients. What are the patterns among your problem clients?

Maybe they’re all in industries where they view your services as a commodity rather than a strategic value. Maybe they’re companies below a certain revenue threshold where they simply can’t afford your approach. Maybe they’re all referred by a specific source who fundamentally misunderstands what you do.

Use these patterns to refine your marketing and lead qualification process. The goal isn’t just to attract the right clients—it’s to not attract the wrong ones in the first place. And when they do appear, you want systems to qualify them out early and refer them to another provider who’s a better fit.

One law firm realized that clients coming through a particular attorney referral network were consistently unprofitable and difficult to work with. These referrals expected heavily discounted rates (because “we’re all lawyers here”) but demanded premium service. The firm politely exited that network and redirected those business development resources elsewhere. The result? Revenue stayed flat in the short term, but profitability increased 20%.

Who Are Your Aspirational Ideal Clients?

These are the clients you want to work with but haven’t been able to attract yet—or haven’t tried to pursue. Your analysis might reveal clear pathways to reach them.

Maybe it’s going “up-market” to larger companies in industries where you’ve already proven success. An engineering firm that excels with $50M manufacturers might be ready to pursue $200M manufacturers using the same core expertise.

Or maybe it’s expanding to adjacent markets that will likely behave similarly to your current ideal clients. If you’ve mastered serving healthcare technology companies, medical device manufacturers might be a natural adjacent market with similar buying behaviors and needs.

The key is using your historical data to make informed decisions about which new markets to enter, rather than randomly chasing anything that looks interesting or shows up at your doorstep.

Building Your Target Market Strategy

B2B targeting is fundamentally built on industry and subsector identification. This is where strategic marketing actually starts. Then you layer in additional parameters:

• Size parameters: Annual revenue and number of employees. Your sweet spot might be narrower than you think.
• Geographic considerations: Regional or national? Which markets offer the fastest ROI on your marketing investments?
• Growth trajectory: Are they in growth or declining markets over the next 12-24 months? This dramatically affects their buying behavior.

The goal is to determine who you want to intentionally market to in order to grow with the best types of clients: revenue-producing, profitable, and a great fit for your firm’s strengths and culture.

Why Your Targets Matter More Than You Think

The right targets have an established need for a solution. This is critical. They require less education on the problem through your marketing, which is both expensive and time-consuming. When prospects already know they have a problem and are actively seeking solutions, your marketing shifts from demand generation (expensive, long-cycle) to lead generation (more efficient, shorter-cycle).

Your ideal targets also have both the ability to pay for value and the willingness to pay for value. These are different things. A struggling company might technically be able to afford you, but they’re not willing to invest in strategic services. A wealthy company might be willing but procurement processes make it practically impossible. You want both.

For instance, a technology consulting firm was pursuing large enterprise clients in retail because “that’s where the money is.” But these prospects, while having massive budgets, had outdated procurement processes requiring 18-month sales cycles and extensive vendor certifications. Meanwhile, mid-market retail technology companies could make decisions in 6-8 weeks and actually valued the firm’s agile approach. Same industry expertise, dramatically different client experience, and sales efficiency.

The Expertise Question

Do you have enough knowledge and expertise in your desired industries that allow your firm to truly excel in your service offerings? This isn’t about whether you can do the work—it’s about whether you can demonstrably outperform competitors.

Accounting firms, for example, need to understand revenue recognition issues specific to technology companies. They need to know SaaS metrics inside and out. They need to anticipate audit issues before they arise. Without this specialized knowledge, they’re just another accounting firm. With it, they become the obvious choice.

If your historical analysis reveals clients in industries where you don’t have deep expertise, you have two options: develop that expertise intentionally or qualify those clients out. What you can’t do is believe generalist knowledge is good enough in today’s market.

From Data to Action: Your Strategic Roadmap

Data gathering and pattern identification create the pathway to building your target markets—the essential first step in developing an effective marketing strategy. But here’s what most firms miss: this isn’t a one-time exercise. Your best clients evolve. Markets shift. Your capabilities expand.

Once you’ve identified exactly who you want more of, everything else gets easier. You can craft messaging that actually attracts them because you’re speaking to their specific situation. You can determine the right marketing channels to engage with them because you know where they look for solutions. You can qualify leads faster because you know what “good fit” looks like.

The question “Who do we want more of?” stops being abstract and becomes concrete. And when you can answer it with confidence—backed by real data from your own client history—you stop marketing to everyone and start growing strategically.

Ask Yourself

Do you want to grow in your current markets or expand into new ones? Your client history will tell you which approach makes more sense. If your best clients are all clustered in two specific industries, doubling down on those markets is probably smarter than diversifying. If you’re seeing diminishing returns in your current markets, your data might reveal adjacent opportunities you’re already positioned to pursue.

The firms that grow strategically aren’t the ones with the biggest marketing budgets or the flashiest brands. They’re the ones who’ve done the hard work of understanding their own history, identifying clear patterns, and building strategies around proven insights rather than hopeful assumptions.

Your client history isn’t just a record of where you’ve been. It’s a roadmap for where you should go next. The question is: are you actually looking at it?