How to Use AI to Find Customers: 4 Prompts
Four prompts turn three clients you already have into one specific person you can search for today. Describe what your last three were going through, let Claude name the pattern, then ask what that person looks like on LinkedIn.
The short answer
You find customers with AI by describing three clients you already have, then asking it to name the pattern underneath them. Four prompts do it. Find what those three were going through right before they hired you, describe the next person that points to, describe what that person looks like on LinkedIn today, and write a post that stops them. You end with a profile you can search for, not a demographic you can't.
At a glance
- Time
- ≈ 20 minutes
- Cost
- Free
- You need
- Three clients you remember well
- Where
- Claude, in a browser
Almost every business we work with is in the same situation.
Referrals are working. Repeat clients are happy. The work is good.
Put that same work in front of somebody who has never heard of them, and nothing happens.
So the answer everyone reaches for is to get better at the work. It doesn't help. Getting better at the work isn't what's broken.
I wanted to see whether Claude could name what actually is. So I described what our last three clients were going through before they hired us, and asked it to find my next one.
What came back was a description of one specific person, detailed enough that I could go looking for them the same afternoon. Watch the video above and you'll see the whole thing run.
Key takeaways
- 01
Finding new customers is the most reported marketing problem small businesses have. In a survey of 1,335 owners, 60% named it a top challenge, ahead of every other answer offered.
- 02
The pattern is in what your clients were feeling, not in what their businesses do. Two clients in completely different industries can be sitting with the exact same problem, and that problem is what you sell against.
- 03
Four prompts take you from three past clients to one searchable person. Pattern, next client, profile, post. Nothing in between.
- 04
A person you can recognise beats an audience you can only describe. "Small business owners, 35 to 55" is not something you can go find today. A stock banner image and a specific posting habit is.
- 05
Claude's first draft of the outreach post will not sound like you. Ask it to point at the lines that give it away, then rewrite from there. What you keep is the prompt, not the post.
The part that convinced me wasn't the pattern. It was how specific the third prompt got.
I asked Claude what my next client looks like on LinkedIn if I scrolled past them today. It told me I would recognise their banner image, because it would be either the stock default or a logo dropped onto a gradient background, untouched since the day the profile was set up.
That is a thing you can actually see. I can scroll and spot it.
And it fits, because the pattern underneath was people who had never had to be found by a stranger. The profile was set up once and never revisited, for the same reason the marketing was: nobody who mattered had ever arrived that way.
One of the three people I described said it better than I could: "People who know my work hire me again. People who don't know me aren't interested."
None of them had a competence problem. What none of them had was any way to be trusted by somebody who had never met them. Being good at the work and being trusted by a stranger are two different skills, and most people have only ever had to build one.
Prefer to watch
6:28The four prompts, in order
Pick three clients and write down what they were going through
Do this part before you open Claude, on paper if it helps.
Not what their business does. Not their industry, their size, or their job title. What was actually going on with them the week before they called you. What were they worried about, what had just gone wrong, what had they already tried.
If you can't remember, ask them. That's a good conversation to be having anyway.
Prompt one, find the pattern
Give Claude all three descriptions at once, and tell it what you're looking for before you paste them in.
The prompt: "I'm going to describe three clients. For each one I want you to identify what they were feeling or going through right before they hired me. Not what their business does. What they were actually experiencing. Then tell me if there's a pattern, not in who they are, but in what they were going through."
Then paste the three, and ask: what were each of these people experiencing before they came to me, and is there a pattern?
Yours will not look anything like mine. That's the point.
Prompt two, describe the next client
Now ask who that pattern points at.
"Based on that pattern, describe my next client. Not their industry. What are they going through right now, today, that would make them ready to hire me?"
What comes back is usually a feeling rather than a job description. Mine came back as an identity problem: they think something is wrong with them.
That's useful for writing. It is useless for searching, which is what the next prompt fixes.
Prompt three, turn the feeling into something you can see
This is the prompt that does the work.
"Now describe that person specifically. If I scrolled past them on LinkedIn today, what would their profile say? What are they posting about? What would they have commented on recently? Be specific enough that I'd recognise them if I saw them."
Ask for the things you can put in a search box or spot at a glance. A headline. A posting habit. The kind of comment they'd leave under someone else's post.
Go and look, before you write anything
Open LinkedIn and go find three of them. Not to pitch. Just to check whether the description holds up, because if it doesn't, the pattern is off and everything you write from it will be off too.
Read what they've posted and what they've commented on. Ten minutes, and it saves you from writing to somebody who isn't there.
Prompt four, write the post that stops them
"Write a LinkedIn post that would stop that exact person's scroll. They're sitting with a specific recent failure they can't explain. Speak to that moment. Don't sell anything."
Don't sell anything is doing a lot of work in that prompt. The job of the post is to describe their problem better than they can describe it themselves.
Make it sound like a person
The post that came back was close, and I still wouldn't have published it.
So I asked Claude to point at the exact lines that give it away as written by an AI. The opener. The sentences that tell you what something isn't before telling you what it is. The tidy reversals.
Then: same idea, same order, every one of those patterns gone, written the way a person talks out loud to one other person.
That version was much closer. I'd still tweak it. The prompt is the thing worth keeping, not the post.
What came back when I ran it
What a client description looks like
Not "a coaching business with four staff." That tells Claude nothing it can use.
Instead: they were getting all their work from people who already knew them, they had just had a quiet month, and they had started to wonder whether the problem was them.
The pattern that came back
Claude's answer was that all three had realised being good at the work and being trusted by strangers were two different skills, and they had only ever needed one of them.
I had never put it that way, and I had been doing this a long time.
The identity problem
Prompt two turned that into a description of the next person: someone who thinks something is wrong with them, because the thing that always worked has stopped working and nobody has told them why.
You can write to that. You just can't search for it.
The banner image
Prompt three is what made it findable. The stock banner. The headline that describes a service rather than a problem. The comments left under other people's posts, never their own.
That's a person you can go and find this afternoon.
The post I didn't publish
Claude's draft opened with a tidy line I would never say out loud, and used the it's-not-this-it's-that construction twice.
Asking it to name those patterns itself, and then rewrite without them, worked better than any instruction I could have written up front.
Sources
Questions people actually ask
Can AI really find customers for me?+
Not on its own, and be careful with anyone who says otherwise. What it does well is find the pattern in customers you already have, and turn that pattern into a description of one person specific enough to go looking for. The looking is still yours.
How many clients do I need to describe?+
Three is enough. You're looking for a common thread, and three gives Claude something to compare without you spending an afternoon writing it up.
What if I've only had one or two clients?+
Use who you have, and add people you've helped without being paid for it. The question is the same: what were they going through right before they came to you?
Do I have to use Claude for this?+
No. The four prompts work in ChatGPT or Gemini too. Claude is what I use, and the free plan is enough for this.
Why not just describe my ideal customer myself?+
You can, and most people do, and it usually comes out as a demographic. The reason this works is that it starts from three real people instead of an idea of a person, so the pattern is one you have already been paid for.
Does this work if my clients are in different industries?+
That's when it works best. When the industries have nothing in common, whatever is left is the actual pattern, and that's what you should be talking about.
Is the LinkedIn post the point of this?+
No, the person is. The post is just the first thing you do with them. The description from prompt three is what you'll keep using, in your content, on your website, in every conversation.
How often should I run this again?+
When your clients change. If the last three people who hired you were going through something different from the three before them, the pattern has moved and it's worth twenty minutes to find out where.
About the author
Hey, I'm Traci
Digital Marketing Strategist
With over 25 years in this industry I help small business owners and creators turn their online presence into profit.
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