18 Ways of Acquiring Higher Paying Clients

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

Now let's see what is happening here. This article was triggered by a prospect who came in through a referral from a friend, but this prospect had no clue about value but was very well educated about low prices. And the interesting thing is that in spite of teaching service professionals how to charge premium fees, this prospect caught me a bit off guard.

Luckily I eventually bounced back and we parted company after a very short discussion on why I should offer her a very steep discount. Well, every now and then the shit hits the fan and some inappropriate people end up in our sales funnels, temporarily holding up the traffic for great folks, so, this is why it is an ongoing process to polish our client acquisition systems, so only the cream of the crop comes through and the crap of the crop gets filtered out before they could stink up our sales funnels.

Why do we need premium clients? They are easier to work with, are more dedicated, understand value. Also. You don't end up working on high volume. Hey, who makes more money, the Ferrari salesperson or the Pontiac salesperson? Nuff said.

You must overcome your negative beliefs around asking what you think your service is worth.

So, let's what we can do here to create an equal perception.

1. You must be regarded as a peer. Make people understand that you are not a peddler trying to sell something, but you are an equal and unless they are willing to meet you eye-to-eye, you are not willing to meet them. Many professionals fall into the trap of grovelling and asking for the business. It is a lot better when you and your expertise are perceived to be so valuable that buyers ask you to accept them as clients and work with them to solve their problems. Your speech should be firm and but not condescending. Some wimps may get pissed off, but you'd better get rid of them rather sooner than later. They can only give you headaches and stomach ulcers.

2. Benefits are great to sell, but if you sell values, that is even better. Get in touch with your prospects' core values and base your selling process on that. Buyers can get benefits from anyone, but when you connect them with their deep-seated core values because this is what your competitors don't do. You must understand that providing benefits for the buyer's company is one thing and anyone can do it, but enabling your buyers to fulfil their personal values is something totally different.

3. Be friendly with all your buyers' subordinates but be firm enough no to accept their request for proposals or "comparing notes" meetings. That can only happen with economic buyers. Never let anyone come between you and the economic buyer. Develop practical come-back statements to lower level managers who try to fool you for a project.

4. Keep your meetings very strategic and don't get lost in tactics. See the difference here: http://www.di-squad.com/toolshed/strategies_tactics.html. Your buyer must be a strategic person with profit loss responsibility. This is how you can keep tactical (paycheque) people out of the equation. Also, at a higher level you interact with visionaries and leaders. They are more interested in the future of the company than senior managers. Leaders and visionaries understand value, while lower level managers only understand costs. For them everything is a cost or expense. They can't fathom investments.

5. Do everything in your power to initiate referrals. You can create compelling messages that can generate more referrals. Just don't give clients the traditional need-based pitch, "Please, please, pretty please give me referrals or my family dies of starvation." I don't think this approach would help too much.

6. The higher you go in the corporate pecking order, the more customised and personalised you can make your services, thus you can increase the perceived value of your service. To provide one-to-one coaching for a senior executive to improve performance, who makes $500,000 a year, must be worth more than $300 a month. You also have to be innovative with the services you offer.

7. It is vital to keep your words and promises, but also make clients understand that slip-ups can happen, after all you both are humans. So, instead of making a tantrum after one mistake, build into projects a system that helps both of you to get back on track.

8. Make sure you keep fear and need out of your meetings. People can smell them miles away. And buyers react to fear just like dogs: They will attack you and tear you to smithereens.

9. Find clients who can consider you as a vital component to their success not just as a contract worker. You have to set up your interview process in such a way that filters out the prospects who are seeking fairly priced contract workers. Make sure you get paid for what is in your head not for what your hands can produce.

10. "No" is a great answer. At least you know where you stand. What you want to avoid like the plague is "maybe", "let me think about it" and similar answers. Buyers know the answer right away, and "maybe" and "let me think about it" are really brush-offs. So, it is actually a pretty neat idea to go for no, and move one as quickly as possible.

11. Know what your service is worth and learn to stipulate it. Remember that just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, value is in the eye of the buyer. But just as you can control your beauty, you can control the value your prospects perceive in your services. One is for instance is value-billing. In contrast, when you charge hourly rates, you are perceived as a peddler of time chunks and you will struggle with price objections forever, unless your service is bottomachingly cheap. But that is a pretty miserable way of living your life.

12. Quit believing that this is all your target market can afford. It may sound sweet to comfort yourself that that people can conveniently afford your services, but that also positions you as a convenience store. The problem with this approach is that there is huge supply and very limited demand. Also, imagine a buyer bragging to the board of directors, "After a long search and research, I have found a comfortably cheap firm to help us with our strategy formulation." Great, I guess birds of the feather flock together and service professionals who provide cheap crap ultimately find their matches: Cheap crap clients looking for cheap crap service. And do you know the price of cheap crap clients. Yes, certain clients cause cancer for service professionals or even chronic suffering from the dreaded fiendish green lurgy. There must be a better option in life than

13. Making it fairly easy for clients to work with you. There is one other thing to consider here. Be yourself from the beginning. Don't put on a sweet facade to close the deal and then bear your teeth on them. Show your bare teeth from the beginning. Let them decide if they want to work with the real person. The other day I got a call from a referral. We had our normal value discussion on the phone, and then we agreed to meet. As usual, I emailed her the exact process, including a $1,000 cheque I always request prospects to bring to the first meeting. Hey, that shows commitment. She was outraged and complained that my method was aggressive and covert.

14. Keep your proposals very high level and pretty short. If it is strategic, then top people read it. If it is a "How to..." instruction manual on something, it will be relegated to a lower level manager who may enjoy your proposal but has no authority to make a buying decision. Keep it result and not process focused. That way the proposal screams value not price, cost or expense. For more on proposals and the whole proposal writing process see http://www.di-squad.com/resources/proposal_writing_process.html

15. Always start presenting your fees with the lowest option, and start getting the nods from your buyer. As you show the more expensive options, they also see the higher return on investment, so they can decide based on return, not on investment. When the return is sweet enough, the money is always found. When I had the opportunity to defect from communist Hungary, I found the money, although I had none. And this is why I don't believe when buyers give me the traditional "no money" bullshit. As a super-penniless refugee in England, I paid my way through university out of my own pocket. How? I don't know. I guess education was important enough for me, so I just found the dough. Yes, it was hard. I was living in a basement room (about 120 sqfeet) right behind Victoria station (Can you imagine the noise?) in London and shared that room with another guy. I just stayed there because my education was more important than moving into better accommodation. And I must say, the short-term sacrifice paid off.

16. Never ever do presentations. Presentations are done by subordinates to their superiors. You and your buyers are peers, and peers meet to compare notes and discuss further actions. Stay away from sales pitches. Only peddlers do that. Go to a meeting with as little stuff as you can – possibly only with a dictaphone, a notepad and a pen. Make sure you record the discussion (with permission of course). I use the recording as a qualification tool. If prospects make a fuss about the recording, in spite of my explanation of why I do it, I ditch them like hot potato. Clarity is important for me, and I may miss something. But the machine won't miss anything, and after the discussion I can listen to the recording over and over again. Most buyers respect my attention to details.

17. Be prepared to walk away from business. You must be confident in your own ability to find better clients and believe in the age-old adage, "Nature abhors vacuum." If you stay away from sub par clients, you will get better ones. You must also practise toughness, and in the long run it will be great for your confidence to tell a few sub par clients, "Joe, this is not going to work out (reaching out for a handshake). Let me see you out and we both move on with our lives." This is psychologically huge. It is good for your self-confidence, and for the client this is plain rejection: "I'm not interested in you, your project or your money".

18. Create a hard-arse, tough-as-nail qualification system. Don't just meet anyone anywhere. Make sure that the people whom you meet actually show some signs of commitment. When you are the only one who goes to a meeting with a commitment, then you are in deep shit. Why? We are living in a society in which most people are flakes, tyre-kickers and bargain hunters. You sell value. Hooray. But most people don't understand value, only low low prices. You must make sure not to give in. The less available you are the higher your perceived value goes.

So, here you have it. These are only 18 methods, but I believe there are many more. Take some time and discovering your ways of finding better clients who pay you on time. Computer wizard and audio visual genius Csaba Gulyas of www.com-fort.ca is definitely an undisputed master at ditching undesirable clients in a heartbeat.

When I asked him about his method, he said, "Tom, these people are in deep technical trouble as a result of their own beliefs and actions. They don't have technical problems, but thinking problems. They invite me in to help, but when I give them some alternatives and recommendations, most of them vehemently defend their own erroneous beliefs, blaming anything and anyone on others ranging from the government to the molecular structure of the Earth's volcanic crust. And when this happens, I'll drop them like hot potatoes. I'm just not willing to wallow in the mud doom with them. If they drown, it's their problem, but I sure don't want them to drag me down with them."

Csaba is a wise man with great clients. Clients who can feel lucky to have him as their technology advisor.

Summary

Go through this list, take one concept per month and implement it. It will take some time to go through them all, but when you do, you will see drastic improvement in the quality of your clientele. Again, my friend Csaba is the living proof that you can't go wrong by setting your standards so high that most people can't even see it, let alone reaching it. So, who will make it? The best of your target market.

Look there is no much pleasure in working with clients your competitors have already rejected.