How do you increase the average sales transaction for your growing business? It’s funny, we coach clients on the different ways we can grow a client’s business, but fail to apply the same thinking to our own businesses. So how do you find better clients?
Before I get any more notes from people saying, “My clients would never pay me a seven figure fee for coaching or consulting!” I suggest the size of the fee doesn’t really matter. If your client isn’t getting a significant ROI on their engagement, the relationship will end sooner rather than later. Let me share several ideas that help you become a stronger advisor and get better, more profitable clients.
The first way to get better clients is to become better at what you do. If you’re a coach and you’re trying to increase your fees you must get better at what you do. I was given great book by Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura called The Laws of Lifetime Growth. The subtitle is Always Make Your Future Bigger than Your Past. This book gives many great strategies that help you increase your confidence in dealing with others.
Each chapter has a law that helps you develop as a better person. The more you model your beliefs, the better you are at creating a future that brings more joy and celebration. Every chapter in this book helps you bring you closer to your growth goals. Dan Sullivan has made a career coaching high performers and taking them to the next level. You just have to read the chapter titles to get the idea. This should be on every successful coach’s reading list. Here’s a short sample of the chapter titles:
- Always make your contribution bigger than your reward
- Always make your purpose greater than your money
- (And my personal favorite) Always make your questions bigger than your answers.
If you’re in the people development business, you might want to consider starting with yourself. The secret of all great business success is invest time and energy developing yourself and your people. Your people and how they feel about working in your startup will begin to attract better clients to your organization.
The more work you do, the more likely you will find your million dollar clients. As my mentor Jim Rohn used to say, it’s not the million dollars that matters, but what you become in the pursuit of the million dollars. You can lose the money, but you will never lose who you are.
I worked for a very successful entrepreneur early in my life who was always investing in relationships with his people. He was always going to lunch with them, understanding who they were, and what they wanted out of their lives. When they left, they almost always brought my friend in to wherever they went. He had better clients because he had a strong champion that could help identify future opportunities in their new employers.
The second way to get better clients is to learn how to identify better clients. I’m amazed that more people don’t spend time better understanding who their best clients are and why. When I was regional President for Association of Microsoft Solutions Providers, I had over 250 partners in my region. I was surprised how many had the same clients.
Our more valuable partners had developed successful strategies to develop clients outside the big four or five that everyone else had. When talking with leaders of these businesses, I learned that many of their best clients came from research on what organizations were growing in the region. Find a growing client and you are more likely to sell more products and services to them.
So did we get you thinking about how to find better clients? Next week, we share several strategies I’ve used to help my startup technology clients accelerate their growth during the early stages of their businesses.