Monday, 29 August 2011 21:11
High-End Clients Marketing - Part II
Last week I outlined all the things you have to do to attract more high-end clients. (See the link to my old blog here.)
But I left out the most important part of all - and that's the mindset you must have to attract high-end clients. I'm not talking about abundance thinking or having a prosperity attitude about making more money. Sorry, but in my experience those don't work. If they did, all you'd have to do is think positive, abundant thoughts about attracting high-end clients.
And presto-changeo, you'd have more high-end clients before you knew it. Wow, wouldn't that be great! Think all the abundance thoughts you want, affirming that more clients will flow effortlessly into your life. But underneath all those prosperity thoughts would be the thoughts you *really* believed.
Perhaps some of these are familiar to you:
- I'm not ready to attract high-end clients yet
- I don't have the experience and services to offer
- I'm not the kind of person who makes a lot of money
- If I made a lot of money bad things would happen to me
- Money is the root of all evil (and I want to be good!)
- Good people aren't focused on making money
- Only greedy, dishonest people are rich
- It takes too much work to make lots of money
- Making more money will turn me into a shallow person
And if these underlying thoughts are stronger than your abundance thoughts, you simply won't take the actions necessary to attract those high-end clients.
Let me tell you about two participants in my Marketing Mastery Program from 2010. They were a couple from England who did high-impact business coaching. Their coaching to top executives made a significant impact to the bottom line of their clients. Their clients loved working with them and valued their work highly.
And they were charging about half the going rate.
I explored this with them and an interesting set of beliefs emerged. They went something like this: "We consider ourselves, good, honest professionals. If we were to charge more and make more money we'd be bad, dishonest people."
Sounds crazy, I know!
They both believed this to their core, so I explored that belief with them. "Where do you think that belief might have come from?" I asked. They told me they were brought up in relatively poor households where their parents kept telling them how bad and dishonest rich people were. I remarked that this was a great message to justify being poor!
And with a little more conversation they clearly saw how they had taken on this belief, with little real evidence to back it up. So we explored this belief in more depth and they realized a few things:
1. This belief was simply not true. No solid proof at all.
2. When they believed it, it became almost impossible for them to ask for higher fees from their clients. It was just unthinkable. It actually made them feel like bad people.
3. They noticed when they did the thought exercise: "How would you set your fees if you could no longer attach to that belief?" they told me immediately, "We'd double our rates!"
And with a little more exploration into their poverty-related beliefs and creating an action plan for increasing their rates, they took the plunge and did it. And they didn't need "abundance/prosperity thinking." Instead, they started to think realistically:
"People who make more money are not necessarily bad, dishonest people, and if we raise our rates there's no reason to think we'll change as people." And, "We really are under-charging for our services in this marketplace, which makes us look less valuable than we really are. Time to raise our rates!"
So they doubled their rates, didn't feel bad or dishonest about it and got virtually no push-back from their clients. Happy end to story!
My guess is that you have a similar story, but not necessarily with a happy ending yet. Perhaps you're not charging enough, haven't packaged your services on the high end, or your services are not designed to produce measurable results, etc.
The More Clients Bottom Line: I want to assure you that this is something you can do. With a transformation of your mindset, and a few changes in the way your present, market and sell your services, it's not only possible, but predictable that you wil start attracting higher-end clients who will love working with you.
If you'd like to know all about my approach to attracting more high-end clients, please join me for a teleclass this week where I'll share all the details of what to do to make it happen for you. It's on Thursday, September 1 at 12 noon Pacific. Details here: