How To Attract High Paying Clients in 2021 [11 Strategies]

In this guide, I’m going to break down how you can get high-paying clients into your business.

So, whether you:

• Sell digital marketing services
• Run a web design business
• Want to get started in sales
• Make money with SEO
• or want to start an online business

You’ll learn exactly how to bring in those high-end clients for your business.

But first let me ask you a question.

Isn’t it frustrating when you hop on a sales call with a prospect, and lo and behold, you find out that they either have no money and they can’t afford what you do, or they’re just not the right fit?

The crazy part is that I talk to a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs that are wasting precious and valuable time each and every week talking to unqualified prospects.

And what’s worse is they’re taking on clients that aren’t the right fit or don’t have the appropriate budget for what they actually should be charging, just because they have no idea where the next client is going to come from.

Well, that’s why in this article, I’m going to break down ten things that you can be doing to increase the quality of your prospects and your clients.

1. Have a Good Track Record

Anyone that’s going to spend any significant amount of money with you needs to know that you can produce results and give them what you promised you can give them.

You’ve got to deliver on your word.

And you can do that by establishing credibility through other past experiences, other past clients, everything that you do with your business online, having a solid website, having everything look and feel and be productive in order.

Meaning if you have a system set in place for how your clients work with you, that establishes credibility that establishes trust, but also having great communication will do that.

So establish that credibility right out the gate.

2. Collect Testimonials

The second part of that is to collect testimonials. And this is going to boost your credibility like crazy, but be collecting testimonials from past and previous clients that have great marks for you.

And there are lots of ways to do this. I love to do it through email, I love to do it through surveys, I love even to use Facebook. so use a platform that you can go out to the public and collect testimonials.

Because you better believe any high-end client that’s going to be spending this big lump sum with you is going to want to know that their testimonial is going to be as good as everybody else’s.

So collect great testimonials.

3. Don’t Shortchange Your Work

The third thing to keep in mind when you’re trying to attract those super high-end clients is to not shortchange your work.

A lot of people do this all the time, they’ll cut their prices in half. For example, in the photography industry, everyone is a photographer, it seems like, right?

If you feel like you’ve got a camera, you can call yourself a professional photographer. And you don’t have to have any credibility, you don’t have to have any certificate, you just claim that you are a professional.

Now, a lot of people that do that don’t have the talent to back it up and those are easy to spots.

But the ones that drive me crazy the most are the photographers that have real talent out there, and they are charging almost nothing for their services. They’ll charge 10% of what other professionals in the arena will do.

And not only are you not going to attract high end clients, because you’re not charging a high end price. But you’re also going to sabotage the entire industry because you’re taking this amazing product that you have with your amazing skill and your amazing talent, and you’re shortchanging yourself.

And that creates a consumer expectation that they shouldn’t expect to be high-end clients for anybody else.

So do not shortchange your work, charge what you are worth.

4. Don’t Discount Too Much

On the heels of that don’t offer excessive discounts. And I want to point this out because it can happen in two ways. Excessive discounts can be percentage excessive, and they can also be frequency excessive.

Frequency Discount

So let’s say you have a base price of $500 for your product, that’s a good base price, it’s the value for value that they’re going to get.

And every Saturday, you say I’m going to offer half off.

Now every once in a while maybe offering half off of your price may be a good sales technique for you, it could be a good marketing technique for you maybe three or four times a year. But if you’re offering it every weekend, it’s the same as just cutting your price in half all the time.

Because people know they can expect that from you. I mean, take Bed Bath and Beyond for example. I never ever pay full price for anything at Bed Bath and Beyond because I know I’m always going to have a 20% coupon in the mail.

They send those out like crazy. Now that’s their business model. And it’s not a 90% discount but I do know that I don’t have to pay full price for anything there.

That’s just the way they’ve taught me as a consumer.

Now am I complaining? Not at all. But if I know if I go to Bed Bath and Beyond versus a high-end store I’m going to have a different consumer experience and I’m probably going to have a higher-end experience.

So don’t offer too frequent of a discount if you’re wanting to attract those high quality clients.

Percentage Discount

Also, don’t discount too much. 90% off, those are like store closing prices. Those are things like “I’m discounting at 90% because I’m walking away from it.”

That’s what that price discount tends to communicate.

Now, a safe price discount would be 10, 15, 5 is probably too low. 20 is pushing it, if you get up to 50, that’s I’m getting rid of this product, not going out of business, it’s just something I’m not going to be offering anymore.

Or maybe it’s a once a year thing.

So make sure that your discount levels are not too deep so you actually devalued your product and you then lose money.

5. Increase The Quality of Your Targeting

So the next thing that I want to talk about is really in the realm of marketing. Because the quality of prospects that we get the quality of clients that we get really all starts with how we attract prospects, right?

How we attract these people in the first place, how they find us.

And so the first thing I want to talk about is targeting.

Now, you could be targeting both with your organic messaging, and also say with paid media.

So you want to be sure that you’re actually targeting the right people.

And one of the things that I see go wrong with a lot of business owners is you serve too many types of people.

So really, you’re just relying on people that are finding you organically and or by referral marketing.

So, there aren’t enough people coming your way, which leads to that problem that I mentioned earlier of having to take the wrong people, because you don’t have enough people coming in your direction at all.

So if you want to increase the quality, you have to increase your targeting, you need to think about where is my ideal client spending their time and show up in those places.

Maybe it’s Facebook groups, maybe they follow specific YouTube channels. And when it comes to paid media the right interests.

For example, if you are targeting other business owners, you’re going to be looking at things like magazines that they might be consuming or other personal brands.

And when you go into paid messaging, or paid advertising, targeting, showing up in the feeds of people that have interests, like the influencers that your ideal target might be following.

So the first thing is you got to increase and hone in on your targeting of where you spend your time.

6. Make Sure Your Messaging Is Speaking To Ideal Client

Messaging obviously aligns with targeting but I kept this separate on purpose. Because one thing that I realized over time is that you get to choose who you work with.

And it sounds kind of ridiculous that you would even say that, but as you start serving more clients, oftentimes, and oftentimes subconsciously, you will choose better and better clients over time.

So what that means is you’re increasing your own standards. But if that level of a standard doesn’t make its way back into your messaging, you’re going to continue to attract people that are lower standard compared to the people that you are actually getting deals with on the fulfillment side.

So there’s this little gap of you’re attracting people, you’re gonna continue to choose who you want to work with. And over time, you’re probably going to get better at selecting better clients anyway in the sales process.

But those selection criteria, the reason we choose one client over another needs to kind of feedback into our marketing, so that in our marketing, we are speaking to the caliber of person.

This is also called client selection.

And so as you are selecting higher quality, more of the right-fit clients, we need to look at those people carefully and understand why are they different than some of the people that maybe we turned down or that we identified weren’t a good fit.

And weave those characteristics into our messaging, whether it’s email marketing, or your paid ads or your videos that you’re doing.

So that you’re speaking more to the ideal client, and you’re repelling the people that are not qualified based on your new level of criteria.

So it always has to come back to our messaging.

7. Lengthen the Process

Number three is to lengthen the process or increase the number of steps that are required to actually talk to you in closing a deal in the sales process.

So you’ll see people use things like a PDF download or a webinar, and then there’ll be an application or booking a call, then you might review those applications and only get on the phone with the people that fill out the application a certain way.

You’re constantly adding more steps to that process to increase the quality.

Now, it is important to understand that the more steps you put from lead to having the sales conversation is going to decrease your volume, but you will increase your quality.

And strategically, depending upon where you’re at in your business, you might want to have less steps to increase your volume.

Or if you’re in a situation where maybe you have a huge audience already, for some reason, you need to actually put more barriers to getting on the phone with you so that you can weed out a lot of the tire kickers and only speak to the quality leads.

So one of these tips is, think about adding more steps, more hoops for someone to jump through in order to speak with you. And you will increase the quality of the person that makes it all the way through.

Again, you will sacrifice volume, but you will increase quality.

8. Have an Application Process

Now the fourth thing kind of ties into the number of steps that I alluded to, but it’s having some sort of application, survey or questionnaire that they have to fill out before getting on the phone.

So when we have clients come through any one of our sales funnels oftentimes to get on our sales calendar, they have to tell us about themselves.

And it’s nothing too crazy about 10 to 12 questions.

• Where are they at in their business?
• What are they looking for?
• What are the challenges?

And through those questions which need to be strategic to what you do and who you’re looking for back to point number two of client selection, you need to ask the right questions to weed out the people that are going to be a good fit and the people that are going to be a bad fit.

And so by having people provide some of this information upfront, allows you to then review anyone that is getting on your calendar, and choose who you speak to and who you don’t speak to.

Because if I can take 10 calls a week from the wrong people, that’s a waste of my time, that’s 10 hours wasted.

But if I get the same 10 people through, and through the application process, I can realize that I really want to make sure I’m spending time with 5 of them.

Well, I got myself 5hours back. And my odds of closing someone and bringing on a new client that is the right fit is going to be increased.

I’m just going to have better odds of closing someone because I’m only speaking to the right people.

So the application or the survey or questionnaire or whatever you’re using is really kind of a filtration process for you to make sure that you’re optimizing your time.

Now if you’re the only one selling in your business, this is easily going to give you multiple hours back a week. Because time and time again, I talked to agency owners that are taking any call kind of fingers crossed, hoping that they’re going to be able to close the deal, lo and behold, they’ve wasted countless hours each and every week talking to the wrong prospects.

9. Serve Only Customers That You Can Help

The next tip is more within the sales process. And that is really just only serving people that you can actually help. I know it sounds obvious, but time and time again,

I’m talking to business owners where they have a sweet spot and what they can do and the client needs a little bit of extra work that’s outside their zone of genius or their skill set and they’ll take the deal anyway and then have to go outsource it.

And now they have to manage someone to do something that they’re not the best at just because they needed the money. And, it oftentimes isn’t even profitable if you do the math on the way most people end up going down this path.

So now you’re managing something that’s not bringing you enough money or allowing you to keep enough money out of the deal, and it’s more headache.

And it’s really just you taking the wrong clients. So when we work with clients, we really help them zone in on who is the right fit, and what does that deliverable have to look like?

And if you get opportunities that fall outside of that, you have to say no. And that allows you to focus and really get good at serving and solving a particular problem for your ideal client, not just taking any type of client that will come your way.

And when you only serve the people that you’re confident you can help, you’re going to get better people, because you already know how to solve that problem.

And you’re going to overtime achieve more mastery in the ability to solve that problem.

10. Train Your Clients

I’ve heard a lot of people say that there’s no such thing as a bad client, because you should never take someone that could potentially be a bad client.

But we’ve all been there. You have a client that comes in, and everything seems great in the initial engagement, it kind of gets a little sour or something goes wrong in onboarding.

So what we recommend our clients do is insert a little bit of training before the meaningful work starts. So the client pays, meaningful work starts, in that gap, you need to educate and train your client on really how to be a good client. This can come in the form of videos or a document.

A lot of our clients will do it like a mini training course 3-5 videos on how to be successful working in our process, what to look out for what we need from you, and putting together that mini-training from right after the client pays, they go into a process that you have choreographed that sets them up for success.

And in doing so you’ve shown them that you are the leader because you just choreograph this thing, they’re gonna follow in the steps that you have suggested for them.

Versus what most businesses do is just hop on a kickoff call, and start asking a bunch of questions, hoping that the clients are going tell you to tell them what to do.

If the client is telling you what to do out of the gates, there are so many problems with that. But really, that’s where most of the scope creep comes from. And that’s where you start to resent the clients that you bring in.

So it’s on you to train your client in onboarding.

• How to be a good client?
• How to get the most out of working with you?
• What to look out for?
• What is the fair gain?
• What are things that you are not going to do as a part of the process?

It really sets the expectation of how they’re going to achieve the result that they came to you for and kind of foreshadow what the experience is going to look like.

11. Shift Your Mindset

The underlying theme to everything attracting high end clients is your mindset.

Now I can give you all day the skill set and what to do and what not to do and percentages and frequencies and all of that. But that skill set is worth absolutely nothing if your mindset is in the garbage about attracting high-quality clients.

If you don’t think you can attract high-end clients, then guess what?

You’re right, you won’t.

You’ve probably heard this quote before.

So shift that mindset. Get into the mindset where you’re actually saying out loud to yourself. At the beginning of every business day, “People pay full price for what I offer, people enjoy paying full price for what I offer”.

Now, these are ideas I’m serious about, these are ideas that you want to write down and build into your business plan, build into your business mantras.

People love to give you quality feedback for their work, and people love to share your work with their friends and family because you produce such massive results for them.

This is the kind of thinking that you need to have in place.

As opposed to this thinking like, “Oh, it’s so hard for me to collect testimonials” or “oh, it’s such a strange man. I’m constantly having to do refunds.”

Which one do you want to have?

Shift that mindset, change your beliefs about your business, that’s going to be the fuel that’s going to launch you into those high-end client bases.

Summary

So let’s do a quick recap.

1. Have a Good Track Record
   
2. Collect Testimonials
   
3. Do not shortchange your work, charge what you are worth.
   
4. Don’t discount too much
   
5. Increase the quality of your targeting.
   
6. Make sure that your messaging is speaking to the ideal characteristics of your clients, and that the type of client you are selecting in the client selection process, that you’re speaking to that person while also repelling the non-qualified people.
   
7. Increase the number of steps that it takes for, a potential prospect to get on the phone with you.
   
8. Have an application as one of those steps so that you can hit the ground running on that call, and really audition them before you ever even get on the phone.
   
9. Only serve people you can actually help.
   
10. Train your clients on how to be great clients in your onboarding process.
    
11. And the last one is to shift your mindset

If you do those eleven things, you will end up having a much higher quality prospect and a much higher quality client.