The Art of Attracting More Ideal Clients

In the simplest of words, attracting ideal clients is the result of combing three fundamental factors:

• Your ideal clients
• Your personal brand
• Your relationship or connection with your ideal clients

Your potentially ideal clients are of paramount importance.

If you have no potential clients for your services, nothing else matters.

Most of this chapter will help you understand why ideal clients are important and how to identify those clients who are ideal for you.

Your personal brand is all about who you are and how you help your clients. It’s about those valuable benefits that you deliver that clients are prepared to pay for.

That’s what the next chapter is about.

And most of the rest of the book addresses how to connect with potentially ideals so that you can build sustainable, mutually beneficial relationships with your clients.

Who Are The Ideal Clients for Your Services?

Given their bewildering range of choices, why do your ideal clients choose you?

Perhaps an even more interesting question is why did you identify specific clients as ideal?

Regardless of the service that we provide, we all face a bewildering range of choices in running our businesses. Among the most critical of these choices is what services to provide and what kinds of clients we want to serve.

Based on the services you have chosen to provide, who are the ideal clients for these services?

Since it’s your choice as to which kinds of clients that you want to serve, why not choose to serve good clients? In fact, why not take this choice one step further and choose to serve ideal clients?

Think of ideal clients as good clients with friend benefits. Ideal client relationships also include the joy of interacting with like-minded people who share common values and interests.

Without a doubt, ideal clients are important to the ultimate success of our businesses.

Benefits of Ideal Clients

Ideal clients are those clients we love to serve and whom we can really satisfy.

They are ready, willing and able to pay us for our help in making the changes they want.

Carefully qualified and effectively served, they can also fill the role of business partners.

All clients serve as windows on your market. Once you have attracted them as potential clients and helped them become actual clients, by duplicating the process, you can also attract other clients like them.

Along with providing clients with your customary high-quality service, invite your clients to help with your market research. They can help you listen to your market, which in turn will help you continue to attract and serve more and better clients.

Client Seal of Approval

By hiring you, clients demonstrate that you are likable and that they consider you to be trustworthy and competent.

When you have satisfied them … or even better, exceeded their expectations and delivered a memorable experience … they will happily and voluntarily sing your praises.

In combination, these two factors represent a fabulous seal of approval for you and your services.

Regardless of what you call this two-factor combination, it’s a powerful combination that will help you attract more business for your business. Appropriately used, client testimonials can confirm that you are a good person with whom to do business.

They are objective third-party confirmation that you are likeable, trustworthy and competent, reassuring potential clients that you can help them.

Good Friends

Good friends help us meet our personal needs.

Our personal relationships with clients help meet our need for belonging.

Each ideal client is also a friend and as such, contributes to our sense of belonging.

When we assist clients in achieving the results they seek, we ourselves experience:

• a sense of achievement: we helped bring about the desired results;
• a feeling of mastery: it was our skills and how we applied them that made the difference;
• recognition: clients will probably recognize the value they received; and
• respect: we helped make a difference for our clients.

These experiences all help boost our self-esteem.

Many service professionals are driven by a higher need than simply earning a livelihood.

Those of us who are so driven choose to use our basic talents to serve others or otherwise make a difference in our world.

Whenever we effectively help clients make a difference in their lives, we usually experience a sense of fulfillment, a sense of ‘yes, that’s what it’s all about!’ In terms of meeting personal needs, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

Don’t Tell Them…Show Them

Prospective clients choose service professionals they believe to be trusted advisers… experts who will help solve them existing problems or achieve specific goals.

The major marketing challenge for service professionals is to present themselves as competent and trustworthy advisers.

However, whenever we claim admirable qualities for ourselves, our words are seen as shameless self-promotion or boasting. Each of these perceptions undermines our credibility.

As a result, as service professionals, it’s important for us to feature our individual competence and trustworthiness…but do this without the self-promotion and boasting elements commonly associated with conventional marketing and advertising.

By way of walking my “Don’t-Tell-Them … ” talk, may I show you how I help clients?

Making Friends, Attracting Clients

Given that ideal clients are much like good clients attracting ideal clients is much like attracting friends.

There are three keys to attracting friends.

First and foremost, we must be likable. The likeability factor includes being interested in others, what they think and like.

Second, we must have something of value to offer our friends. At the very least, the value that we offer includes common values and interests.

From a marketing perspective, likeability includes understanding what clients need, want and expect from our services. The value that we offer includes the ability to satisfy these needs and wants.

This helps convert acquaintances into friends…and prospects into clients.

As professionals, most of us are really good at engaging our clients in conversation. That’s how we learn more about what they need and want from us.

If our expertise and know-how help us serve our clients, there is no reason whatsoever that these factors can’t also help us attract clients.

Not only can we generate new business by engaging others in worthwhile conversations, we will attract more and better clients by taking this route.

These conversations could be with any or all of prospective clients, actual clients and folks who might refer others to us.

Shall we have a conversation about how you can attract more and better clients?