My Yoda Reveals Four Irresistible Ways To Attract Right-Fit Clients

Meet a few Yodas of mine.

If you want to attract right-fit clients, you’d best get into the expertise business. Let me give credit where credit is due. Let me tell you about a mentor that helped shape my thinking.

He told me to start giving away valuable problem-solving advice far and wide. A mentor who taught this to me 20 years ago was David C. Baker, an author, speaker, and advisor to entrepreneurial creatives worldwide.

“What’s so compelling about Mr. Baker,” The New York Times has opined, “is that he’s an expert on being an expert.”

Here is my point of view: If you are a consultant or offer a high-end service, getting published is the number one marketing tool, and public speaking is the number one marketing strategy.

This one-two punch can make you, in the words of the poet Robert Palmer, simply irresistible.

Baker recommends the following four irresistible ways to be an expert that attracts right-fit clients:

#1 Give away lots of insight…for free…and then charge high fees in very specific circumstances.

“We work really hard to put together useful insight, both for our clients and for the prospects that we are trying to turn into clients," says Baker. "Because of that, we begin to feel precious about ‘owning’ that content and protecting it. Take a counterintuitive approach. Give away your great stuff for free, but don’t apply it to your (potential) client’s situation until they pay you a lot of money."

#2 There’s an ideal number of competitors for your expert services; avoid too many or too few.

“If you have too many competitors, you are too interchangeable with viable competitors," says Baker. "If you have too few competitors, you are likely either addressing a market that hasn’t fully developed…or many other experts have attempted that same thing and abandoned it because it wasn’t viable. The ideal range for an expert is to have at least ten competitors but no more than 200."

Baker says as you walk along that spectrum from "undifferentiated to an ideal place," you’re walking into a narrower and narrower space.

You should pick a niche with 2,000 to 10,000 prospects. This is why I choose to serve agency owners with five to 200 employees: there are 7,800 of them in the United States.

This is what another Yoda of mine, Ellen Melko Moore, calls a "supertight niche." Many of my other Yodas, like Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner, authors of Sell With Authority, also give this niche-down advice.

#3 Baker also says client relationships get stale; plan for intentional obsolescence so that you can reinvent yourself.

“The logic says that once we land a client, we should try to keep them as long as we want," says Baker. "After all, it takes a lot of work to find them, orient them properly, and finally turn them into a profitable relationship after that typical overpromising that we all do out of the gate. That’s the conventional wisdom, but it’s wrong."

Baker contends experts are very impactful but in very small doses. They move in and out of client relationships at key intervals when the client faces some intractable challenge that requires an outsider.

"So don’t look to land a client and then set up shop until you wear them out," says Baker. "Instead, fashion the engagement so that you are only solving the higher-level challenges in a way that allows you to be more episodic.”

#4 You aren’t leading client relationships when you let them dictate the process you’ll follow.

Baker says: “You’re either in the service business or the expertise business. In the service business, you adapt to client preferences, including the process and the deliverables. In the expertise business, you know what’s best for your clients, and you’re making them eat their vegetables, even when they’d prefer not to do that. You’ll land on a process that your clients—even your better ones—will try to nudge you away from. But don’t do that. There’s as much value in the process as the result, and you’ve landed on your way of doing things for very specific reasons. If you vary from this, you aren’t serving your clients well. Instead, you’re letting them lead. But leading is your job.”

Bottom line: An expert is someone who freely gives away advice in a general sense and then attracts the right-fit clients to tailor it for their specific situation.

In other words, you attract them with general advice and get paid the big bucks for the specifics. Thank you, Master Yoda, Mr. David Baker.

What is your supertight niche? Who do you want to view you as an authority?