Create Your Own Dream Clients

In this episode, I talk about the simple discovery that made nurturing ideal clients SO easy, and helped me create my own dream clients.

Hey there, and welcome to the Client Attractor Show. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, client attraction coach and author of the brand new book Client Attractor. If you haven't gotten your copy of Client Attractor, hop on over to clientattractorbook.com, and you can get a free copy today. 

In this episode, we are going to be talking about the phrase that I use a lot, which is attracting your dream clients. Dream clients can look a lot different for a lot of different people, but usually, they share the same overall set of characteristics: first being that they're coachable, second, that they can actually afford your services. Those are two pretty universal qualities of dream clients. One of them is also that they're ready to buy, that they're actually ready to invest in working with a coach or consultant or a service provider, depending on your niche. 

 And in the dream world, you would be having these dream clients show up at your doorstep, warm, eager to buy, ready to buy, where they're coming to you and saying, “Hey, Jacob, I want to work with you. Just tell me how much it costs. Here's my credit card number.” The reality is that that tends to be the exception to the rule but not the rule itself. That's not the norm, right? Unless you are someone like Tony Robbins or one of the big, big names of people who have this long waiting list of people who are waiting even years to pay upwards of a million dollars to work with someone. 

 The reality is that most of the people who come your way are not going to be dream clients yet, and there's a difference between a dream client and an ideal client. A dream client kind of fits all these characteristics that you basically dream of. They're the total package. They are that dream man that you want to meet someday but you know probably doesn't exist, because he's a little bit too perfect. Whereas ideal clients, that's the guy at the bar, who maybe has kind of a funny nose, or maybe he doesn't have a six pack. He's not just good enough; he's pretty decent, but he's not perfect. He's ideal in a lot of ways, and nine times out of 10, when you encounter a prospective client, he's going to be that guy at the bar; they're going to be that guy at the bar who fits a lot of the characteristics of an ideal client, but maybe not all of them. 

 So maybe they're not ready to buy, maybe they are not quite as evolved as your ideal client needs to be, so there's some way that they're not perfect yet. And that's an important thing to note: that they're not ideal yet. They're not a dream client yet. And that's what I want to talk about today. 

 When I was first starting my business, I had this pipeline. I have a new prospect that tried to get them on a call, and I tried to close them, and for all the people I was talking to, those were the main three steps that were happening after that call. It was Did I close them or did I not? And if I didn't close them, well, they kind of fell off my radar. I didn't really think about them. I didn't try to nurture them in any way. I might check up on them, you know, six months down the road, but that was about it. 

 On the other hand, I had the people I did close. Those were the people who, when I got on a call with them, they were ready and eager to buy. Ultimately, this practice, what I was doing here, meant that I was losing a lot of opportunity, because I was only accepting these dream clients, the exception to the rule. I was ultimately only selling to the people who were eager to buy by the time they were already on the call with me. That made my job super easy, of course, but it meant that there were a lot of people I wasn't closing.

 It wasn't because I should have had higher-pressure sales tactics or I should have pressured them into a sale. The problem was that once I didn't close them, they kind of fell off my radar and I didn't make an effort to nurture them, or to, in other words, turn them from this warm, but not-quite-ready prospect into a warm, ready, eager-to-buy prospect. I started to realize that I really needed to up my nurture game, that failing to close someone on the first call I had with them and then letting them fall off my radar was not a sustainable practice, that wasn't something that was going to help me. In fact, it was actively hurting my business, because I was spending so much time and energy generating these leads, and I wasn't taking advantage of the leads I was getting, because I was just kind of abandoning them. 

 I think the big thing that kept me from continuing that relationship and continuing to nurture those not-yet-ideal prospects is that I was kind of scared. I was scared that if I kept reaching out to them, if I kept the conversation open, they would view it as me trying to pressure them into a sale. I had this belief that if I messaged them, even once a month or every few weeks, they would get tired of hearing from me, because they would just think that I was reaching out and saying, “Hey, are you ready yet? You want to move forward on this?” when really, that wasn't wasn't my goal at all. 

 In light of this realization, I did start reaching out to these prospects who were not quite ready to buy, I did start messaging them now and again and kind of checking in, seeing how they were doing. But it still felt really stilted. It still felt kind of like the “Hey, how are you? What's going on with your business? You want to work together?” It wasn't really in those exact terms, but that's at least the feeling that I got from it, and I still wasn't quite comfortable with it, I wasn't really sure where to go from there, because I knew that I really needed to follow up, but I was so stuck with how to actually do that. And the thing that actually helped me the most in terms of figuring out how to reach out was talking to this prospective client—we'll call him Daniel. 

 It was very, very clear from the first time we talked, that Daniel was, in a lot of ways, a dream client. Now the only thing that kept him from being a true dream client was that he couldn't quite afford to work with me, and that his business was in a little bit of an earlier stage than the businesses and entrepreneurs that I normally work with. I normally work with people who are at least somewhat established; he was not established at all. But talking to him, I just had this feeling in our first strategy session that was pretty much like, Oh my goodness, Daniel is such an amazing, amazing person, and I want to work with him so badly, and I just got excited about the prospect of working with him. 

 After we got off that initial call, I didn't even really think about how I was going to follow up with him, because I just kind of knew, and what that ultimately ended up looking like was messaging him and talking to him like he was a friend. I was not messaging him and checking out his business every three months. It was not because he was showing up in my CRM as “Oh, it's time to reach out to Daniel.” It was just that we had this Messenger conversation going on in Facebook, and it was so simple. It was “Hey, how’s your day been?” and then he’d message me back, “Pretty good. How about you?” and we would just establish this rapport, almost as if we were two friends who were just chatting throughout the day. Instead of it being every three weeks, we're gonna I'm gonna reach out to him, and instead of it being this really stilted, scheduled thing, it was so much more natural. 

 The reason that this worked so well was that I actually really liked him, it was that we actually had this really great dynamic. The idea of putting him in a CRM and getting reminders to reach out to him seems kind of ridiculous, because that was just not how I was going to relate to him. And obviously, not everyone I talked to at that point was as good of a fit as Daniel, but I started to apply the same principles to other people, with other people who I didn't necessarily hit it off with right away. I tried to show up in that exact same way, just in that natural, friendly, ongoing conversation. 

 I started to see pretty immediately the results of that. I did start using a CRM more efficiently with that, because I do have to keep track of how many people I'm talking to. But the way that I was engaging changed so dramatically, and people were way more open to conversations, and I wasn't just nurturing people along; I was also creating some really great friendships and really great relationships, which were arguably just as important as the clients that came as a result of it. 

 So if you're really struggling with how to nurture prospective clients, my advice to you is don't overthink it. Don't let the conversation fall off and try to restart a new conversation every three weeks or every however often. Instead, keep the conversation going. Keep it friendly and really treat it as if you are just talking to a friend at a bar or you're just texting your bestie, however you want to think about it. But whatever you do, just make sure to keep that conversation going and to keep it light and friendly and natural. 

 Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and make sure to check out clientattractorbook.com to get your free copy of Client Attractor. Until then, I will see you tomorrow.