085: More Clients Who Spend Over $20K-50K+/Year With You? Here’s How.

“Have your clients spend more with you”, it’s something people harp on about but “HOW do I do this” is your real question. I’ve got you covered, iIn this episode by listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:

• Understanding the annual value of a client
• Six strategies; three do’s and three don’ts that will help you to ensure clients are spending upwards of $10K-$20K (and more) per year with you
• The importance of applying this these ideas to each conversation and interaction

Enjoy!

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Transcript

Annual value of a client

Don’t #1: Letting clients put in their order

Don’t #2: Over-servicing lower-end clients

Don’t #3: Marketing to everybody

Do #1: Have a proper diagnostic meeting

Do #2: Map out milestones

Do #3: Seasonal moments and triggers

Action step

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Have you noticed so much business and marketing content out there is so abstract and airy fairy? Like what they're saying sounds good, but what do you actually need to do? That's where the Good Marketing Good Business Podcast comes in. This is where I share practical strategies to help you grow your service-based business. And in case we haven't met yet, I'm Shannon Stone, award-winning business and marketing consultant. And for the last decade or so, I've been diving in deep with small business owners, helping them to make more sales and get more done in less time. And today's episode is no different. Enjoy. Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. Really excited to jump into today's episode where we are talking about how you can have more clients who spend over, I want to say upwards of$10,000,$20,000 a year with you. So we're gonna jump in and talk about that. I've got some do's and some don'ts to really help you. But really, I guess there's six very particular and helpful strategies with this. Now, just to kind of I guess set the tone a little bit, you may have heard, especially in from a marketing sense, the lifetime value of a client. So that the LTV basically means what is that lifetime value of a client working with you over the course of that business relationship. So it's very much what it says on the tin. But one thing I think is so important is to look at the annual value of a client. And that's what I wanted to focus on in this episode in particular. It's it's one in parcel with the lifetime value, but slightly, I guess, more here and now over the course of a 12-month period. So let's jump in. So the first I'm gonna share are three don'ts that I guess take away from client spending more with you. And we've all heard that, you know, it costs far less to retain a current client and go back to previous clients than it does to attract and convert new clients. So so many people do leave a lot on the table. And the points I'm going to share with you today might, I guess, bring some light to some of that as it relates to your business and the way that you have been doing things. But I'm sure you're doing a lot of great things as well. All my clients, service-based businesses, so I always focus these conversations around that, and often they're selling services, like it's not it's not new for them or you to sell a service at$1,000,$5,000,$10,000, something like that. But is it normal and intentional for you to look at how can we have our clients spend more with us? Even the ones where you're like, oh my god, we there's so much more we could do to help them if only they could see that. This is definitely the conversation for that. But definitely take notes, as I always say, and there is a companion article with this episode. It will be on my LinkedIn. It'll look very similar to the title of today's episode, but you might find that helpful as a written format of the podcast episode as well. So feel free to check out my LinkedIn if you want the written version of that. If you like me, you like to have things in every single form, audio, and written as well. Okay, without further ado, let's jump in. So three don'ts. The first one, and I guess this is almost like a mistake that people can often make, is letting your leads and clients almost put in their order of service from your business. They approach it very transactionally. So they might say, I want or I need a new website, that's why I'm coming to you to get this quote. Or we just need you to create these flyers for us. I need, you know,$5,000 for upcoming drop that we're going to do. Or in another context, you know, a client might be coming to you to improve one particular system in their business, or one particular area in their business, or whatever it is that you how you help them. So why this is a problem is because you're letting the clients lead the way, and you are always going to be more of the expert at what you do and solving their problem than they will ever be. Even though they're in their shoes, you do this day in, day out, client in, client out. And while you can hear what they're saying around, I want a quote for this particular thing, or I want your help for this particular thing, you are probably like wondering on the inside, like, why can't they see how much more we need to work on? It's not just about this one isolated area. There's so much more to it. And I'll talk about when we get to the do's how you can address this, this particular, I guess, mistake that people often make. But keep it in mind because I guess I want to put you back in the power position that you can lead your clients to help them to make better informed decisions, at least put it out there on the table. So we'll talk about that in a moment. So that's the first one. Basically letting uh clients or leads lead the way. The second don't is getting stuck over-servicing or over-delivering to lower-end clients who will never exceed that 10, 20k per year with you. The numbers may vary depending on what you do in your business. So just make it relevant to your particular business. But if you look at all the clients you work with, quite often there are lower-end clients who do spend less, and then there's those who, and it's sometimes the outliers who spend more. And often businesses are like, well, why can't we just have lots of those top-end clients and and have them the only ones that we work with and focus on? You can absolutely go down that path, and that's it's a bigger conversation, I guess, beyond this. But what I want to say to this is even if you have lower-end clients, if someone's spending$1,000 with you versus$10,000 with you upwards from there, they're still your client and you still want to take care of them. You still want to obviously deliver to them the deliverables and follow through the exact same way and make sure that you dot all the I's and cross all the T's. But I also want you to understand, I guess, the separation between what one client's capacity is as far as investing in your services versus the other end of a client who has the means or the capacity or even the requirement, the need to actually invest even more with you. Not everyone needs to get everything from you, but there's definitely people much more than what you're allowing to happen right now. Now, this point and this mistake or this area that I'm bringing up is to not get stuck over-servicing and over-delivering those lower-end clients. It's very much around sticking with what you've promised and then using that awareness to say, okay, when I'm looking at this and bringing my business acumen to it, these$1,000 clients, we can only have X number of them. And they are great for these reasons. They, you know, they could be great advocates of your business or they're just very easy services for you to pump out. But you also want to be very aware and intentional that they may not be the big revenue and profit drivers for your business as well. So it doesn't mean you have to ditch all these clients. And I have had clients who, in nicer words, have moved on, I guess, from that lower end of the market, but that's relevant to different businesses. It may be relevant to you, may not be relevant to you. So this second point is getting stuck in over overservicing and over-delivering on your lower end clients. Okay, the third point that I have to share, the third don't, is the mistake of marketing to everybody. And you've heard that you market to everybody, you attract to nobody, which is that there's a lot of truth to that, definitely for sure. But often, it's often the sneaky ways that some of these ideas or tactics do appear in the way that you do things. So a sneaky way that you might be doing this is in your marketing, you might be sharing, following on from our previous point, you might be sharing in your portfolio or in your projects that you're sharing in your marketing. You might be sharing, here's one particular thing we did for a client. Here's one website that we did for a particular client. But I want you to understand within each problem that you solve, there's a pocket of people that you can work with. And there's a pocket within that that some of those people will spend even more. So do you want to be known as a business who people go to for one transactional thing, one small piece of the puzzle? Or do you want to be known as a business that I guess covers more of the transformation, not the transaction that, like we said in the first point, letting people just come to you putting in their services? So when you're looking at your marketing to when I say everybody, everybody that you could help, but I want you to be more clear and specific on the pocket of people that coming back to this overall topic, who can really spend that$10,000,$20,000 a year upwards with us? So being more, I guess, granular as far as okay, yes, we solve this problem. Yes, we create websites, yes, we do X, Y, and Z, whatever it is. Um, but who within that do we really want to work with? And so when it comes to our marketing, maybe it's not just sharing that one particular project or website that you did. Here's one part of the piece or the puzzle that we are doing for this client. And we'll get into some of what the rest of this looks like because all these tips really tie into each other as well. So they're the three don'ts. Let's get into the three do's or the three things that can really help you. The first one is probably my absolute favorite, and it is to have a proper diagnostic meeting with your client. So having a and this this is whether they're a new client, a current client, a past client, a new lead, you can have a proper diagnostic meeting with them at any point in time. And what I mean by this is having a sit-down conversation and an honest conversation with them about what is it that they're really trying to achieve. And it's almost like a it really is like a consultation. It's a consultation to really figure out what is it that they're trying to achieve. Someone might say, Um, especially in the past when I worked heavily in marketing and ran my marketing agency, the answer to that question is I'm just so busy that I just really need someone to help us with our marketing. If I can just get that off our plate, then that would be so much better. Now, if you kind of read between the lines there, someone who's extremely busy, they're trying to get one particular, one spinning plate, I guess you could look at it, off their plate. But this is a reason why I went into also looking at the business side and consulting in this way, is because I knew that that was only one piece of the puzzle. So someone saying, I'm really busy, I just want to flick off the marketing component, it just never worked because this person is flat out, and that's that's not how you see success with marketing, despite sending it off in one isolated way. It it ties into so many other areas of the business. And if you come back to, I guess, the true answer of what are you really trying to achieve, if you can get the honest answer out of that, then you can really see how your services actually match what it is that they're needing a solution to. So someone who wants to flick off their marketing, at the end of the day, they want to grow their business. And as a business owner, someone who's extremely busy, they want to do that in a way where it's easier, business is easier, runs smoother. They take home, their take-home pay is something really consistent. They have a team that they can delegate to. They want more than just flicking off their marketing to someone to, you know, almost like put that out of their peripheral vision. They want more than just what they're saying. So when you have a proper diagnostic meeting with someone and you ask them the right questions and prompts, you really get to figure out what is it that they're actually wanting. And what you'll what you want to find is what is the big picture here? What is it that they're really wanting to achieve? And you sitting in your position, in your area of expertise and the ways that you can help people, you will start to understand, oh my God, like it's not just about this thing, it's about that thing. And now I can see that it's not just a website, they also need traffic, and actually they need this and they need that. So you can improve your service offerings just by having these real talks and real conversations with people. So this is one of the biggest and best things that I would suggest to everyone, even if you just ask the question. I don't know why so many people are resistant to it or haven't thought to ask it, but what is really your goal here? What is really your goal here? And that is one of the best questions you could ask your clients, especially those who come and say, I just want to buy or I just want to quote for X, Y, or Z. What really is your goal here? You will get so much more insight that's going to help you to propose some better solutions for them. So that is the first do. It's to have that proper diagnostic meeting. The second do that I have for you is to map out milestones. And this is really good for businesses who have often project type work. So even if someone comes to you for a particular isolated service, when you are more transparent about saying, look, now that I understand what your goal is and what you're really looking to achieve, this solution, such as a website, is only one part of that. It's a very important part, but it's almost going to be nothing unless we follow through with making sure that you get traffic to that website or you do this next or you do that next, whatever it is in the scope of what you do. So mapping out milestones around your service offerings and presenting that in front of the clients and the people that you're there to help, bringing it back to how can we look at clients spending basically even more with us, upwards of$10,000,$20,000 per year, mapping out those particular milestones from the beginning, or you can even look at it from this current reset point. If you're already working with people or if you've worked with them in the past, there's nothing stopping you from going back and saying, I'd love to sit down and do a renewed diagnostic meeting with you. And within that, you can start to map out what the milestones of projects you can work with them on. So the second one, mapping out the milestones, is something that can really help to sequentially help people to work through your services. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to package it all up and do it all from the beginning and the get-go. And there could be different reasons for that as well. Financial investment, just spreading that out, making it easier for that person as well. That can be a really great way to, again, like we said, come back to the topic of how do we get people to spend more with us, that 10,000, 20,000 and upwards from there per year, mapping out your milestones and presenting that to the clients is one of the really good ways that you can do that. And just like side note in this, these are all quite, you know, you can look at all these ideas as something that you like blanketly, I guess, apply to everyone that comes through your business, which I do recommend that you do in a sense. But I think where it makes the most difference is when you think about each client, each conversation, each person that I talk to, how can I really help them even more? So bringing it back to okay, this is like a blanket method that I want to do across the whole business of everything that we do and fuse it into everything. But it always, always, always is going to come down to the individual people that you talk to, those individual conversations. It takes one client at a time to convert, unless you've got a method where you're converting them all at once. But again, even if you're doing it that way, how are you doing it in that that one particular conversation, applying some of these ideas and concepts? Okay, the last do that I have for you is really cool. It is to have a look at the seasonal moments or the triggers that happen for your clients that happen across the year. They can happen across lots of different times, but I want to focus this across the year. What are those seasonal or triggering moments that happen where people should be working with you? And I always have my clients really dive in and figure out what are those pinpoints. They're really two different things. So seasonal, what are the seasonal events that happen across the year that are relevant to your business and your market, as in the people that you work with? Is it your typical milestones? Like we start at, you know, the start of the year, New Year's is Valentine's, Anzac Day, Easter, like Christmas, and a financial year, Halloween, like what are all these seasonal type things? Even I've had businesses where it makes sense for them to have summer, autumn, winter, spring type seasonal, I guess, awareness, because when you're aware of the various seasonal moments across the year that make sense for your business and your market, you can then reach out to your clients about particular services that are relevant for them to engage you with around that. And you can also and definitely take it to your marketing as well. It's a great way to map out your marketing by mapping out what are those seasonal events that happen throughout the year that are relevant to our business, but also relevant to our clients as well. One thing I definitely want to, I guess, share or say on this is never assume, like if Christmas is a big milestone event for your business and your market, don't just assume people are going to come to you. People will come to you for sure, but take the reins. Like make sure you're still reaching out to them, make sure you're still doing the marketing for it. Make sure that you're not basically like sitting on your laurels just expecting people to come. People will come, but imagine how many more will come if you are more proactive about it and you reached out to them. And people love it. Love it when you reach out to them. They don't see it as annoying. It'll be the non-ideal clients that will find it annoying. But if you work with them before, if these are people that have loved your services, they're going to love you reaching out to them. Even if it's a no or a not right now, definitely make sure you do your part. And if it's for them, then that's amazing too. Now, the other side to this, so we've got the seasonal moments throughout the year. The other part that I mentioned is the trigger moments. So, for example, and you can plug these into seasonal parts of the year as well and make it relevant. So, example, I've got here is for a financial advisor, their clients could be receiving bonuses throughout the year. So if you're their financial advisor, you'd want to know when do they receive these bonuses? And you want to plug that in into your calendar, into that follow, into your CRM, whatever it is that you use. And you want to reach out to them and see how you can help them. As their financial advisor, if they're receiving bonuses and such, you want to help them to invest that wisely or make the decisions that align with their goals, whatever it is, to take a holiday to put it into something, whatever it is. But a trigger moment for a financial advisor could be looking at when their clients receive bonuses, even having a lookout for a financial advisor. I know one of the, for everyone, one of the high spending times is obviously at Christmas. So as a financial advisor, you might want to have a pre Christmas season meeting with them or conversation with them, just to preempt, you know, what the the next um festive season has coming up for them financially. And then maybe you want to do one in the new year, so a post Christmas conversation as well. So you might make a plan before Christmas. Christmas, you'll let that run its course. And then after in the new year, you can have a chat with them to see how did it go? Is there anything we need to course correct? Did it, did our conversation beforehand really help? And I think this is great. It's a great exercise to have a look at the trigger moments because it can really help you to strengthen your service offering. It can really help you to see actually, if I was an accountant, for example, I shouldn't just wait for people to come to me to do their tax return. There's all these trigger moments or stress moments or even positive moments that happen throughout the year that I could really help them with. So this is something that helps you to stand out from all your competitors when, and this is why I say, like there's really like obviously there is a thing as competitors, but when you bring it back to the clients and the people that you actually help, you can craft the best offer, the best service offering, the best everything when you just dive into what's right in front of you. So trigger moments is like actually quite a grand method that I focus on with clients. It's an amazing strategy because so much can actually come from it. So it's something that, bringing it back to today's conversation, when you have a look at the seasonal moments throughout the year and the trigger moments throughout the year, it will lead to your clients spending even more with you. And I think you're getting the gist. Well, in this episode, but even in the way that I like to approach business, all of this actually, actually helps your clients as well. It's a beautiful thing because it helps them, but it also helps you to grow your business as well. And we're doing this from I think like a beautiful way of, we're not doing this just to make money. We're doing it from a way of how can I have, how can I give incredible value to people? And by default, our business grows as well. So let me recap these do's and don'ts, and then we'll get into an action step, which you definitely do want to take note of. So the don'ts, letting clients put in their order of service. We don't want transactions, we want transformations. The second is getting stuck over-servicing or over-delivering lower-end clients. We still want to service them. We just want to be aware of where they fit into your business so that you can also focus on that top end of your clientele. The third don't was to market to everybody. And by this I mean have a look at those people who will spend more with you. And so when it comes to your marketing, are we just sharing one isolated project or are we sharing the bigger picture? The three do's that we had was number one, to have a proper diagnostic meeting with them. So really understanding what is their goal here, what is that big picture, and then you can match that to your service offerings and your expertise. The second is mapping out the milestone. So you might start with a particular project, and that runs in a sequence with some other service offerings that are to come. The third do was to have a look at the seasonal moments and the triggers across the annual year and see what are the, I guess, time periods that you could be reaching out to them, as well as including that in your marketing. And you can apply so much automation to all these um bits and pieces as well, automated emails or yeah, there's so much you could definitely do. Okay, the action step for today. It's a couple of questions that I want you to basically sit down, collaborate, ask yourself, ask your team about this. These three do's and don'ts, they're actually quite tactile. So you can actually do a lot and run with it. But this is why the action step is something you could almost like ponder and deliberate on so that these tactile things will actually make a difference. So the questions I've got is how can we shift into a business that focuses on the annual value of a client more? That's the first one. How can we shift into a business that focuses on the annual value of a client more? The second question is, where are we going right? So you will be doing some of these things already with your clients. You might already, you know, a client might come to you and put in their order and you're saying, look, you actually need this instead, or you also need this, or that's only going to work if we do this. But are you doing this across the board? And what I want you to do here is is really be more intentional. So where are you going right with some of the things we've spoken about before? Because I know you will already be doing some of these things, but how can you make sure that you're more intentional, more strategic, and apply it to all parts and all parts, all parts of your business and all your clients? And then the last question I have is where could we be going better? So you're probably not listening to this if you've got all the answers to this particular topic, but where could we be going better? So of the do's and don'ts that I've shared, what are some of the things that are really standing out to you as it applies to your business? So if something stands out and you're like, yeah, we're really falling short there. We spend way too much time on all of our clients, no matter how much they spend, that's something you really want to tighten up. So reflecting on what you could be doing better, and then tightening that up is profoundly going to help you. So I hope you found this useful with this topic. And a lot of the strategies I share, they are small but mighty shifts. They are, I guess that's really what strategy is. It's getting, I can't remember who said it, but it's like getting the most out of the least. Like in a way, that's kind of what strategy is. It's working smarter, not harder. So you'll find that these very intentional incremental improvements really do help. So, with that, if you have found this useful and would love to, I guess, have a more specific conversation and personalize this to your business. I do at the moment offer complimentary consultations for the first time that we do speak. It's my free gift to you. If I can help you beyond that, I would absolutely love to. But at the very least, my promise is that you'll have more clarity than you've had all year when it comes to your business. So if you'd love to book that, just visit my website shannonstone.com.au. Shannonstone.com.au. I was going to give you my email there. Yeah, that's where you can find that and you can book that consultation in. If you have any questions at all, always reach out. If you want the companion article to this episode, have a look at my LinkedIn. It's just under Shannon Stone. And then, yeah, I'm someone who likes everything in all forms, so hopefully you find that useful as well. But I hope you do something with today's episode and any episode that you do listen to. And I will see you again really soon. Hey, thanks for listening. If you found this episode useful, I'd love for you to send it to a friend. The best podcasts I have found have all been recommended to me. If you can spread the word by sharing this episode, I can spend more time helping you by creating episodes just like this one. Send it, text it, tell somebody about it, whatever you need to do. The more you spread the word, the more I can focus on creating needle moving episodes to help you and your friends.