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If you want to attract high-paying clients, you best get into the expertise business.
Start giving away valuable problem-solving advice far and wide. A mentor who taught this to me 20 years ago was David 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.”
If you are a consultant or offer a high-end service, getting published is the number one marketing toll and public speaking is the number one marketing strategy. Baker makes the following recommendations:
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. Because of that, we begin to feel precious about ‘owning’ that content and protecting it. Take a counter-intuitive 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. And if you want them to pay you a lot of money, they’re more likely to do that if they know how you think, first, before they write the check.”
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. If you have too few competitors, you are likely either addresses 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 10 competitors but no more than 200. As you walk along that spectrum from ‘undifferentiated’ to an ideal place, you’re walking into a narrower and narrower space. You’re walking slowly as you look up at the traffic light. When it turns green, you’re entering a safe zone. You keep walking until it turns red, at which point you’ve exited that safe zone.”
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. 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. Experts are very impactful…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. Instead, fashion the engagement so that you are only solving the higher-level challenges in a way that allows you to be more episodic.”
You aren’t leading client relationships when you let them dictate the process you’ll follow. “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.”
Bottomline: An expert is someone who freely gives away advice in a general sense, and then attracts high-paying 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.
