Sean's Notes

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the right kinds of clients

Inbound marketing faces the unique challenge of trying to find the right kinds of clients, you're reliant on your marketing efforts to attract your perfect client avatar; good for systematized businesses; bad for boutique types of services.

The art of identifying & pursuing the right kinds of clients for your services is a cornerstone principle behind the ECS method; the quality of your client greatly influences the success of a project.

The Wrong Kind of Clients...

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Clients Who Aren't Flexible, or worse, using you to justify their own issues.

How do you approach working with clients who aren’t open to changing anything (but still want to hire you)?

This is something I went through recently.

A client hired me for cold outreach copy but I only found out later that they were dug in about not changing anything about their offer or funnel whatsoever (which were NOT working).

The offer was in the investing niche (and the traffic was of course cold).

I typically work with clients on forming / coming up with the offer and risk reversals for the copy I’m writing for them once I have a big idea / hook.

Most of my clients use different offers for their cold outreach than they do with their main funnel (and most want / ask for my help in coming up with one for their campaign).

This clients offer was a $7 one week trial and then straight to being locked in with an auto bill of $600 a month for three months at the end of the seven days.

No guarantees or risk reversal.

That, based on my experience, is a big leap for a cold prospect to make not just financially but mentally / psychologically.

I walked him through my thinking but his response was “I’m not changing my whole funnel just for you!”

I ended up refunding him and we parted ways.

I’m of course wondering what I can do to avoid this in the future….

My Response...

"I ended up refunding him and we parted ways." is often the best answer... there is very much a thing as "bad clients"

However, to avoid it in the future make it part of the approach up front. "A copy is only as good as the offer" kinda thing... you're selling the whole package at that point, and should charge accordingly.

Position yourself as a partner, sell them on growth, and if they don't work with you like a partner - their loss. Clients who insist on hiring experts and setting them up for failure are often times fulfilling an emotional need to feel validated that THEY'RE not the problem... "see I hired an expert and it still didn't work!". They're not trying to solve their problem, they're trying to feel better. Not a great client.

Referenced in

The ABC Client Method: Get Paid More With Less Clients

Create - Since you're working with the right kind of clients they already have many of the assets you'll need for your campaign to be successful. You can leverage these and save yourself time. You'll also very likely be able to leverage the team members of your new partners to help create needed assets.

inbound vs. outbound

Inbound marketing faces the unique challenge of trying to find the right kinds of clients, you're reliant on your marketing efforts to attract your perfect client avatar; good for systematized businesses; bad for boutique types of services.