Attracting and Retaining Your Perfect Fit Clients

Do you find it challenging to attract and retain new clients because you're continually working on the ones that you've got? Well, that's a common challenge that I deal with in the work that I do with professional services practitioners. You see, you're really fantastic at your technical skills, but that doesn't mean that you have the skills that you need to be able to do business development.

So if that's something you'd like to know more about, how you could get not just more clients, but the right fit clients, the clients that are actually easy to work with, they're a perfect fit for you,

And stop attracting the ones that are not a perfect fit, the ones that cause you all the trouble, then this is for you. Hi, this is Grant Herbert, the founder and global managing partner of the Professional Services Leadership Academy. And this week, we want to talk about attracting and retaining your perfect-fit clients.

Here's the thing, people need to know you, like you, and trust you before they buy, repeat buying, and refer you on to other people. Now, in this new world of AI, there's a new element that's been put in the middle of all that. Trust is no longer enough. You need believability because there's so much out there that's fake news, that's false, that's made up, that's artificial, that people need to get through that noise now that they didn't need to get through before.

So in professional services, how do we do this? Well, we establish our own positioning. Positioning is all about going from being invisible and like everybody else, to being in demand and standing out. Most people who do what you do, do it pretty well the same, and that's the concept that people have out in the marketplace.

Hey, if I need a lawyer, I go and get a lawyer. If I need an accountant, I go and get an accountant. If I need a finance professional, I go and see a finance professional. And they don't understand that there are differences within each profession. So how do we shift that? Well, I just want to keep these short and give you actionable strategies that you can go and use straight away.

The first thing you need to do is decide who is your perfect-fit client. So before you can attract perfect-fit clients and repel those that are not within that avatar, you need to know who they are. I remember when I first got started in my practice, seventeen, eighteen years ago now. If it was alive and breathing and wanted to pay me money and needed my skills, yep, I'll do that.

And that caused me a lot of pain. You know, I now work in professional services firms. However, I've got a filter that helps me to work with the ones that I'm best suited to help. That eliminates the need for me to convince anybody. I have what you need, so therefore you'll come to me when you need it. So positioning is all about positioning yourself as the go-to person in your market, standing above everybody else, looking different, speaking different, and making sure that you are speaking the language of your perfect fit client.

One of the things I see all the time is using jargon. We know what it means in our professions, but they don't. So we've got to be able to speak it as if they would say it, otherwise it's just noise. When you communicate, you have a sender who sends a message some way. It's got to go through the noise of everything else out there, and in this case, the noise of every other available person who does what you do.

Then it gets to the receiver. The receiver then decodes what they think it is that you're talking about, and then they respond accordingly. So what we've got to be able to do is make sure we position ourselves in a way that cuts through that noise. That in the moment when they have the problem that you are best to solve, those two equations are put together in their mind.

So I do a lot of work in working with partners in law firms, and the track record that I have gives me that authority. Over behind me there, you've probably seen my book, Professional Services Leadership. So I'm a subject matter expert in that particular field. I don't do everything. So that means that people who need what I do know who I am So it's not a matter of needing to get out there and go networking and hand out business cards and all these sort of things.

It's a matter of establishing authority. So how do you do that? You find the biggest problem that your market has right now, relevant to today, and you speak to that. You speak to the solution of that. You help them to understand that not only do you know about the solution, but you understand the problem, and you understand the problem through their lens, not through yours.

So when you speak their language, it's like they're wearing a set of Bose headphones, that they're listening to the music that they like the most, and they're in that place of certainty and comfort and security, and that's where the believability comes. So at the end of the day, the job that you and I have is to make sense of the problem that they have, to make sense of the solution to that problem, and to help them to understand how they can use that solution to solve their problem.

It's not about foot in the door, direct selling, chasing people down. That doesn't work. And it's not about inventing new things and fancy words and jargon that's going to impress them because they're not interested in that. They're interested in having their problem solved. So what can you do this week to establish more authority in that area?

One of the things that I do is wherever I'm going, I'm off to Singapore next week, and while I'm there working with clients, I'm meeting other people, and I'm also doing some speaking around problems that people have right now. See, right now in the professions that I work in, the biggest challenge is attraction and retention of good people and burnout.

And then on top of that, the presenting problem is: How do we work with this AI thing? And it's consuming a lot of their energy. So what I'm able to do is to speak to those people who are my perfect fit clients in the context of the age of intelligence. So I'm talking about emotional navigation in the age of AI.

So emotional navigation is the key to being able to keep the human element within your organization where it needs to be as we all navigate this thing called AI. So it's not AI. I don't talk about AI. I can build custom ChatGPTs, and I can use Claude, and I can vibe code and all these amazing things, but that's not what my clients need.

They need me to understand how do they work with their people? How do they work with themselves in this current era? So look at opportunities to get those perfect fit people in front of you or get yourself in front of them. Find out where they hang out and offer yourself to speak. Not delivering a paper, but speaking at a deeper and emotional level to help them to understand that you understand their problem and that you can help them to navigate the solution.

So attracting and retaining your perfect fit clients is all about knowing who they are. It's about making sure that everything you talk about is music to their ears and it makes everybody else not interested, and you continue to be more relevant and shift what it is that you do through a message that is for today.

Well, hope that helps. And if you're not yet in our community where you can come and get more of these things, and we do our 20-minute transformations where I give you one shift that gives you big impact and you can go away with an actionable strategy, then find the link down below here and join our community.

It's a free community I love to get the opportunity to serve in. And whatever you do this week, make sure that you do it with confidence, with certainty, and you help people to realize that you are the go-to person to solve their problems. I'll see you next time.