Attract high paying clients with clear, confident brand positioning

Every single client I’ve ever worked with shares one ambition: to win higher paying clients and bigger ticket projects.

Whether you’re starting a new business or have been trading for years, focussing on premium clients is the fastest way to driving profits - so how do you do it?

So many of the entrepreneurs I speak to tell me they’ve no problem in attracting clients, it’s landing the right clients that’s the challenge; the ones who value their expertise, pay what they’re worth and open the doors to bigger opportunities that’s the ultimate hurdle. Most entrepreneurs struggle to articulate what makes them different, leading to the frustrating and demoralising cycle of remaining underpaid.

The good news is that it’s easily resolved.

The fastest way to truly stand out and attract high paying clients in a competitive market is to solve a problem that no-one else can solve. What do I mean by this?

Stop selling your service, and start a different conversation instead: talk about the challenge that you help clients to overcome. For example, finding a leadership advisor doesn’t keep CEO’s up at night - but worrying about how to get key stakeholders on board with their transformational vision certainly does. Barely anybody loses sleep over looking for a coach, but they sweat bullets about improving performance and maintaining influence.

When you can align the service you offer with the one big, scary challenge that your client has, you gain permission to position yourself as the go-to expert who makes problems go away. You shift the dynamic away from ‘here’s my services, please pick one of them’ to ‘here’s how I’m going to take you from where you are today to a place that feels completely out of reach right now’, you build exponential trust and credibility into your message.

And as a result?

You become the only option that matters to your clients. You elevate yourself above the sea of competitors who are all selling the same thing, perhaps with a different spin on strategy or sales message here and there, and place your business in a space which is uniquely yours. You make yourself irresistibly valuable to your clients, and they’ll be only too happy to pay your fees - because they believe in the power you hold to deliver what they really want.

In practice

List out your five favourite clients - those which ‘get’ what you do, bring profitable work and who are an absolute pleasure to work with. Now think about what bought them to you - what were they looking to achieve as a result of working with you? And what did that outcome mean for them? Maybe you supported them to overcome an obstacle standing in the way of their next promotion? Perhaps your insights enabled them to navigate a challenging time and emerge stronger? Consider both the tangible and intangible results… or as I like to think of it, the ‘real’ results (higher pay cheque, commercial stability) and the ‘emotive’ results (greater confidence, reduced anxiety, sense of optimism).

Once you’ve arrived at these three factors: client scenario, problem and outcome, you’ve got the framework of clear brand positioning. From here, you can engineer every detail of your brand identity, language and client journey to place this problem-solving angle front and centre of everything.

Give it a go, and please do let me know how you get on! To discuss personal support in strengthening your brand positioning to attract more high paying, premium clients, you can reach me at hannah@ditto.uk.com