Hi Reader,
I held my first public workshop of the year earlier this week and I loved every minute of it. Even the 10 minutes at the start when no one could hear me because apparently Zoom went FUBAR on me.
That workshop proved to me once again why I want to spend time with all of you and the freelancing/consulting community. You're supportive, kind, and excited about what we do. If you didn't get the chance to attend live and would like the replay and activities, please let me know and I'll send you a direct link.
Another thing came out of that workshop for me. I've been working on two books (well three but two are prioritized). I've been going back and forth on which I should publish first and on a whim decided to do a brave thing and ask the people.
Overwhelmingly, they said I should prioritize my book on client attraction. So I thought I'd be brave for the second time in a week and ask you too. Would you prefer a book on client attraction and acquisition or on thinking like a content strategist?
Here's a quick synopsis of each of them:
- The attracting clients book is a practical look at how to build a multi-faceted client acquisition system instead of relying on random bursts of marketing whenever work gets slow. It follows the entire path from getting in front of the right people, to building relationships, having sales conversations, getting to a decision, and turning that decision into an actual client relationship. It also digs into the systems, metrics, habits, and troubleshooting you need to keep your pipeline moving.
- The thinking like a content strategist book is about learning to look beyond individual pieces of content and see the larger system around them. It has three main parts: how to develop and apply critical and strategic thinking to solve business problems, how to do content strategy, and all about your business and how it should change when you offer higher level strategic services.
Hit reply and tell me which one you'd rather read first. I'm still taking votes!
Since client attraction won so decisively in the workshop, I've been thinking about it a lot this week.
And, because apparently I enjoy making more work for myself, I've also been watching what other people are teaching about finding clients. One of the videos I watched threw me for a bit of a loop. The person teaching it didn't start with networking, referrals, LinkedIn, cold outreach, content, lead magnets, discovery calls, or any of the other things we usually associate with client acquisition. She started by asking something along the lines of: What do you need to change about yourself to attract the clients you want?
Her approach to the topic made me a bit angry. Actually, I didn't like the video much at all. There was something about the framing that bothered me. The idea that we need to change ourselves so that some theoretically better class of client will deem us worthy of working with them feels wrong to me.
We have enough people on the internet telling business owners that if they would only become more polished, confident, visible, disciplined, magnetic, premium, optimized, or whatever the word of the week happens to be, the good clients will suddenly arrive carrying large checks.
No, thank you.
But the idea stuck with me, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was something useful there. I just think she was asking the wrong question.
The question I would ask is this: What might need to change about your business if you want to attract different clients?
Because that is a very different conversation.
The clients you attract are responding to the business they see
One of the hardest things about changing direction in a business is that you experience the change long before anyone else does.
You know your skills have grown. You know you've handled increasingly complicated projects. You know you've moved beyond simply executing someone else's instructions and can now diagnose problems, recommend solutions, and contribute at a much higher level.
You know all of that because you lived it. Your prospective clients did not and they only have the evidence you've shared with them.
As an example: if your LinkedIn profile still talks almost exclusively about writing blog posts, your website leads with a list of deliverables, your portfolio shows execution work, and your content teaches people how well you understand the mechanics of writing, you can become the best content strategist in the world and people are still likely to contact you about writing blog posts.
I know because that was me 7 years ago.
It has nothing to do with the market refusing to recognize your brilliance, and everything to do with you spending years teaching the market what you do.
The same thing happens when someone wants to move from small businesses into corporate work, from projects into retainers, from execution into consulting, or from general services into a specialty.
Your business creates a set of expectations. Your positioning, language, offers, content, examples, testimonials, case studies, pricing, and even the questions you ask during a sales conversation or discovery call all tell people something about where you fit in their world.
If you want different clients, at some point you have to make sure what you're presenting to the world matches the needs of the clients you want to work with.
Your offers tell people what kinds of problems they can bring you
Your offers are so much more packages of services. They teach prospective clients what kinds of problems you solve.
Imagine someone visits your website and sees offers for:
- A set number of blog posts each month
- A combination of social media posts and social media management
- Production of email newsletters
- Monthly reporting
What are they likely to conclude?
Probably that they can hire you when they know they need blog posts, social posts, and a newsletter.
Now compare that with an offer built around figuring out why the company's content isn't generating qualified demand, identifying where the customer journey is breaking down, developing the messaging and channel strategy, and then determining what needs to be created.
Those two businesses could be run by the exact same person, but they invite very different conversations. This is one of the reasons people can become frustrated when they decide they want to do more strategic work but keep getting tactical inquiries. They changed what they want to sell, but they haven't fully changed what they're offering people.
The same concept goes far beyond content and services.
- If you want clients to bring you bigger problems, your business needs to demonstrate that you solve bigger problems.
- If you want to be involved earlier in the decision-making process, you need an offer that lets people involve you earlier.
- If you want to move toward advisory or consulting work, somewhere in your business there needs to be evidence that you can advise and consult.
That doesn't mean throwing away the services that currently pay the bills. Business evolution never goes that smoothly and it's always a trial and error process. During that process, you need to pay attention to whether your offer structure is helping you build the business you want now or continually rebuilding the one you're trying to move away from.
Different clients may need different reasons to trust you
There is another part of this that has very little to do with making yourself look impressive and quite a lot to do with risk. And you are impressive, my friend. Never doubt it.
The bigger the problem, the more expensive the engagement, and the greater the consequences of getting the decision wrong, the more confidence a buyer generally needs before saying yes.
That confidence can come from a lot of places.
You could share a case study that shows how you approached a difficult problem or a testimonial that talks about your results (rather than simply saying you're nice to work with). Maybe you could create content that shows how you think. And you can definitely show your expertise by the quality of the questions you ask during discovery. I try to do all three, but my discovery calls are my preferred method of building confidence.
There are more tangible ways to build confidence too, like showing you understand their industry, or you've solved a similar problem for another client.
And sometimes it's as easy as helping them to understand what happens next.
People sometimes respond to a lack of traction by trying to look more "premium." They redesign the website, get new headshots, change the color palette, use bigger words, and start talking about themselves using words they would never use in real life. When it's done badly it comes across as hifalutin and forced.
Those things may have their place, but they're not substitutes for reducing uncertainty and building trust. Your prospective clients don't need you to cosplay as the person you imagine someone with a larger budget would hire. All they want is enough evidence to believe you understand the problem and can help solve it.
And then there's the uncomfortable part
It might not be our businesses reinforcing our current positions. Our decisions are doing it too.
We say we want more strategic projects, but when someone offers us an execution project that we know how to do with our eyes closed, we take it.
We say we want larger or better clients, then lower the price if they hesitate.
We say we want people to value our expertise, then spend sales calls demonstrating how flexible, accommodating, and easy to work with we can be instead of showing them how we think.
We say we're trying to specialize, then add three new services because somebody asked if we could do them.
Yes, I know there may be a very good reason to take that execution project. Sometimes the mortgage has strong opinions about our positioning strategy. I'm not saying you need to be inflexible. Some months I'm so flexible I should be in one of those gymnastics shows.
Going backward only becomes a problem when temporary decisions become permanent patterns.
One tactical project becomes five. The old service is added back on the website. We keep posting about it because that's what we've been doing lately. Those clients refer people who need the same thing. Six months later, we're wondering why nobody wants to hire us for the work we said we wanted to move into.
I feel like I should say again that I'm not pointing fingers. I'm speaking directly from my personal experiences here, and from what I've seen happen in some other pretty great businesses.
It's never a matter of one terrible decision. We need to look for the small decisions we make that reinforce our old path.
Last call to register for the August
Content Strategy Bootcamp!
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So, what should you actually do with this?
And yes, you should do something with it. We all need to examine and refine our businesses occasionally, and when the world is already wonky is a great time to do it.
Here's how you can start (baby steps, remember): Pick one kind of client or one kind of project you want more of in your business.
Maybe you want to work with B2B SaaS companies instead of local service businesses. Maybe you want strategic projects instead of implementation work. Maybe you want longer engagements, corporate clients, executive work, retainers, nonprofit organizations, or companies at a particular stage of growth.
Choose one.
Then look at your business through that buyer's eyes.
- If they landed on your website today, what would they think you specialize in?
- If they looked at your LinkedIn profile, would they see evidence that you understand the problems they're dealing with?
- Do your offers give them a clear way to connect with you for the kind of work you want?
- Does your content demonstrate how you want to work, or does it mostly reinforce the services you'd like to step away from?
- Do your case studies and testimonials prove the things that matter to this particular buyer?
- If the project requires a significant investment or carries meaningful risk, have you given them enough information to feel confident putting that work in your hands?
And this might be the most useful question of the bunch:
What are you currently doing that keeps attracting the work you say you don't want anymore?
Client attraction begins earlier than we think
When people say they need more clients, the conversation usually jumps straight to activity: post more, network more, ask for referrals, start a newsletter, send cold emails, go to events, create a lead magnet, do more outreach. I've recommended some of those myself, and I've done all of them.
They are absolutely part of client acquisition. I'm writing an entire book about them, so I'm certainly not going to tell you they don't matter.
But I've become increasingly convinced that we sometimes start one step too late.
Before asking, "Where can I find more clients?" it may be worth asking, "What kind of client is the business I've built designed to attract?" Because you can become excellent at driving people toward a business that is sending the wrong message.
I've seen people double their visibility and get twice as many inquiries for work they don't want. It's possible to build an amazing referral network that keeps referring you for the thing you're trying to stop doing. You can become wonderful at client acquisition and still build the wrong pipeline.
That is why the original idea from that video has stayed with me even though I disagreed with the way she framed it.
I don't think you need to change who you are to become worthy of the clients you want. I do think your business has to grow with you.
At some point, you have to stop asking an old version of your business to create a new result. And if the clients you want aren't finding you, recognizing what you do, or seeing a reason to work with you, the answer may not be to market harder.
It may be time to look at what you've been teaching people to expect from you and then make some changes.
Depending on your votes, it's looking like I'm going to finish the client attraction book first and it's going to have a whole chapter on this topic. Thoughts?
Cheers,
Treasa
