How To Screen Your Clients – Increase Value For All
The ultimate goal of any client screening is two-fold: you want to create the most satisfied customer base, and you also want to have a group of people that you yourself enjoy working with. The foundation of this is offering value for all. Today, I’d like to discuss how to screen your clients properly so that you are improving the lives of others while also cultivating your long term business success in ways that you never thought possible.
Why You Have To Screen Your Clients
The first thing you should know is that from the very beginning, you need to be screening your clients. A lot of novice entrepreneurs tend to take on any client they can get, and I’ve seen them get disappointed in their own business and clients by “putting too much on their plate” early in their career. You can be very unpleasantly surprised if you do not establish very CLEAR rules for your company on which clients you take, and especially if you do not screen in a coherent and consistent manner.
If you don’t have a consistent message with yourself and your employees about what you want in a client, the prospective customers can sense this themselves and will often become “tourists”. The tourist is someone who will buy your product or service but will not actually use it in their business. Tourists simply don’t implement what you’re telling them consistently enough. This is not because they have bad intentions, they just haven’t quite developed the right mindsets to succeed yet
Trust The Good Intentions Of Your Clients
Think about it – in 20-30 years time, when it’s all said and done, do you want to look back at the work you’ve done for people and say that you just let them coast, enjoying the act of being in a “tourist” in your niche while you squeezed money out of them? Do you want to look back and say, “I convinced them to give me all the money I wanted, knowing all the while they weren’t ready to implement any of lessons they learned”, or you want to have something of lasting value?
I think you know the answer. The best way to build your business is one based on actually helping other people. You want to make money off of actually contributing something of value to society. If you look at some of the heaviest hitters in the modern digital age, places like Amazon and Ebay, they are very conscious of creating a culture for their customers that trusts that people are inherently good.
They’ve created platforms where customers express themselves and purchase items to their liking, all the while trusting that the customer will do the right thing and use the company’s products for a positive outcome. And it’s worked. In fact, this kind of value-offering culture is part of what has helped companies like Amazon and Ebay grow from from the tens of millions of dollars in revenue to the billions and billions of dollars in it.
Here’s How You Do It – Create A List of “Must-Have” Properties
The way to screen your clients for maximum value-offering and revenue generation is as follows: create a list of “must-have” properties (maybe 3-4) that you want you have in your prospective or ideal client. It would probably start with something like, “I will not take a client on that doesn’t put at least 10-15 hours into this project”, or “I will not go below this price point”, or “I will not take a client on I feel procrastinates too much”, and so on.
If you do not create this list, you may have random smorgasbord of unfocused, unmotivated people who are essentially just throwing money at you to play around. Truth be told, ironically they will probably leave pretty quickly in the short-term so even the money will dry up. Always remember this: you cannot be all things to all people. Furthermore, if you are trying to be all things to all people, many prospective clients will sense this, and will not be suitable to do good business with you.
If you comes down to you having to say, “I’m sorry but I just can’t do business with you if you’re not willing to put this many hours into our work” or “I simply can’t offer you the most value if I’m only getting paid that amount”, then so be it. Trust me, you will be doing both them and yourself a favor.
Create A Second List of Preferred Properties
Another thing is you can do is create a list of properties you would prefer your clients to have. This really helps to reinforce the idea that you are choosing the client, and building the kind of business you’d like. These particular properties are not going to be set in stone. In other words, if a client doesn’t have these properties, you can still take he or she on, however you will want to help them to better embody like those preferred properties. If they’re kind of goofing off in sessions, joking too much, or if they’re being a bit stubborn and hard-headed, you will want to lead them to a place where they’re practicing more professionalism on a daily basis, for example.
In my business for example, I need my clients to invest enough time to post at least one video per week. If you cannot create one video per week, you cannot create an active and vibrate business. If you can create one video per day, you’re working seven times faster. This is ideal, and I’d love if every single one of my clients could do one video a day, but a lot of people can’t, and I understand that. So 1+ videos a week goes in my preferred properties category. We all need a little bit of leniency.
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The underlying core principle is provide more value than you receive. If you’re a company that provides more value that you receive, good things will come to you. This is not karma, this is just good common business sense. I highly encourage you to implement this in your business and your life. Screen, screen, screen, and the entire world will reap the fruits of your labor.
