What To Ask New Clients (For Coaches And Service Businesses)

How can you bring your service or coaching business from a level that is low-paying, annoying, and stressful, to high paying clients who pay tens-of-thousands of dollars, who are not a pain, who reply when you need them to reply, who work with you on deadlines on time, and who generally they make your life nice? This article is for you if you are wanting to improve how good your clients are and you are looking to make sure you are working with top-notch people who are the best quality that will pay the most for you.

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First, if you are just getting started in business right now then you may need to worry about taking on just about anyone to make sure your sales, marketing and cash flow are working correctly. If you are already on point and getting a steady stream of clients, it is time to be very picky with who you choose to work with. If you decide you want to work with everyone and you do not care who you work with and try scale your business like this, then you are going to need to make sure you are very picky.

How do you select good clients?

Client screening is where you screen the clients you work with and look at a few of their characteristics carefully to see if you want to work with them. I am always super picky who I work with in the sense that if it is a sales call, they are selling themselves at almost every single point. It is important you understand this because you will be able to select clients instead of them asking a few questions and you ending up giving away a free discount. This takes you from bad clients to being the boss and in charge of selecting.

What do you look for when choosing your clients?

First of all, you need to make sure that in the first ten minutes of the conversation you will have an idea whether or not they will be able to afford your services.

There is nothing as annoying as spending 25 minutes, or 2 hours, talking to a client just to find out they are broke, they cannot afford your service, and you still need to go talk to someone else for a sale.

Before you continue the conversation, if your service is the best possible service they can get, ask if they would actually buy from you. If they are in the position that they can buy from you. If not, that is great because you just helped them out a little bit and you can close the call a bit faster so you do not spend too much time with them. Do not tell them you are ending the call because they suck, be polite and help them out a little bit but do not take them on as a client because they cannot afford your services.

The second thing I look for when screening clients is that they have enough time to work for me.

I recommend you do this as well because it is very important you only look for people who have the actual time to work with you.

For example: if you offer digital services, Facebook ads, or websites, you can ask them, “Do you have enough time to review emails that I send you every single week and when I need content for the ads, website, or whatever, are you able to provide that on time?” Ask, “Would you agree with setting a deadline for every part of the project for you and for me?” and, “Would you agree to reply to emails within 48 hours?”

Put all these into the contract, and when these are all verbally agreed to then you can be quite sure that this is the correct kind of client. Otherwise, you could be waiting a half a year for a reply and they could be wondering where their stuff for the project is. This makes it so the work to be delivered is also on their end to deliver to you because not everything in a project is you delivering to them. It is you working with them to deliver a service. You are a team together with the client.

The third thing to look for when screening clients is to make it abundantly clear that you are very picky with who you work with and they need to explain why they are motivated to work with you.

This is actually them selling themselves to you rather you selling yourself to them. This is a crucial part to any sales interactions with any clients. Anyone who does not do this in their sales are pretty much guaranteed to charge little money and have bad clients because clients can see they are a pushover and they are not selecting clients, or have the client’s best interests in mind and they do not deserve to get paid a lot of money.

These are three of many screening techniques we teach in the Daily Business Hustle mastermind where we take complete beginners like 17-year-old people with no experience to 17.5-year-old people selling $3,000 products and services. Remember to screen your clients in order to see the most value for them and yourself.