Join Fabienne and Gail Kingsbury for this conversation about purpose, defining moments, and serving in a much bigger way. Join them to discover “best practices” on how to play big – in your business and your life. Enjoy!
Gail Kingsbury is a 25-year veteran of the Personal Development Event Industry, pioneering many of the most popular seminars series’ in history. Her rolodex reads better than a Who’s Who directory and her respect in the industry is unparalleled. Gail is bringing her vast knowledge and contacts to her clients and helps authors and experts create platforms to deliver their message to their perfect audiences.
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There comes a time in almost any entrepreneur’s practice when you revamp your programs. Talking to new prospects about the revised program is easy since they don’t know about your previous options. But how do you get existing clients to upgrade?
Earlier in my practice, I raised my fees on a regular basis, like every few months for new clients that signed up for one of my programs. However, I never did actually raise my rates for current clients. That didn’t feel right to me.
Yet, when you adjust your programs, if you are providing more services or if clients are getting better results, there is a way to discuss this with your current people. I recommend taking the following steps to open a conversation about the new program and pricing:
1. Timing – bring this up a month before a client will be finishing with you. This is a great time to talk about their future goals and plans.
2. Discontinuing current program – Let your clients know you are discontinuing the program they have been in and replacing it with a new and improved program.
3. Set up transition call – Ask if they’d like to have a conversation about the new program to see if it makes sense to continue in a more in-depth way that offers bigger, faster results. This is when you go over program details and pricing so you have established the value your new program delivers.
4. List objections – Type up the advantages of the new program so you actually have a rationale in front of you as to how clients would benefit if they moved up and that it’s in their best interest. Then, write down all of the objections that they would have and counteract those again with a really good paragraph.
5. Don’t be devastated – Expect that many clients won’t want to pay more. At least this process gives you the opportunity to discuss it with them and encourage them to go for the upgrade.
Your Client Attraction Assignment
To create a list of objections and address each one, think about interviewing clients who are in the new program. This is a great way to also get testimonials from them and prepare them to share their excellent results. It also helps you gather details about their accomplishments so you can elaborate on them in your discussions. Your new programs may be delivering fabulous results you hadn’t even thought about.
Now, if you’re just starting out and trying to fill your practice in the FIRST place, then follow a step-by-step system that feels easy and authentic to you. The Client Attraction Home Study System™ gives you the most important things to do to set up simple, solid systems, so that you consistently fill your pipeline and continually get new clients. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. Easy. You can get it at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.
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Usually at ClientAttraction.com we talk to you about attracting and signing on new clients. That’s what everyone wants right–new, ideal, high-paying clients, continually filling your pipeline. For the bulk of my career that’s what I focused on too. After awhile I realized that I was spending a huge amount of time and effort attracting brand new clients, but my current clients were leaving after their initial term was over.
I didn’t understand what was going on because they were getting great results. We were transforming their businesses. They were going from making not much to making six figures and beyond. I didn’t see why at the time the majority of them weren’t signing up for another year. (Click here to tweet this.)
Here’s what I knew. I knew deep in my heart that I could help them further multiply what they had already created with me. I knew that I could take them to the next level, but somehow they didn’t see that and they ended up moving on to another mentor. If I’m being transparent with you this actually kind of affected my ego and my self-esteem. It was like, “Ouch. You’re moving on to someone else. Why?”
Have you ever thought about what it takes to retain clients past their initial term? In the last several years I have actually shifted the way that I do business. Miraculously we have witnessed clients staying with us for much, much longer—signing up again year after year even at our highest programs levels.
You may be thinking, “Why are they signing up again? Didn’t they get everything they needed the first time around?” Well, yes they did get everything they needed, but now they feel great about signing on for year two, year three and so on. Today, I’d like to take you behind the scenes in our business and share with you just a few of the many, many things that you can shift within your own business so that your clients happily stay with you longer and continue to get great results with you, while recommending you to others.
Today, I will share with you three simple things that we do in our business that perhaps you would like to apply to your own business.
1. Give more than clients expect to get. You may not know this about me yet, but in my work with clients I love to give huge value. I believe in under promising and over delivering when it comes to value.
That means that our clients are surprised to see how much more they get than what they paid us. For example, people traditionally come to us for marketing and for client attraction and we deliver that like nobody else does because we’re experts at it, but what they don’t realize is that we also give them all the mindset work and all the spiritual marketing principles that really work to get clients. We give them list-building, internet marketing strategies, systems, all of that for free, which helps them create even more results. They’re very surprised to get all of this extra stuff.
2. Continually innovate. For many years I had only a couple of programs. Once a client consumed those programs and got results there was nothing new for them to learn and this is why they would move on. In looking back now, I don’t blame them. There was nothing new to consume. Well, the solution was to create new stuff.
Derek and I are always learning, always improving our own businesses and getting best practices from other sources. Now as we continually sharpen the saw, we have our own mentors. We take all of these new things that we’ve learned and when they’ve worked for us, when we’ve digested them and we see that they create results, we distill everything that has worked for us and then we pass it on to our clients so they can use it. This makes it easy for our clients to get best practices without having to invest lots of time and lots of energy and lots of money elsewhere to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
They tell us that this is one of the big reasons why they come back again and again and again. It’s because we’re constantly innovating.
3. Make your clients feel significant. I’ve realized something about the human race. It’s that every single person on Earth loves to feel like they are significant. They want to matter in the eyes of others. We all want to feel loved and when you can make your clients feel special they like being around you and they don’t want to unplug from that.
Many people I know keep their clients at arm’s length. We do the opposite. We love them. We surround them with people who love them and champion them and they feel, for the first time in their life perhaps, that they have a tribe of people who unconditionally accept them. We surprise them with little gifts that they didn’t expect or anticipate. They experience little touches here and there. It’s the way that Derek and I and the team are anyway, but we’ve decided to extend that into our business. For many of our clients they don’t get that anywhere else.
Your Client Attraction Assignment
Ask yourself these three questions because this is about you.
What can you do to over deliver and give your clients more than they originally expected?
How could you continually innovate in your programs and offerings?
How will you start making your clients feel more significant?
When you do these three things you’re going to see a huge shift in your level of client retention and the years that people stay with you happily and in your referrals. Best of all, it feels amazing.
