Getting paying clients can be a difficult process.

Using the methods outlined in the Offline Gold Army and Get Clients Now will make the process a whole lot easier but when it comes down to it it still takes work to build a new relationship with a prospect.

One foundational principle is to put more effort into selling and servicing the paying clients you already have and getting referrals from them.

Once someone has hired you they already have a relationship with you.

It’s very easy to get them to read your email, your letter or get them on the phone.

So you can sell additional services to them or you can make life a whole lot easier and less stressful for yourself by selling ongoing services.

If you have say 10 clients all paying you $400 a month you’re making $4,000 a month without having to get any new clients.

That takes a lot of pressure off you.

Here’s the biggest secret to
getting paid ongoing fees for a service…

When you’re in the process of getting hired get your prospect excited about the benefits to them of a service that you provide month after month.

That’s not too difficult.

Business owners love new customers and more profits on a more regular basis so any service you can provide that does that will work just fine.

Think email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, marketing with online video, Facebook marketing…the list goes on and on.

If the service helps bring in more customers month after month you can charge a monthly fee for it.

And here’s something to consider…

Different business owners think differently.

Most are trying to reduce their risk and increase their sales and profits.

Some are happy paying substantial sums upfront and some are happy paying less upfront but don’t mind paying you over and over if you’re getting results for them.

You may consider a pricing model where you focus on getting a business to pay you $250 to $2,500 a month for your service rather than charging such a large upfront project fee.

You need to exercise a LOT of caution with this.

Your best clients are nearly always those who have paid you a substantial sum of money before you do any work (by charging upfront you force a client to establish the real value to them of your skill and expertise.)

But this is an option you can consider and any variation of it (for example charging $1,500 upfront then $500 a month after that).

IF a client keeps paying you for a year $500 a month ends up being $6,000 over a year.

If you go down this route
remember to educate your clients…

Some clients will be a pain in the arse thinking they own you for that fee unless you invest a lot of effort in educating them on what they can expect from you, what you expect from them and what the limits of your service are.

Generally speaking the idea of “residual income” where you have money coming in is a bit of a fallacy.

Businesses require ongoing work.

But if you’re smart about how you deliver your services (you can outsource) and how you allow your clients to interact with you or your staff you can get very close to an income that will keep coming in without a whole pile of effort on your part.

10 or 20 clients at $500 a month amounts to an income of $5,000 to $10,000 a month which is not too shabby.

Here’s a question I got today that I think is quite reasonable and covers a lot of the problems and reservations people encounter when they’re looking to sell their services to brick and mortar businesses:

I would like to make a great living selling offline products or services with these constraints:

1. No face to face – only phone , emails or ???

2. Reasonable continuity rate.

3. Potential to be more than just $44 for hours – although that is okay to start.

4. No cold calling – and strong preference to the client self qualifying by calling or contacting me.

5. If I left anything out – feel free to add – 🙂
Here is my answer to this question:

1. What you ask for is possible. I’ve had many clients over the years who have hired me from just emails or from emails and follow up phone calls.

I have found if you want to increase the percentage of prospects hiring you getting onto the phone with the business owner as early in the process as possible does wonders.

2. I’ve found that the people who do best at getting some kind of ongoing fees are those who make an ongoing service the most exciting part of the customized solution they offer to businesses. It’s really that simple.

3. You should be getting way more per hour than $44 an hour. First of all charge for the project or for an ongoing service…never by the hour.  If you want to charge more you need to get better at establishing the potential dollar value of your service.

Just thinking through different ways of doing that with prospects will help you. Also we have a whole series of articles on the topic in the Gold Members section at Offlinebiz.com here…
Secrets To Establishing Value, Getting Hired And Massively Increasing The Fees You Can Charge…

Probably the biggest keys to charging more are being worth more (in other words making more profits for your clients), being willing to ask for more (understanding the real value of your service to a business) and being aware of your “posture” in your dealings with prospects and clients (being aware of how you come across to them and making sure they see you as an in demand consultant with highly valuable skills and knowledge.

4. I simply don’t do cold calling. I’m not against it but honestly it’s not the best way of getting a client. Outsourcing cold calling to someone else you might consider.

But I have two products that explain in detail multiple ways of getting clients that simply don’t involve cold calling and yes many of them will get prospects contacting you first.

The 2 products are:

Get Clients Now (one of my favorite strategies is the “gratitude magnet” which gets people you would barely believe would communicate with you at all emaling you back…usually the same day sometimes in just hours or minutes). And no the gratitude magnet has nothing to do with providing a service in advance or anything ephemeral…it’s a very solid, simple strategy that takes minutes and it’s may be the most effective icebreaker.

And there are many, many other strategies in the Get Clients Now product where you can get the ball rolling with an email. That is so much more effective than strategies like cold calling because when it comes down to it you’ll actually sit at your computer and send 20 or 30 or 100 emails but only a small percentage of people will sit on their phones and make even a dozen cold phone calls.

If I call someone it’s a person who has already shown a strong interest in what I’m doing, preferably someone who is showing signs that they have money and they’re ready to hire me. In some cases I don’t even talk to them on the phone. I just get them to pay me the upfront fee.

Offline Gold Army
You get a lot of people claiming their product or strategy is a “game changer” but this one really is.

As soon as you contact prospects by email they’ll WANT to talk to you. And you’ll find many who will both be interested in your services, but even more important, motivated to send you high quality prospects.

That’s the power of the Offline Gold Army strategy.

5. The thing that’s likely to make the biggest difference is making  a really serious, committed decision that you’re going to make money from this.

Business is not a game and business owners often have their lives and their livelihoods on the line every day. If you’re going to persuade them to work with you they want to see that you genuinely care about them and that you’re genuinely COMMITTED.

Many people aren’t getting hired not because they don’t have skills but because they’ve never made any serious decision to make their own business work.

It’s great to have a service based business with next to no overheads and no real risks but it you want to really enter the business world and be seen as a serious option for helping business owners with their marketing they need to see that commitment in your eyes.