Transform Yourself From “Just Another Vendor” Into a One of a Kind Business Professional
Attract the Right Clients, Get the Respect You Deserve, No More Haggling Over Fees
“Jason’s Incomparable Expert Transformation was so insightful and brilliantly strategic that we hired him on in an ongoing advisory role.”
Jeff Paro and Robert Monaco, Influenceology.com
I learned the lesson I’m about to share with you the hard way. It turned out to be an extremely expensive lesson. About $37,500 to be exact.
A few years ago, I was in negotiations with a prospective client to help them increase the lifetime value of their customers. Basically, they were generating a fair amount of customers but had no systems in place to maximize the value of those customers. In short, they were leaving tons of money on the table and were looking for ways to fix that.
The $1,104,000 FAIL
My proposal to them was impressive. I spent a lot of time on it. And I gave it a lot of thought. I basically showed them a way to take their gross revenue of about $240,000 per month and add an extra $92,000 per month…a $1,104,000 revenue increase over the next 12 months. (And I was being conservative.)
What really I did, if it isn’t already obvious to you, was give them a bunch of free advice and consulting IN my proposal. Dumb, dumb move.
Sadly, that wasn’t the big mistake I made. The real serious mistake happened long before the proposal.
Getting Picked Out of the Apples Line-Up
If you’re wondering, I didn’t get the business. I didn’t get anything except a short explanation… “You’re way more expensive than any of the other copywriters,” he said.
“Yes I am. And did you see the part where I showed you how to add an extra million bucks to your topline revenue over the next 12 months?”
At that point, logic didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I had screwed up. My mistake wasn’t that my price was too high. My mistake was that I had walked right into helping my client make an apples to apples comparison between his other options.
I went right up to the front of the room. I stood next to all of the other “apples” and waited for my client to choose the cheapest, best looking apple. The fact is, I wasn’t an apple. But my client thought I was. Mainly because I hadn’t shown him otherwise.
From his perspective, I was one expensive apple. And I cost way more than he wanted to pay for a silly piece of fruit.
The Source of 95% of Your Issues With Clients and Prospects
When comparison is possible between you and your prospect’s other choices, you will lose. You might not get the business. Or worse, you will get the business, but it will be on their terms and not yours.
Think of all of the things that annoy you about getting clients and working with clients. Most service providers think those things are problems. They’re not.
Having someone haggle with you over a fee isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is that you haven’t cemented yourself as the unique and valuable “one-of-a-kind” expert you are in the mind of your prospect.
THAT is the problem. Do you know anyone who haggles with a heart surgeon? Never happens. Why? Because that doctor has been positioned as the one and only choice for that client.
How to Make Yourself Stand Out Like a Diamond at a Coal Convention
The fact is, you already have everything you need right now to set yourself apart from your competition in ways that would drastically improve the quality of your clients and business. What you probably haven’t done, though, is created the package that communicates that to your prospective clients.
What makes you unique? What makes you a better value than anyone else? How do you communicate that to prospects so they “get it” like a smack right to the face?
If you don’t have those answers, then it’s high time to do something about it.
Most Service Providers are Great at What They Do–But Very Few Are Good At Communicating the Unique Value of What They Do
I was on the phone recently with a service provider who was explaining some of the challenges she was having with clients. I asked about the unique value she provided and she told me. I asked if her clients were aware of this unique value and how it impacted them reaching their goals? “Probably not,” she said.
So here was a very talented service provider who was basically blending in with the crowd because she wasn’t articulating what made her materially different than everyone else!
What do you think happens to fees when prospects deal with service providers they can’t even tell apart from one another? Fees don’t go up, that’s for sure.
And fee pressure is just one of the problems you face when you’re just “another vendor.”
Without the ability to clearly locate and articulate your unique value to your marketplace, you may as well just be one of the crowd. Actually, you will just be one of the crowd.
You will be invisible. And you will end up fighting for scraps and leftovers from the service providers who DO have this together.
“I needed to differentiate my business from thousands of competitors, and spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. I had a basic concept, but it didn’t get my prospects very excited – too much business jargon that just didn’t hit home. Jason took my ideas and came out with the perfect wording for it – compelling and easy to understand. Even though my business is highly technical, I can get my value across quickly and easily, and have a much easier time explaining what I do.”
Phillip Theriault, Web Application Developer
You Have Something Unique and Valuable That Sets You Apart From Everyone… Now You Can Find Out What That Thing Is and Use It to Build Your Business
I wouldn’t say I’m “world class” at many things… but this is one of those things where I qualify. The ability to hear you talk about your business and then, after a few questions, extract that unique value you bring to the table and articulate it in a way that powerfully connects with your target audience…that’s what I do better than anyone I know.
You already possess unique and inherent value. The trick is in knowing how to communicate that value to the world. In most cases, that never happens successfully. There’s no chance for it to happen. Because most of us are completely blind to that value.
We’ve been brainwashed into not being able to see it. And because of that, we search in the dark for the answer to “what makes us different, special, valuable, yada, yada…”
And we wonder why the clients haggle over fees? It’s because we haven’t given them a good reason not to!
Most service providers package themselves up as me-too versions of everyone else in their niche. And they suffer because of it.
You Can Choose a Different Path… You Can Become a One of a Kind Service Professional
I’m going to walk you through it and do it for you. One on one. The process is called The Incomparable Expert Transformation™.
In the span of a week or so, I take you from “vendor” to a true one-of-a-kind service professional.
It all begins with a phone call. This is where we talk about your business. I ask questions to extract the core essence of the unique value you bring to your clients.
If you’ve ever spent time with me on the phone, you know I’m good at this. If we haven’t spoken on the phone, then you will be very pleased, especially if you’re looking for clarity.
After our phone conference, I take the information I’ve discovered and create a unique positioning for your business.
What you get is extremely simple. The priorities are clarity, simplicity and IMPACT. What you get is a 1-2 page document that clearly outlines how you should be talking about your business in your marketing and with your prospects and clients.
“Jason Leister – A man of a million words. There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English dictionary and Jason’s unique talent is the ability to take a few thousand of those words and put them in place perfectly to describe what others do. Ironically, I was unable to find the words for myself and it is the work that I do. He just listens and then is able to magically regurgitate my mumble jumble into prose. I will be forever be grateful for Jason’s innate ability to put onto paper what my special gift is in the work I do in the world. This allows me to stand out amongst the sea of other people in my profession. This marketing arms me to go forth in my business confidently knowing who I am and what makes me unique.”
Pamela, Coach
The funny part is, very little of it will focus on you. The vast majority will show how WHAT you do can help your clients get what they really want. What they really want is rarely the actual product or service you provide.)
Included in the Incomparable Expert Outline will be specific reasons why clients should hire you over any and all of their other choices. This short document becomes the foundation for your entire client attraction system. It informs your marketing materials. It informs how you conduct yourself at networking events and even on the phone. It is 100% customized for you!
If you’ve ever been asked “What do you do?” only to have your listener’s eyes glaze over when you start to tell them, then this document will put an end to that. From now on, the question “So what do you do?” will be answered in a compelling way that leaves your listener asking for MORE.
Enrollment for the Incomparable Expert Transformation is $1997.
The question, really, is how many clients, how many thousands of dollars of fees do you stand to give-up if you go out there with a marketing approach that says absolutely nothing unique? That will be extremely expensive. Getting ignored is an extremely expensive mistake to make.
All of this stuff about differentiation isn’t just marketing speak. It’s much deeper than that. It’s primal… it’s genetic. Take any 2 human beings… on a genetic level, they’re 99.9% identical.
The only interesting part is that .1% difference.
That’s the game! We as a species are attracted to different. If you want to fight that, be my guest, but I wouldn’t recommend it.