How to Get Clients in the Creator Economy (4 Critical Steps)
Jan 18, 2024
A plane needs a runway to take off.
It has to build momentum as it shoots down a straight, asphalt surface.
Once it obtains the right speed, it can begin to ascend.
After that, the “sky's the limit” (pun intended).
If you're a personal brand builder, you might be trying to monetize your brand through coaching and courses.
If you aren't selling enough of these to pay your bills, you're still on the ground— trying to "take off".
Taking off means:
- You’re making enough money to support themselves
- You’re profitable, so they can reinvest to get more time back and grow even faster
But you just can’t seem to get traction or gain momentum.
You can’t find the runway.
If you could find the runway and take off, you options would explode.
When your bills are covered, you can reinvest the additional money to grow your business even more.
To delegate, systemize, and get more eyeballs onto your work.
But, most personal brand builders don’t know what this runway really looks like or how to navigate it.
That’s what we’re going to cover here.
We’re going to cover the four “stops” alon the runway that will allow your business to take off.
Stop #1 — Dial in Your Offer
A standard grilled cheese sandwich isn’t that sexy on its own.
But, if you were selling them at 1 in the morning in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert right when it let out, you would be swarmed.
Demand would outstrip supply. You would sell out fast.
This is the idea of finding a “starving crowd” to sell your offer to.
If you’re doing sales calls but no one is buying, your offer probably isn’t good enough.
If people are hitting your landing page and not buying your book or course, your offer probably isn’t good enough.
Your offer is the last thing that leaves your lips on a sales call before the prospect says “yes” and pays your invoice.
It better be damn good.
If you haven’t dialed in your offer yet, this is the first place to put your energy.
Instead of selling something generic that no one wants, you have to learn offer creation at a deeper level.
You’ve got to create something unique to the market and learn how to talk about it so that it sells.
Stop #2 -— Social Proof
Do you ever go to a restaurant that has zero reviews?
I personally don’t go to any restaurants with less than 4 stars. The same is true when I buy things on Amazon.
Social proof has a huge influence on our purchasing decisions.
Once you’ve dialed in your offer, it’s time to make sure it works.
The way you do this is to get your first 3 clients, even if you have to do it for free.
In fact, if you haven’t gotten the result you offer for anyone yet, you better do it for free. You don't even know if your system works yet.
One reason people aren’t buying your offer is because you don’t have any social proof that it works.
Obtain social proof — at least 3 case studies — and you will have completed stop #2 on the runway.
Stop #3 — Generate cashflow
Now that you have a desirable offer and you have proof that it works, it’s time to generate cashflow.
One thing I loved from Alex Hormozi’s 100M Offers book was a concept called the “The Sales to Fulfillment Continuum”.
This continuum shows that an offer can either be:
- Easy to sell and hard to fulfill (on the left side of the continuum)
- Hard to sell and easy to fulfill (on the right side of the continuum)
- Somewhere in the middle
If you sold 1:1 nutrition coaching and you literally drove to your clients house, hand delivered all their meals, counted their calories, held them accountable every day, your offer would be on the far left side of the continuum.
It would be easy to sell because it’s so valuable.
It would be hard to fulfill because it’s a lot of work on your part.
If you put your method into a digital course, it would be hard to sell.
The course is less valuable because the client has to do all the work.
Fulfillment, however, would be a breeze.
If you aren’t able to sell your offer at stop #3 of our runway, it’s because you’re trying to sell an offer that’s too far right on the continuum.
You have to move your offer far over to the left, so that when your prospects hear it, they think:
I get all that for this price? Wow. I’m in.
Then, you get clients.
This ensures you get cash in the bank, and have people coming through your program. This gives you insight on what your clients need.
It’s critical so you can optimize your program, which leads us to our fourth and final stop on the runway.
Stop #4 — Add Friction
This is the final stop before you “take off”.
Right now, you’re getting clients, but you’re massively overdelivering. It’s taking up a lot of your time.
The good part is that these clients are teaching you what they need.
For example, if you do real estate coaching, your clients might keep asking you to help them analyze potential rental properties.
After doing this manually for a while, you see enough patterns to be able to build formulas inside of a spreadsheet that analyzes the potential deals automatically — with just a few basic inputs.
You film a training video showing your clients how to use this tool. Now, you’ve removed yourself from this part of the interaction.
You are slowly productizing yourself — removing yourself from the deliverables.
Then, you see if you can sell your offer at the same price, while removing this deliverable.
No longer do you promise to “analyze all your deals personally”. Instead, you offer a tool that they can use to do it.
This creates “friction" in your offer. People may not be perceived as valuable. Can you still sell it for the same price?
The goal over time is to remove yourself as much as possible while still creating a system that gets your clients what they want.
In order to truly take off, you have to remove yourself from the deliverables.
My newest offer Get Clients With a Book is still in this stage. I’m doing a lot of the heavy lifting for my clients still.
Over the course of this year, I plan to productize more of the process so I can deliver this in a group, versus 1:1. This will allow my newest offer to take off and go beyond 3-4 new clients per month.
It’s time to bite the bullet and go through each stop on the runway so your business can take off this year.
In this post, we’ve covered what happens at the point of sale in your business.
Another part of the business that can really slow you down is marketing and prospecting for new clients.
I used to spend so much time trying to convince everyone that I could help them, and it was highly inefficient.
So, I started writing books and using those books to help people in advance — so they would come to me ready to hire me for help with implementation.
This turned out to be much more efficient at warming up the right people to work with me.
If you want to learn how to use a book the right way in your business, so that it really grows your authority and brings you clients, watch a short training video I’ve put together here:
To your success,
Brian
