Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly, I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy.

Hey, Jonathan here. Got a question from Daniel James who asks, Hey Jonathan, I have a quick question about your quote from this episode. Quote, One thing you'll always see is a huge list of really impressive clients that they've worked with. And that to me becomes the thing that attracts new clients. My question is, if you don't have a list of really impressive clients, but let's say a list of middle tier clients, should you still display them on your website to show credibility? Or would it do more harm than good to show that you've only worked with middle tier clients and not the very top clients in your vertical? I work in music and have some really great clients, but none are particularly household names. All right, so a couple things going on here. First, I want to explain the reference. So Daniel is talking about a quote where a lot of times you'll see really big famous agencies who seem to have what looks like a soggy positioning statement compared to what I generally talk about. And that can be true, and it can work for them because they have this amazing client list. So if they've got Nike and Apple and Samsung as clients, then somebody like Google might come along or Facebook might come along and say, that looks like a list I should be a part of. These peers of mine have trusted this person or this company and presumably with good results. So I don't want to get into a whole thing about how blurry to make your focus over time. That's a different conversation, but you can blur it over time and use your clients as your positioning. Okay, so that's that background. But what do you actually do if you're in a situation where you've got great clients, but they're middle tier clients, not household names? A couple things I would say. First of all, ask yourself if you really want to work with Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon, or if you'd like to keep working with the awesome clients at the tier that you're at. You don't have to always go up to the top tier. You can still continue to service like a middle tier, small to medium business and make plenty of, I mean, just a huge income by leveraging your expertise to fit within a budget that's appropriate for those companies. So instead of doing six and seven figure projects for them, you might do four and five figure workshopping engagements or other things that you can leverage, group coaching, paid masterminds, monthly retainer engagements. That's what I'm trying to say. So really what I'm saying is the first question here is like, why do you want to leave this middle tier? Do you really want to go up? If you do, that's great. If you don't though, there's no problem with having middle tier clients. They probably hang out with each other. You could probably network through your existing clients or past clients to find more people that are sort of colleagues of theirs or friends of theirs in other markets and have really strong word of mouth through there. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about here is should you display them on your website to show credibility or would it do more harm than good? I can't, I understand the question, but I can't think of a situation where being transparent and true would do more harm than good. I understand what you're asking though. If you're trying to reach that sort of Google level of clients, then working with some local IT company on their marketing or some pizza place on their marketing, maybe that's going to make someone from Google think, eh, maybe this person isn't the right fit for us. Here's what I would do though, and I think this is true regardless of your situation. On your website, that sort of logo wall of like Nike, Apple, Google, Facebook, that sort of fancy, wow, very impressive type of thing. Instead of worrying about that, worry more about having testimonials. If you can, get testimonials from whoever clients you have, whether they're middle tier or not middle tier, and get them to share results with you. Not just, you know, Daniel made a beautiful website for us, but after Daniel was done, we dramatically increased our close rate or the traffic to our website skyrocketed or the conversions on our mobile app were through the roof. Some sort of numbers about the change that you had on their business or your contribution to that change. Maybe you didn't, maybe you're not responsible for the entire, you know, fact that their sales shot up in Q4 last year, but you probably were hired because you were, they believed that you were going to make some contribution to that bigger goal. So you can talk about that. You can, you know, you can have them talk about that. So to wrap this up, what I'm saying is I think it's...

I really don't think it'll hurt you to have, you know, sort of unknown client logos on there, as long as you sort of reinforce that with testimonials from the key people at those companies who you worked with that describe the results that working with you had for them. And if those kinds of results are the kind of results that people at Google or Facebook are interested in, then I think it's going to be compelling. And, you know, maybe it's not going to be Mark Zuckerberg on your website, but there might be a person that heads a department of 25 people that's actually the department is roughly the same size as these middle tier clients that you work for. And you network your way to them or you're introduced to them because the results that you deliver to your, let's call them unknown clients, are the kinds of results that, you know, this department inside of Facebook is looking for. Who knows? But I think being totally transparent about who you work with and the results that you've delivered for them is a great way to go. I think it's going to get you lots of clients at the existing middle tier and you could even leverage up into departments inside of larger companies. Okay, I hope that helped. I'm Jonathan Stark, and if you, dear listener or dear viewer, have a question for me, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, on Twitter or LinkedIn, and we'll get to it as soon as we can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.