Eric Siu and Sujan Patel share five ways to land clients paying $100k+ annually: nail your ideal client profile, create deep case studies for outbound outreach (a 12-13k-word ebook helped them close two $600k fintech deals), use podcasting as a long-term lead source, stand out with unique daily content, and expect 18-24 months before the pipeline consistently delivers.
Fun fact, I was at a conference last year and I was walking by and a guy points at me and says, hey, podcast guy. That contract is now worth $500,000 and they will continue to pay us more. So that's one example of what we're gonna talk about in this video, which is how to get high-paying clients. So my name's Eric Siu from Single Grain and this is Sujan Patel from Web Profits, and we're both gonna give a little insight as to how you can get high-paying clients. So Sujan, I'm curious, kinda starting with you, how do you go about getting high-paying clients and what is a high-paying client? Like, how do you even define that?
Yeah, so let's just define it real quick. A high-paying client, depending on wherever you are as a business, it's someone paying you $100,000+ for a year, right?
Mm-hmm.
It's also not just paying monthly, it's signing an annual contract.
Mm-hmm.
So I would say anything above $100,000 a year would be a high-paying client. So here's my strategy to get high-paying clients, no matter if you have a brand, if you're just starting out, whatever it is. It's outbound. It's going outbound and finding the client that you want. So go and find the industries that you want to go after. So here's an example. So at Web Profits, we landed a really big client in the fintech space. So first and foremost, we chose the fintech space. So my sales team and I, we looked at every single industry we can go after. Who can we help the best? What have we done the best for? What's the most profitable? And we chose fintech. And there's a bunch of other categories too. So we found the biggest player in the space and we created a case study on them. So we created a case study on cabbage.com. So it was this marketing piece that was like about 12,000 to 13,000 words. My co-founder and I, Alex, we spent maybe 15 hours together tearing down what cabbage does to market their company. Then we created a video and a couple, you know, a bunch of content on this, one whole ebook-type piece of content, and we pushed it out to the web. But that wasn't it. We also Emailed all the people that we wanted to go after in the fintech space saying, hey, we just did this article, I think you would like it. And when they clicked on it, we actually had a video from our salesperson that introduced the article and a couple other pieces to that. And we did this follow-up and whatnot, and we actually at the end, we mailed them something.
Hmm.
And so it was this integrated campaign, and it ended up getting us 2 clients in the fintech space, and those 2 clients were worth Almost, I wanna say about $600,000 in annual contract value. So that piece of content took us about 6 weeks from end to end to finish for the whole campaign, but it was well worth it.
Cool, that's really great. And actually you're gonna find a trend here, 'cause we both started, we start talking about, Sujan's talking about his marketing prowess and also doing these case studies, which is just creating content, right? So for us, it's the same thing too, where we talk a lot, we kinda show off our marketing prowess, and then also at the same time, it's content. But in this case, like the example I gave in the very beginning, a guy points at me and says, podcast guy. That's one of the podcasts, right? And that actually came from the Growth Everywhere podcast, which is actually much smaller than my other podcast, Marketing School. And the example I'm gonna give here is a deal where they paid us about $400,000. And what happened was, we, this guy binge listened to the Marketing School podcast, the one I do with Neil Patel, every single day. Neil Patel, who's actually his cousin.
Wow.
And he's like, you know, Man, I should just call this guy. And so, you know, we get on the phone and what he says, this is even more crazy, his daughter has listened to even more episodes than the father who is like the chief operating officer. So you get a lot of validation that way, right? So my point is, having a point of view and doing them differently than other people, we only do 5 to 10 minutes a day and it's every single day, that was where we were kind of zagging where people were zigging. So zig or zag where other people, you know, do the other thing. Or the other way you can put it is, go into the blue ocean when everyone else is competing in the red ocean, right? So this is very much a content-driven strategy, and as a matter of fact, about 15% of our clients come through podcasting. It is a long game that you're playing. It's just the same thing with the podcast— the case studies too. What I like about what Sujan said was, he actually took the case study, he didn't just sit there and wait, he actually went outbound to the people, and that way he took a lot more control and a lot more action. I think kind of to build on that too is, Sujan was very focused. They focused on fintech. So having an ideal client profile, or an ICP, is important because then you have a sort of focus. Because if you try to go for everyone, if you try to cater to everyone, you're catering to no one, and you're not gonna get the clients of your dreams, and you're gonna get everyone that's trying to nickel and dime you. You're gonna start taking asshole clients like the, you know, the asshole clients that Sujan was talking about in the last video. So you don't wanna do that. Is there anything else you wanna add?
Yeah, I think it's focus, right? I think you hear a lot, you see a lot of people being, overnight successes or getting all these awesome logos, but they don't come from nowhere. You have to have a concentrated effort, and there's a lot of things you can do like a podcast in the blue ocean, outbound, creating content, you know, defining your ICP, but you have to have a concentrated effort. It's just not gonna come out of nowhere.
Yep.
You can get lucky, but it takes a long time to get lucky.
That's a good point. I mean, this content game, it takes, God, it takes years. It's not just 1 year, it's like 2+ years if you really wanna get something going. I don't know what your take is on that.
Yeah, I think after like, 24 months or so, 18 to 24 months, you actually start to see this, like, I call it this magic to happen where things just land in your lap. But it sounds easy to say, oh, things just land in my lap after 18 months of investment, but that's when things start to turn around and it'll be consistent after about 24 months.
Great, so if you enjoyed this video, leave in the comments, let us know what you plan to do to get high-paying clients. Let us even know what high-paying clients you're planning to target. Don't worry, Siu Joon and I will not steal from you. We're just looking to engage with you. And don't forget to subscribe. In the next video, we're gonna talk about Sujan Patel's growth playbook for 2019 and beyond. We'll see you in the next video.
