How to get better clients?

"There’s one thing I learned very early on in my journey as an entrepreneur to attract better clients: the best clients attract more great clients! Exactly that. It’s better to have two excellent clients — often referred to as 'high-ticket' clients — than ten average or bad ones… especially in marketing! Why is that? Because the cost of acquiring new business in the marketing and web industry is nearly as high as in insurance and finance. Yep, it really is! So, what’s the method to get better clients?

Account-Based Marketing: Your Best Ally for Better Clients

At Gro, we’ve perfected a method often used by large agencies to get the most out of their clients and prospects: Account-Based Marketing (also known as ABM).
What does it involve?
We target companies in niches where we deliver outstanding results, offering them highly personalized content and services.

The following steps summarize our sales cycle that has consistently helped us attract better clients:

• Targeting selected companies and collecting essential information (email, phone, industry, etc.)

• Adding them to a personalized automation track (via ActiveCampaign) with actionable content

• Offering a free audit of their growth process and digital marketing strategy

• Creating a report with both free and paid action items and growth levers

• Sending a proposal that addresses the most impactful and easy-to-fix problems (Low Risk / High Reward)

• Delivering personalized, relevant, and actionable content on a regular basis via email and SMS

• Continuously analyzing challenges and growth opportunities for the client

• Upselling, when appropriate

• Retention and referrals

Below is the flowchart of our sales cycle and how ABM is integrated into our overall process:

Step 1: Define Your Hunting Ground (a.k.a. Your Niche)

What do you do best in your business?
Which of your services deliver the highest ROI for your clients?
Who do you want to work with?
What types of companies? In which industries?

That’s a lot of questions—but here’s a simple method to help you identify a niche that can turn your prospecting efforts into high-ticket opportunities.

Create a two-column table:

Left side:

• Your top-performing services

• Your strengths

• Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

Right side:

• Who do you want to work with?

• What types of companies?

• In which industry?

From there, you’ll quickly create a list of companies or types of companies you want to work with. Next, determine where and how to reach them:

• Networking events (5 à 7s)

• Direct outreach (cold calling or door-to-door)

• Social media (e.g., Instagram & Twitter to engage, LinkedIn to connect)

• Inbound marketing (by writing content specifically tailored to their niche)

This plan won’t work 100% of the time, but it will quickly give you a direction and/or a strategy to start prospecting better clients more effectively.

Step 2: How to Find the Right Prospects Who Will Become Great Clients

Now that you understand our overall process, you’re probably wondering how we actually find the right prospects. Honestly, this has become one of the easiest parts for us, and here’s why:

1. The market we’re in has a high demand for MarTech and programming.

2. The supply is very limited for SMEs, and services are often too expensive for micro and small businesses.

So we rely on traditional methods to find high-potential prospects, such as:

• Cold calling and door-to-door outreach

• Social media

• Inbound marketing

• Referrals

• Events and networking

I shared the full breakdown of this process during networking events, including how we use ActiveCampaign, on La Tranchée’s platform (it’s a 4-minute read). The key takeaway is this: the best clients—the ones every agency dreams of—are often highly sought-after, which means we need to approach them with a highly personalized and soft-sell approach, while being extremely disciplined with follow-ups.

In fact, I often jokingly ask prospects or clients if I have their permission to “harass” them with follow-ups—and the answer is almost always yes. Ultimately, good prospects and great clients appreciate working with companies that are tight on their follow-ups and structured in their delivery and processes.

Here’s an example:
One of my best clients only said yes to a major contract after I followed up with 5 text messages and 4 phone calls. I had previously asked him if I could follow up that way, and he agreed. He now appreciates the fact that we’re always ahead of the curve.

As mentioned earlier, we always try to identify problems early on. In this case, we took the initiative to do a deep SEO audit of his website because we noticed a significant drop in organic traffic. That’s when we discovered a serious issue: an NSEO (negative SEO) attack.

That simple act of initiative greatly increased the client’s trust in us, and as a result, he hired us for another project for a different one of his businesses.

Cold Calling and Door-to-Door

Back in 2006, when I was just 18, my business partner and I built a seven-figure company in our first year, and we did it entirely through door-to-door and cold calling.

For most service-based businesses—including mine—this remains one of the best ways to find high-quality prospects. Why?

1. You can quickly understand a prospect’s needs and get a feel for their personality, which helps you prepare better for any future meetings.

2. People are less and less solicited by phone nowadays, so prospects are more open to cold calls—if you know what you’re doing.

Once we’ve collected information via phone or in person, we tailor our CRM and marketing Automation strategy to match the prospect’s needs and context—which greatly improves conversion rates.

The Key to Success: Patience and Empathy

When I meet with clients or high-potential prospects who could become high-ticket clients, I always block off a large window of time—either the entire morning (9:00 AM–1:00 PM) or the whole afternoon (12:00 PM–5:00 PM).

Most meetings stay within 90 minutes. But if I feel the client wants to dive deeper, chat longer, or even grab lunch—I make time. That’s how one day, a meeting scheduled from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM turned into a 7-hour session. I walked out at 7:00 PM with an additional 6.5 billable hours and, more importantly, a $50,000 contract.

Why?
Because during that meeting, I discovered their highly profitable website was losing 60% of its conversion potential due to a poorly designed homepage—thanks to Hotjar insights. On a site doing $180,000/month, that’s a loss of over $90,000/month—huge.

Without empathy, I wouldn’t have understood my client’s concerns, needs, and ambitions.
Without patience, I might have seen that time as wasted and tried to close the deal quickly, instead of truly adding value.

Step 3: Retention (+ Upselling) and Referrals

Great clients will want to help you—always keep that in mind!
After about three months of working with a client, or after delivering a successful project, I always ask for five simple things:

1. A LinkedIn endorsement or recommendation

2. A review on Facebook and Google

3. A testimonial

4. Permission to create a case study based on their project

5. Most importantly: if they can refer me to other businesses

Referrals account for 75% of our revenue—that’s massive. And most of it comes from these five simple, free actions. They’re easy to implement and extremely effective.

We also send a birthday text message and a personalized Christmas gift to clients—small gestures that build strong, lasting relationships.

Upselling

In my field, I can upsell in two main ways:

• I identify a problem and offer a solution

• I propose a profitable growth opportunity

To do this effectively, I use two approaches:

• I listen actively, ask lots of questions, and let the client guide the conversation

• I analyze the business and its processes to uncover pain points or missed opportunities

In both cases, empathy and patience are key. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to properly support my clients in their growth journey.

Silence is Golden. Listening is Diamond.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) can be incredibly sophisticated and continuously refined.
In our view, it's the best strategy for attracting better clients and building long-term, successful business relationships.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more content about MarTech, ABM, and other cutting-edge growth strategies.