Who You Are Is Who You Serve

There is a reason you need Dream Clients, those clients who perceive what you do as strategic, who will consider you a partner, and who will be willing to pay for the outcomes you help them generate. Who you are a salesperson is in large part dictated by the clients you serve.

If you call on prospects who don’t perceive you as being valuable, treating you and what you sell as a commodity to be purchased as a transaction and nothing more, it will be difficult for you to create greater value for them and nearly impossible to be considered a strategic partner. These clients won’t allow you to grow into something more or do the work you are capable of.

There are other clients or prospects who will be unwilling to invest more for better results. They will still want you to give them the better results, but they will refuse to make the necessary investment. Everyone wants better results, and the laws of the universe are structured so that one gets exactly what they pay for, even when they wish it were otherwise. When you are starved of the investment to produce those results, you have unhappy clients—and you must deal with their unhappiness.

The time you spend with people who don’t value you, don’t care about what you sell, want results they are unwilling to pay for, pay their bills late, are adversarial in nature, who treat you like a vendor (or something less) is time that would be better off spent with people who have the opposite attributes described here.

It isn’t easy to build a portfolio of dream clients, but it is possible to obtain enough of them over time that you can start swapping out nightmare clients to improve your portfolio. Who you are as a salesperson is going to be dictated by who you serve one way or the other. If you sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas.

Winning your dream clients is difficult and it takes time. If you are going to be selling anyway, you may as well focus on the clients that will value you as a partner.