175. Crafting Unforgettable Client Experiences with Jeffrey Shaw
What does it take to capture the attention of premium buyers?
How do you win their trust?
How do you exceed their expectations?
and, most importantly, how do you keep them coming back again and again?
Well to help answer all those questions I’ve invited Jeffrey Shaw onto the show and he’s got a new book out that’s called, “Sell to the Rich” which is all about crafting unforgettable client experiences.
In it, Jeffrey imagines “A world where only the highest standards of business are upheld. Where every business owner finds in themselves levels of greatness they couldn’t have imagined before. Where luxury is NOT a market category but a feeling within you and your customers.”
Sound like a world you’d like to inhabit?
Well stay tuned ’cause we’re going to find out…
Having been the go-to, family-portrait photographer for the rich and famous for 40 years, author, speaker & business coach, Jeffrey Shaw is sharing insider secrets you want to know and gives the final word on who the affluent are, what they want, and how to sell it to them.
Resources:
Get Jeffrey Shaw’s new book, Sell to the Rich
Ready to Fill Your Coaching Practice with 10-20+ Ideal Clients While Doing What You Love Most? Join the Coaching-as-Marketing Blueprint masterclass. (It’s FREE)
https://awesomevideomakers.com/blueprint/
Transcript:
Jeffrey Shaw:
imagine you’re an everyday business but you upheld the standards. If you had the inside secrets that luxury brands have. Imagine how your business, your everyday business, non-luxury business. Imagine how your business can stand out from the rest, and it will, because it’s an opportunity, I think, for everyday businesses to learn the practices and mindsets of attracting and working with a luxury buyer that they can make their business truly stand out.
Brad Powell:
Welcome to the Standout Business Show, where it’s all about making a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, your Standout Business Coach, and today we’re talking about how to sell to the rich, as in. What does it take to capture the attention of premium buyers, how do you win their trust, how do you exceed their expectations and, most importantly, how do you keep them coming back again and again? Well, to help answer all those questions, I’ve invited Jeffrey Shaw onto the show and he’s got a new book out that’s called Sell to the Rich, where he imagines a world and I’m going to quote from the book right now a world where only the highest standards of business are upheld, where every business owner finds themselves levels of greatness they couldn’t have imagined before, where luxury is not a market category but a feeling within you and your customers. Does that sound like a world you’d like to inhabit? Well, stay tuned, because we’re going to find out. And with that, let’s start the show.
Brad Powell:
Before we get started, I want to announce that, after three years and over 160 interviews on this show, I’ve just created a self-assessment tool that I’m calling the Standout Business Scorecard. The scorecard lets you rank yourself on how much your business stands out and will give you personalized recommendations based on your score from several of my past guests. So to find out your standout business score, just go to awesomevideomakerscom slash scorecard. I’ll say that again awesomevideomakerscom forward slash scorecard. It’s quick, it’s free and you can thank me later. And now back to the show. You can thank me later and now back to the show. All right, jeffrey, welcome to the show.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Hey, brad, I’m glad to be here with you.
Brad Powell:
Well, when I saw the title of your book, I was reminded of some advice that my mother gave to me a really long time ago, and what she said was when you go out and are thinking about getting married, see if you can find a rich woman. And she said it’s just as much trouble to find a rich woman to marry as a poor woman to marry. And so you might as well find the rich one, because your life will be a whole lot easier if you do.
Jeffrey Shaw:
A good friend of mine dated like five men named Rich and she said one. She said her mother told her to marry Rich. She got it confused. She just kept dating men named Rich All right.
Brad Powell:
So the question is does this transfer to the average entrepreneur? Like it’s just as much trouble to find a rich, premium buyer, rich customer, as it is to find one who doesn’t have very much money, who wants to actually do work with you. So you might as well go for the premium ones. How would you take that philosophy?
Jeffrey Shaw:
I love that, you know, and it ties in so beautifully with the name of your show right, stand Out. That’s really what it’s about, because my expertise, my background, is in the luxury space and I’m not going to deny that I’m embracing it more than I never have when I started for those little background context, so for 40 years I’ve been a family portrait photographer for ultra wealthy families. When I started speaking in 2009, a lot of people told me that’s what you should specialize in and I had this brander vision that there was more to me than just all things rich people. So I wanted to explore a lot of other avenues, like expertise in luxury sales and marketing, because, as I love to say, I don’t just know this market. I was in their closets. So in my profession as their family portrait photographer, I had a very unusual exposure to the ultra wealthy. But, brad, to your point. So I speak to that. That’s my core mission, you could say, is to help luxury businesses and brands work and understand with their ideal clients.
Jeffrey Shaw:
With a subcontext that I would love to change the world in, that doing business for everybody is a more life-transforming experience. Everybody is a more life transforming experience. Imagine and this is where the standing out comes out is. Imagine you’re an everyday business but you upheld the standards.
Jeffrey Shaw:
If you had the inside secrets that luxury brands have, imagine how your business your everyday business, non-luxury business. Imagine how your business can stand out from the rest your everyday business, non-luxury business. Imagine how your business can stand out from the rest, and it will. Because, as much as you know, as a coach myself and as a speaker, as much as I would love to change the whole world, the fact of the matter is, with everything that we as experts teach, such a small percentage of people actually enact what they learn that it’s an opportunity, I think, for everyday businesses to learn the practices and mindsets of attracting and working with a luxury buyer that they can make their business truly stand out. So I think again, I’ve written a book trying to support and help luxury brands and businesses with an underlying mission to help everyday businesses stand out in their own fields.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, well, I’m glad you went there, because that’s actually where I would like to dive in today.
Brad Powell:
Most of my listeners are people who run everyday businesses and they don’t think of themselves as a luxury brand. But if I take myself as an example, I do video marketing and I am a videographer and I haven’t thought of myself as so much a luxury brand but just as more of a videographer of excellence and greatness. That’s what I’d like to be, and I’ve definitely catered to and I’m currently catering to some very premium clients, people who run multi seven figure businesses and operations, and I’m helping them grow by substantial amount. And I’ve also worked with people who weren’t there yet but, because of our work together, have become a seven figure entrepreneur. You know all of that is true, and yet in my mind I still have the everyday business guy mindset, and so what I want you to help us with today is what do we need to shift internally so that we can get into that place of greatness, like this thing of I want to be seen as premium and I want to be attractive to the people who are also aspiring to live in that realm.
Jeffrey Shaw:
One thing I’ll suggest is that is think about the word luxury in itself. Like, even if you consider yourself in everyday business, one of the only ways that you’re truly going to stand out, not only in your field but in the world of choices, is making sure that doing business with you is a luxury. So if we just use the word luxury, it does not have to mean that you are in a luxury business providing a luxury goods. So if we just use the word luxury, it does not have to mean that you are in a luxury business providing a luxury goods or services. But doing business with you had better be a luxury today, because if you’re in any way a hassle, customers are going to leave you Right. So I talk a lot about a frictionless business model and really combing through your business to consider all the places that there might be friction in your everyday business. Because, again, if doing business with you doesn’t feel like a luxury, they’re out. And this is something, again, everyday businesses need to focus on.
Jeffrey Shaw:
How to stand out is the phrase I use a lot. Is that great isn’t good enough anymore. And one thing I can assure you, just like Brad you’re saying of yourself the people I work with clients. I coach. They’re great at what they do. I never have to question someone’s talent. What I have to make them do is enact some of the principles and practices of luxury brands so that they’re not just the best choice in their field, but they’re the best choice of investment in someone’s life. Because in many cases and this is my case as a photographer I was at a significant price point that lifted me so far beyond my so-called competition of other photographers that I didn’t worry about other photographers. We were targeting a very different financial goal. What I had to worry about is there are all the other places that my affluent clients could spend a comparable amount of money, right, so they were comparing me to a trip. They were comparing my services to jewelry. They were comparing my services to wardrobe. When you consider the fact that if you have to be better than not just people in your field, but better than all somebody’s choices, you’ve now raised the bar on how good and how exceptional you have to be, and I this is one of those notions that I would love to get to get across to everyday businesses is to understand it. I’ll qualify it by saying it this way, too.
Jeffrey Shaw:
One thing I’ve learned by having served the luxury buyer for so many decades is that and it’s in many ways similar to the ordinary world, but on steroids Everything’s overly exaggerated in the luxury business because when money and economy is restrictive, people’s choices are restricted. Now imagine you’re working with a clientele where money isn’t really an issue or their spectrum is so much broader of what they can afford. That’s what over-exaggerates the choice paradox that you’re no longer just vying to be the choice in your field, but other choices, because when money is not a strong parameter, the world is your oyster. You have almost unlimited choices.
Jeffrey Shaw:
So if you’re a business trying to be chosen by a clientele that has unlimited choices, man you better, you have to really raise your game and you have to be the best choice, not just in their field but in all their life’s choices. Like why would someone invest in videography to promote their business versus Facebook ads? Right, it’s not even an apples to apples comparison. Or it might even be so extreme. It’s like well, we could invest in videography to market our business better, or we can implement new computer software programs, okay so people are not comparing apples to apples.
Brad Powell:
We could just use AI.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Exactly right. So you have to think and again. That’s why I I love challenges and so ai and everything technology, always and again. When you’ve been in business for 40 years. There’s been a lot of technological advances in 40 years, so it’s all a challenge and I love the challenges because it allows us an opportunity to figure it out and step up, and step up to the plate. Um, so every time there’s more technology introduced, there’s more choices, and that becomes one of our big. I think it’s one of the biggest challenges in business today is how to not just be the best choice in what we do, but how do we be the best choice in someone’s, in their world of choices?
Brad Powell:
That is a really interesting question. I mean, and it’s so true that our competition isn’t just other people who do what we do. It’s like everything else this person could be doing.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Yeah, it’s my definition. You know, something you hear so often in marketing today is that people don’t have an attention span, which I think has become the laziest excuse for bad marketing there is, Because guess what? Netflix has proven that to not be true. People have an attention span. I don’t think science has tried devolving us. Even if it were true, it’s not serving you by buying into that. So I look at it as it’s not so much an issue that people don’t have attention. It’s that they have a lot more places they can put their attention. So how do you stand out when people feel like they have so many more choices of where they can put their attention? So the problem is that it’s not that people don’t have consumers our customers it’s not that they don’t have an attention span. It’s that most businesses are actually not attention worthy, and that’s what they need to work on.
Brad Powell:
Right Attention worthiness.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Yeah, I actually call it the Netflix test. Your ideal customer sitting on the sofa, preferably even beside somebody, with a laptop on their lap and they’re watching a binge-worthy Netflix show. What if they scrolled past something about you and your business on the internet in front of them on this laptop? Could it be compelling enough that it would stop? It would take their attention from Netflix. They would turn the laptop to the person beside them and say, hey, check this out, that’s attention worthy. And that’s why you think about what often gets our attention are those funny reels. You know, just comedy tends to get our attention and we’ll literally do that. We’ll turn the computer and share it with somebody beside us, like check this out, interrupting our attention from something we were binging. The problem is, most businesses aren’t that attention worthy and that’s what they need to figure out how to be so attention worthy you can pull somebody’s attention away from something they’re deeply engrossed in. It’s a tough challenge, but one worth exploring.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, for sure. Well, that’s part of the world I live in, for sure, and I want to go back just underline this thing that you said, where you said doing business with you is the luxury. This is the attitude that you want to exude is like doing business with me and my work that I do. That is the luxury. If there’s any kind of hassle or friction, this is one of the things that I like to espouse. A lot is like as much as possible, you need to remove the friction for the people that you’re working with and give them this experience that feels at ease, because they’re already super stressed with whatever else is going on in their life, and so if they come in and they’re doing stuff with you and it just feels like, oh my gosh, this was the best part, my day it’s.
Jeffrey Shaw:
I love that. You just said that the best part of the day, because that’s my dream. For, like everyday businesses, right? Because we all know the experience. Like we could be having a pretty horrible day. Uh, I know, you know, I have my moments, my days of stress. I’ll walk into my local coffee shop which nails it. Every time I walk in they greet me, they know exactly what I’m going to order, because they order the same thing every day and it’s a locally owned shop, it’s not a chain. It brightens my day. But we also know the feeling of having a great day and having to call your cell phone company, right, and they destroy your day. So you know the notion of friction is so important.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Now, again, I don’t love to speak in absolutes because I don’t like to speak in terms of what’s true for most is true for all. Rarely in life is that the case, but I think it’s fair to say most people don’t like hassle. There probably are a fair number of a few people out there. Same thing with the dynamic of time, right? One thing I stress a lot of my work is that for the most part today, you can expect people will pay you more just for you to save them time In the luxury space. That’s a really interesting and tricky dynamic because, on one hand, the being given a lot of someone’s time is a luxury Like I don’t. If I’m making a large purchase, I don’t like that to be rushed and I will resist a salesperson feeling like they don’t have enough time to cater to me with a level of understanding. It might be the busy holiday season, but even still, if I’m making a luxury purchase, I expect the sales associate or the service provider to have more than enough time to give me, because so time receiving a lot of someone’s time can be a luxury, but it’s equally true that professionals who save us time are highly valued. So, similarly, you need to figure out with friction. Again, I think there are very few people that like hassle. So therefore you have to figure out in your business how you can remove all the friction, all the points of hassle.
Jeffrey Shaw:
I’m at this point in my own life where I flat out tell people I don’t own checks Like if that’s how you require, you need to get paid. I can’t work with you Whether you’re a lawn service or I don’t do cash and I don’t have checks Like if that’s how you require, you need to get paid, I can’t work with you, whether you’re a lawn service or I don’t use, I don’t do cash and I don’t have checks. Like, if you haven’t set up an electronic payment method, I can’t do business with you. Yeah, because I need the frictionless experience in my life, cause I’m likely to pay your bill at two o’clock in the morning. It’s just the way life is right. So, and I don’t think I’m that unusual I think that’s why we need to look at how can we make our businesses frictional, and I said, one of the things I tell my clients is comb.
Jeffrey Shaw:
I like to use the word comb. Comb through your business, every aspect, the frictionless experience on your website booking appointments, changing appointments, communicating with you, paying you, receiving the goods or services Down the line. We need to figure out how we can make every bit of it invisible, because what’s invisible they can’t complain about.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, well, I think, interestingly enough, the pandemic did a lot to evolve people into a more frictionless kind of way of operating. I mean, in my own experience, I was doing in-person events where I was live streaming. You know three and four day conferences. Or I was doing all of my work in person and you know loading up the vehicle, bringing all this equipment, unloading, getting into the place. You know doing all this stuff. That was very full of friction, let’s just say.
Brad Powell:
And now when I work with clients, all that’s gone, like all we do typically. You know, my main service is that I work with a client. We get together just once a month. We spend an hour where I interview them, just like you and I are doing now, and I’m recording in high definition their side of the conversation and we’ve done some work to get them set up so they look and sound great. But the process is come on with me. We’re going to have an enjoyable conversation and you’re going to talk all about yourself and I’m going to go deeper and pull out your best insights and I’m going to take that and turn it into great footage and content for you, for them. It’s this I get to be the talent and show up like I’m the special guest on somebody’s show, and this is easy and pretty light and nothing can go wrong really, and this is something I don’t think I ever would have come to this if I hadn’t been forced to.
Jeffrey Shaw:
You’re bringing up such a great point and, again, as I said earlier, one of the benefits of having worked with a luxury client for so many decades is that, as I said earlier, everything’s exaggerated. One of the realities of the behavior of a luxury buyer is they’re the first to respond. Right, they just are. They will tend to be the first. In fact, often because of the professions they’re in often financial services or investments they have the inside scoop. They tend to see things coming before it trickles down to the awareness of most people. They tend to be the first to respond to the potential downturn of economy. I saw this coming in the fall of what was it? 2008. The economy, the greater recession didn’t actually tank until what was it? September of 2009,. I think it was Months earlier. I saw this coming because of the clientele I worked with. Their behavior shifted in weird ways that I noticed.
Jeffrey Shaw:
I’m like something’s coming and I’m going to prepare for this in a way that made sense, because I could tell without having any indication on the news or in conversations I could tell the behavior of my clients was shifting and that let me know as being the first responders that something, some change in the world was coming. They’re also the first to bounce back Okay, that’s the good news, right? So their typical financial stability can make them be truly cautious on the on the upfront and the quickest to recover. So all of that has been I’ve observed this for 40 years being a little exaggerated. So when you have a time of a crisis come along, like the pandemic and many others we’ve gone through, we can’t ignore the deep loss, particularly loss of life, right, we never want to just gloss over that, and crisis has always sped up what was going to change anyway, and the world has been wanting this type of adaptation and evolution of businesses. The crisis forced it to happen. One example of this I did an interview on my podcast of a professor at I think it may have been Stanford University or a big university, and he had said that the university had a five-year plan to add e-learning to their structure, which they completed in two weeks when they had to. The five-year plan was for the future and suddenly, within two weeks, they accomplished this. So a crisis has always sped up what was coming, and often what it has sped up is a change in social values and what people value and what they appreciate. So the challenge becomes not only do we have to respond to it in the crisis moment, but we also have to deal with the aftermath after that change.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Like well, as a speaker myself, it’s like well, once many events got the taste of virtual events and how much money that can save them in catering halls and in flying in speakers. It can be challenging to convince them to go back to live events where speakers can receive their top dollars. Of course, most have, most have really leaned into the benefit is the camaraderie and the reconnection people wanted. But I think a lot of times it’s more of a hybrid model now, because, yes, people want the connection, but here’s the other way in which it’s changed, and this is true of all everyday businesses. In order to convince someone to lay down money to attend an event, which is more than the money, I think the biggest challenge that is faced is the time commitment that it takes to attend an event and you have to add to it now the potential health hazard of traveling. So you have more obstacles to convince people to show up at your event, which is why many events have struggled to get regrounded.
Jeffrey Shaw:
These are the obstacles that are presented because people’s values shifted Suddenly the taking the time away from your family, risking your health. It better be a damn good event if I’m going to invest in doing that. So this is the constant raising of the bar that I refer to as kind of your call to greatness. It’s a constant call to greatness of raising the bar because the world around us is changing.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Again, my glimpse into the luxury world for so many years I’m able to pass that message on to everyday businesses because it’s exaggerated in the luxury world. This has always been the case. In the luxury world, how do you stand out as exceptional when there’s plenty of people in your industry that are ordinary? So it’s that kind of insider secrets that I’m trying to that I feel very much everyday businesses can embrace, which is why I wrote this book making sure that everyday businesses also feel spoken to, because while you’re learning the strategies of luxury businesses, you can imagine how can I incorporate this and integrate this into my everyday business and truly give myself the opportunity to stand out.
Brad Powell:
Yeah Well, let’s talk about that from perspective of standing out when so many other businesses are, in fact, mediocre and ordinary, and what’s happening with the ordinary businesses is that they’re all going for the same ordinary customers and that competition is super fierce, whereas the luxury world, the premium world, there’s not as many people who are working in that realm. So talk about that space in terms of the encouraging words for people, like if you jump up there or into that realm all of a sudden, you aren’t competing with a lot of the people that you were.
Jeffrey Shaw:
You know, last month a lot of the people that you were, you know, last month. Yeah, Yep, yeah, and, and and actually there’s a chapter in the book on on discouragement, because I speak to the fact that if, when that’s your goal, it’s going to take longer, right, you can’t there’s. You can’t rush to build the business that’s looked upon as being exceptional, right? You can’t rush the building of a luxury business. You can’t start it as Home Depot and then suddenly try to become a luxury boutique. You have to have chosen to start out as a luxury boutique in the first place. Now, that’s not to say that a business like your own, or any of your listeners, if they’ve got a good, solid reputation, it’s not to say you can’t level up. In fact, you should. But what you want to do, which is really the focus of my first book, Lingo, because it’s about speaking the lingo of your ideal customers, and I refer to it as a secret language. Like you, want to call forward people that deeply feel like they get you and you get them. So I’ll give you a inside scoop on one of the tools I use when I’m working with a client who’s looking to do just that.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Let’s say, they’re looking to rebrand, focus more on attracting their ideal customers, which, by the way, when I pre-survey an audience even in the luxury, my luxury events when I pre-survey an audience even in the luxury, my luxury events when I pre-survey an audience as to what people most want to gain from the experience of being together, the number one answer is always more ideal clients. So every business at all socioeconomic scales is looking for more ideal clients. A you have to first define what ideal clients mean to you. Yes, profitability, the clients that pay you the most are somewhat ideal, but to me, one of the highest or the highest criteria is that their clients that are easy to work with, because I’m not willing to work with a really difficult client, no matter how much they pay me. So because that, just because it’s so life-consuming, it’s taking too much time away from other places and other clients that could I, I could put energy. So you have to decide for yourself what your ideal client, who that is.
Jeffrey Shaw:
When I’m working with a client to meet that and that goal of attracting more ideal clients, one of the first things I asked him to do is to make a list of what I refer to as self identifying questions. What these questions are are questions that you could imagine your ideal client. You’ve determined who your ideal client is their demographics, where they live, their socioeconomic scale, their values, their attitudes, behaviors like the people that you could just be so happy hanging out with. That’s your ideal client. What are the questions that are in their mind that they’re thinking but they’re not even verbalizing?
Jeffrey Shaw:
If you can tap into those questions, if you can pose, even on your website, questions that people might be thinking in their head that they’re not verbalizing, that will literally set them back in their chair and make you then feel like, wow, it’s like this person is in my head and that’s how you call forward your ideal client. In the end, it becomes an alignment of them feeling like you totally get them. And the nice thing, Brad, is when people feel that way, they will almost always put money aside, Like it almost doesn’t matter what you’re going to charge them, because that is such a rare experience in life, let alone in business. When you feel like someone who can provide a service that you need that they get you so much. They’ve asked questions that you’re thinking but you realize you haven’t even verbalized to them, but they get it. That’s how you attract your ideal clients and level up.
Brad Powell:
Yeah, that’s great, get inside their head.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Get inside their head. I said to me that should be the goal of marketing today. The goal of marketing should not be just client acquisition. Like you really know, you nailed it. When somebody says to you my God, it’s like you’re in my head, like they’re sold, locked in, don’t care about money, that’s the best compliment you could seek.
Brad Powell:
Right, exactly, all right. Well, that’s probably a really good note for us to start wrapping up. Now. You’ve got this new book. It’s not quite out of the press yet, but people can preorder it, so let’s talk about how people can do that.
Jeffrey Shaw:
Yeah, so, first and foremost, it’ll be available on Amazon. It can sell to the rich. My name is Jeffrey Shaw, so you can search by name of my name. If you do, you’ll find my other books as well. It will be for pre-sale mid-January and it releases April 25th, so we’re giving it a nice long runway for pre-sales because, again, you and I were chatting a little earlier that. You know I’m always paying attention to buyer behavior and one of the things that changes book buyers nowadays are so happy to pay for something months in advance, just so they don’t have to think about it, and when it’s done and released it’s going to show up on their Kindle or in their mail and this way it’s good content they want, it’ll show up when they need it. So go to Amazon, sell to the rich or Jeffrey Shaw, either way, you’ll find it All right.
Brad Powell:
Great Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is a great conversation and it’s also just a really great mission that you’re on. Thank, you.
Jeffrey Shaw:
I thank you for saying it that way. Like I said, the book, I believe, encompasses both the strategies for luxury businesses and it really is a mission to support everyday businesses to do better.
