I’m not asking you to believe me; I’m asking you to stop lying to yourself.
This essay is a blunt memo to anyone selling seven-, eight-, or nine-figure products. Through a “giraffe in the cage” parable and a Netflix analogy, it shows how digital platforms manufacture activity while starving results. The cure isn’t bigger reach—it’s precision, reputation within UHNWI circles, and fewer intermediaries. Client acquisition equals an industry constant times a luck coefficient; you control the latter by multiplying direct connections and sustaining consistent outreach. Stop paying for noise. Shorten the path. Sell to those who can buy now.
Another true story — but only for those who sell something truly expensive. For everyone else, reading this article may not be the most relevant use of your attention. It all starts with an anecdote. One day a man comes to the zoo; he is led to a cage with a giraffe and left there for a while. After a few minutes the man returns and says, “No — such an animal does not exist!” Now imagine how the giraffe feels, and all those who also see it and believe in its existence. If they have a direct interest, they are forced to fight to prove the obvious — instead of doing what they do best.
This is what our business looks like. And for almost 20 years now, a story that was once funny has been turning into a sad reality. It is astonishing how quickly, with the advent of digital technologies and the general rethinking of sales strategies in the UHNWI segment, views on methodology and mechanisms of communication have changed. People were too lazy before to separate the wheat from the chaff; they always searched for ways to automate the hunt for potential clients. Now, when such means have been created, the need to think seems altogether unnecessary. But they forget: to sell something expensive, it is not enough to carry stacks of money to digital platforms that supposedly separate the wheat from the chaff. The simplest evidence of this insufficiency is that, regardless of investment, you do not achieve a sufficient level of sales. Instead, you receive “activity,” some numbers that somehow satisfy you. And the sum of these actions, multiplied by time and by your other activities, eventually leads you to sales — and you attribute the success to a “well-working” platform.
However, this is not the most rational way to solve the problem. I wonder how much more money and time you need to spend to finally see and understand that you yourself have become the product of the very platform on which you are looking for your clients. By spending money to promote what you sell, you are in fact buying someone else’s product that selectively satisfies you — through access to an audience, numbers on your dashboard, and an hour of futile communication with leads that creates the appearance of work. This is hard to see from the inside, so here is a universally understandable example: the cost of your annual Netflix subscription (US$24.99 per month × 12 = $299.88). For this money you receive a stream of content and a certain feeling of “sufficient volume” — and this, taken together, makes renewing the subscription seem sensible. But in fact, for that continuation only 4–10 storylines a year are responsible, if you are a sufficiently busy person. And if at the very start you had been offered only 10 storylines for the same price, you would probably have hesitated. In other words, it is hard for you to believe that one can remove the noise and leave only what truly works. On digital platforms, where you are invited to tap into gigantic masses of “connected users” (99.9% of whom, by financial profile, are not your direct target audience) and a set of filters, you likewise content yourself with this limited result — not because it works effectively but because there is a sense that everything is abundant and that next time you just need to tweak the creative or the keywords a little, change the age group, or pick another ZIP code or college in the targeting settings. Convinced of the future result, you continue to spend — disproportionately more than necessary — because it is not in the platform’s interest to give you results quickly and easily. That contradicts the business logic that keeps you on a leash and occasionally rewards you, even as their appetites grow and internal competition on the platform increases, creating more noise and the “need” to spend even more — all to the benefit of those who build these platforms.
But the most surprising thing is not even this. When you try to show people from industries where a single item sells for seven, eight, or nine figures, they see anything except the giraffe in the cage. The market is full of pseudo-experts who lead people to cages with truly nonexistent fantastic creatures, and if you have made a couple of mistakes yourself or heard colleagues’ or friends’ defeat stories, it becomes difficult to distinguish the real from the fake — once again the task of separating the wheat from the chaff. And instead of training this skill and delving into the specifics of an offer, it is simpler to trust platforms where you do not have to validate the methodology or those who propose it: “these are all large companies with a credit of trust and recognition.” The less you trouble yourself with analysis, the weaker your ability to tell truth from lies, the effective from the ineffective, the rational from the irrational. In the end, everything is reduced to a few metrics and old tricks that you inherited along with your position.
Against the backdrop of the frenzied boom in content generation and information circulation, platforms are turning into an information dump. This is happening across all channels. However, there are channels that, due to relative nontransparency and the complexity of initial setup, are less polluted, and with a competent approach and the right strategy one can still obtain results commensurate with the costs. But you must understand at once: it will not be cheaper — it will likely cost about the same — yet the reputational component and the generation of a window of attention occur within the UHNWI circle rather than the general population, and that has never been cheap. As you spend yet more tens of thousands on social media advertising, decide what you actually want to do: become an Instagram star (or a star on some other platform) and, in the end, sell underwear or chips, or sell what you actually sell to those who can truly afford it, without bothering about recognition beyond this narrow circle of UHNWIs.
All this rhetoric about investing in big reach — that you will also hit those who will one day become UHNWIs and that by then they will have formed knowledge of your company — is not rational. You no longer need to do this, because those for whom status display is a way of life do it for you for free. How many people photograph themselves in expensive cars, private jets, with costly jewelry taken on rent? They do it for free. If you stop paying them, they will not stop. There will always be those who show off to others, and nowadays there are more and more of them every day. Just look at Instagram.
If, however, you focus only on those who truly move the market and sales, you not only obtain real revenue but also the much-vaunted word of mouth. The rich and famous talk with the rich and famous, exchange experiences and information, and then the inhabitants of the internet copy this after them. By the time one of those you are reaching today within your big-reach strategy, in the hope that one day he or she will become your buyer, is actually ready to purchase, everything may have changed — both in the world and within your company. Do you need sales now? Then to get them now you must spend time and money on those who can already afford it. Stop being taken in by stories that cooperation with brokers, family offices, private banks, and all the rest of the retinue surrounding UHNWIs is an “effective” strategy. First, they do not do it for free. Second, you are not the only one working with them. Why do you need someone in between you and your end buyer? Think about what you are spending money on.
The point of this story is not to say that you are doing something “wrong.” You do what you consider right — or what is considered right in your market. But “feels right” does not always mean “rational and effective.” You have been made to believe that this is “right.” Perhaps you do not see an alternative. Perhaps you fear taking responsibility — or fear being deemed unnecessary. All of that is understandable. But it does not mean there is no way that works more effectively. It does not mean the giraffe in the cage does not exist. If you learn to see opportunities where others see nothing, or, blinded by past negative experience, see only an attempted deception; if you stop fearing responsibility for a strategy that is alternative to the prevailing view, you will finally obtain that very advantage others do not have — because they play by rules created in others’ interests.
The key to success in selling to the UHNWI segment is consistency and extreme precision. You will always be ahead of those who take the long road. The more intermediaries between you and the UHNWI, the longer your path and the less control you have. Shorten the path. Understand that the cost of client acquisition is an intra-industry constant multiplied by a coefficient of luck. If you cannot influence the constant, you can influence the coefficient — by increasing the number of direct connections to UHNWIs. This is elementary mathematics; it is not a miracle and not an attempt to “convince” you. It is objective reality: if you have gone from idea to sale, and your product is competitive, then by covering the lion’s share of only those who can afford it you will inevitably have sales — provided you maintain stability. And the cost of that sale will justify your investment, because what is embedded in its unit cost is only what should be there: the expansion of UHNWI reach and customized hand-delivery of content — rather than maintaining a staff of thousands, chasing dividends, and all that the growth of large companies entails. If you want to pay for someone else’s celebration of life at the price of your forgone profit — that is your choice.
If you’re not totally lost and still want outcomes that manifest as real revenue—not just an accounting of ad spend in clicks, views, and leads—please choose UHNWI Data for your next 12–36 months of marketing outreach.
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