The Secret to Getting New Clients Now

When cash is tight and you need new clients now… Most people view marketing and selling like this.

Identify target a market, tell them what about your service/product, maybe work in a little solution selling and hope they choose you. Or target a market, respond to RFPs and hope they choose your price.

Either way, what you’re building on is hope and hope is not a plan.

See, the secret to getting new clients now is to take hope out of the equation to a large extent by understanding how to choose your customers.

One of the most important elements of getting new clients for a service business is understanding the make up of existing clients that are ideal. When you come to understand who makes an ideal client it allows you to build your entire marketing, sales and service efforts around attracting, choosing and converting this target group.

Start analyzing the common characteristics your existing ideal clients share. Start asking yourself or your client facing employees some questions about these people: what age, sex, illness, income, and particular area of town are they? what industry are they in?, where are they located?, what size is their organization?, what do they read?, what do they listen to?, what challenges do they face?, how do they buy? and most importantly what triggers them to start looking for a solution?

This information is the secret to unlocking a flood new clients now. Most service businesses have a need triggered soon by some type of life or business cycle change, married, children, divorced, birthday, illness, pay raise, calendar event, budget refresh, office relocation, etc. (Hint: focusing on identifying what these triggers are with your current clients is the best way to immediately grow share of wallet.)

The answers to the questions above are not always available, but thinking about them in correlation to your ideal client will allow you to boost sales now.

NOTICE I didn’t mention anything about getting involved in autoresponders or landing pages or salespages or Facebook ads or any of that.

Why not? Because you said you need new clients now, right?

DO:

1. Identify a clear problem you can help solve / result you can create…

2. Describe the kind of person/organization who likely has that problem / likely wants that result.

3. Make a list of 1–50 such people/organizations. (Yes, a list of 1 is a list. And it’s the only place to start.)

THEN:

1. Email them. Call them. Have a very real conversation. Do they have that problem? Want a result? If they do, lead this “Sales Conversation” to where they feel you deeply understand them. ONLY once they feel you understand them, then…

2. Make them an sample offer that’s easy for them to say “Yes!” to. It could (and probably should) be a small starter project. Something that will help them solve their problem, get their result — either in full, or in part. A meaningful part.