10 Things That Will Grow Your Clientele and Revenues

Part 3 of 3

By Bill Doerr, Sales & Marketing Editor
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Previously, we’ve looked at a key element for generating more clients – a clear strategy and goals to help you focus your efforts and measure your effectiveness in reaching them.

So a quick recap of Part 2 before we move on to Part 3.

STRATEGY: In general, you want to focus on building relationships with 1) people who might do business with you (suspects), 2) people who are likely to do so in the future (prospects and existing clients), and 3) people who are likely to introduce you to others and refer others to you (centers-of-influence).

GOALS: To support your desire to build relationships (and, the revenues they suggest!) with these three (3) groups of people in your business or practice, we previewed ten (10) tactics or goals you’ll want to take as steps that will take you closer to realizing your strategy.

These include:

  1. Articulate your ONE BREATH COMMERCIAL
  2. Profile your IDEAL PROSPECT
  3. Profile your PROBLEM-SOLVING ABILITY and SERVICES
  4. Identify and build STRATEGIC ALLIANCES with COI’s
  5. Develop COLLATERAL MATERIALS for communicating with your suspects, prospects, clients and centers-of-influence
  6. Use a DATABASE SOFTWARE to manage your marketing relationships
  7. Drip your MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS on your key people
  8. Re-contact and re-qualify your CULTIVATED CONTACTS periodically
  9. Generate PREFERRALS to qualified suspects for your services
  10. Gain access to audiences of qualified suspects via PUBLIC SPEAKING and by creating INFORMATIONAL MATERIALS to attract qualified suspects

TACTICS: These are the ‘how’ to the ‘what’ of the above goals. The means to the ends you want.

In Part 1 and 2, I discussed the first six (6) marketing goals you’ll want to accomplish. Now, in Part 3, let’s look at the last four (4) goals on our ‘Top 10’ List:

7. Plan to CONNECT REPEATEDLY

Closely related to goal #6 -- to use CRM or Contact Management software to help you manage your marketing contacts – it’s imperative that you understand and apply what any marketer worth his or her salt will tell you – “Marketing is NEVER a one-time event!”

To be effective, your marketing missiles must be sent to your market members as repeatedly and frequently as propriety permits. In the ‘biz’, we call this kind of repeated contacts with prospects, clients and COI’s ‘dripping’ on them. It works, too!

Keep this in mind – marketing is a STRATEGIC rather than a tactical experience. You will need to plan for and carry out your marketing over time – with repeated contacts.

8. Re-Qualify...Religiously!

Just because some person ‘qualifies’ as a prospective client for your services, you must never assume they will always deserve that classification. This is why you must periodically re-connect with each person you’re cultivating and re-qualify their status as ‘still viable’...i.e. able to provide you with future revenues and/or future referrals to other people who could do business with you.

Bottom line: NEVER assume that someone is ‘always’ qualified for your time, money, energy and attention. If the pass muster once, you must periodically plan to reconnect and requalify their status. Fail to do this and you’ll find that you’re carrying more ‘china eggs’ in your business than you’ll like or need.

9. Generate PREFERRALS – ‘Preferred Introductions’ to New Prospects

Earlier, I mentioned the need to establish a network of COI’s. These are people who know, like, trust and respect you. They are a source of names of people who should be made aware of you and your services. And, vice versa. So a COI is WHERE you go to get names of people who could become your client. If not today, in the foreseeable future.

Well, the names you collect from your COI’s is WHAT you want. And the kind of name you want...is a Preferred Introduction or PREFERRAL.

A Preferrral is someone who:

  1. satisfies your ‘Ideal Prospect’ profile
  2. respects and values the opinion of your COI, and
  3. you can meet through the influence and prestige of your COI

If you’d really like to know how to generate a LOT of these kinds of names...on a regular basis...week in and week out...I suggest going to www.sellmoremarketing.com/events for details.

10. Use PUBLIC SPEAKING and Create INFO-PRODUCTS

Some years ago, Howard Shenson, the highly regarded and extremely successful marketing consultant to other consultants did a study of all kinds of consultants and how they marketed their services.

He found that a major difference between consultants who made ‘less than $50K’ and those who made ‘more than $100K’ was that consultants making the larger incomes were far more likely to use ‘public speaking’ and ‘writing’ as means of promoting themselves than were the consultants earning in the lower income range.

OK, not everyone is suited to utilize public speaking. Some say they’d prefer to die than speak in public. So if public speaking isn’t your forte, don’t worry about it.

Writing is a lot less anxiety producing. For one thing, you can correct your mistakes and no one but you will know about it! Besides, if you have any kind of ‘good ideas’ then you’ll find writing may be a more viable and equally effective means of marketing yourself.

Ultimately, what you’ll want to do is create a ‘game plan’ for either getting in front of the kind of people who can best appreciate your mission and/or creating the kind of ‘information products’ (often called Special Reports, Success Letters, and the like) that will help you achieve a certain level of lasting notoriety and position yourself as a highly qualified resource of practical expertise in your field.

And LAST...but NOT LEAST...

So you don’t lose the value of this report, please...do the following:

  1. Re-Read these three (3) articles...with a pen and highlighter nearby
  2. dentify any goal where you have an opportunity to improve your marketing
  3. Prioritize these goals in terms of their ability to impact your main objective - to improve your marketing and increase your clientele and revenues
  4. Devise an ACTion Plan to eliminate any opportunity weakness you’ve found:
    • Define an objective to achieve which, when you do, will indicate that the weakness is no longer present or, at the least, it’s substantially reduced
    • Assess your resources . . . to determine what you have available to help you achieve your objective of reducing a significant weakness
    • Identify any / all action steps your objective requires
    • Assign a timeframe for accomplishing each action step
    • Identify who is to be responsible for making sure the step is completed
    • Monitor frequently, the desired vs. actual results your plan calls for
    • Correct ‘deviations’ from you plan as soon as you discover them
      • h. Accomplish THE objective . . . you originally set out to achieve

Do this and you’ll be ahead of the game and . . . ahead of your competitors, too!

 

Bill Doerr, CCO of SellMore Marketing, LLC is the creator of The Preferral Prospecting System®,
The Expert Directory® and The Ultimate Client Development System™. Bill uses these programs to
help service providers build their business by leveraging relationships and generating more referrals.
You can reach Bill by phone at: 860-798-6964, online: www.sellmoremarketing.com or by
email or by the TNNW Blog: http://thenationalnetworker.blogspot.com

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