Conventional wisdom would imply that the only way to get new clients is to fight for them, going out of your way to hunt them down, talk them up, and eventually persuade them to buy your products or services. It’s a process akin to hunting, where salespeople or advertising take on the role of an outbound specialist, selectively targeting potential new leads and recruiting them to the brand, one by one.
Let’s face it; it’s a lot of work, and it’s not always worth it. You invest dozens of hours a week yourself, and might pay full-time salaries to your staff members, who can’t guarantee new clients with any degree of certainty. Fortunately, there are ways you can attract new clients without having to go through this intensive, multi-step, unpredictable process.
Working for Clients
The title of this article is a bit misleading—though these strategies do help you earn new clients without the intensive processes associated with traditional sales, they aren’t completely liberated from effort. You’ll need to put some time and energy into these strategies if you want to use them to attract new clients, but they represent a natural attraction of clients, rather than an active hunt. In essence, the clients come to you rather than you going to the clients.
These are the strategies you’ll need to adopt:
- Referrals. This is the least intensive strategy of the three I’ll list here, and it’s one that literally any business can adopt. Referrals are generated somewhat naturally; if you do a good job for one client, they’ll be likely to refer you to another potential match (such as a related business, or a partner they know). The more people and businesses you connect with, and the better your reputation is, the more referrals you’re going to generate. Therefore, this is where you should spend your attention.
You can generate a better reputation for yourself simply by improving your business; go out of your way to get exceptional results for your clients, and work on building the personal relationships between your organizations. If you do this, eventually all of your existing and past clients will be more willing to put in a good word about your organization in the future. As a complementary strategy, start networking more—the wider your potential network is, the more natural referrals you’re going to attract when people realize your organization is a good fit for someone they know. You can even ask for referrals directly.
- Personal Branding. Another way to generate more sales is by developing your personal brand. People have a natural tendency to trust other people (far more than they do personal brands), so the better reputation you develop for your personal brand, the more visibility and potential you’ll receive. That extra visibility and reputation will help you engage in more conversations with potential clients, as more readers find your work and seek your advice on matters in your realm of expertise. From there, it’s just a matter of closing the deal.
Personal branding does demand a degree of effort, consistently, over an extended period of time. You’ll need to develop your own personality and expertise in social media, and possibly connect that to a dedicated website. You’ll also need to develop new content regularly, onsite and in offsite publications. As you scale up your efforts, you’ll get your content and your brand in front of a wider breadth and higher quantity of people.
- Inbound Marketing. Personal branding could, in some ways, be categorized as a branch of inbound marketing. The idea here is to engage in strategies that naturally put your brand in front of more people online. Rather than hunting them down, one by one, you’ll be making your brand more visible to masses of people at once.
The biggest asset here is content; you’ll need a strong, unique, valuable content marketing strategy if you want to make progress in any other area. You’ll need content to optimize your site for search engines, provide fuel and reading material to your social media followings, and use it to encourage more online visitors to convert. Throw in your personal branding efforts (by redirecting your readers and followers to your company site), and some link building to improve the visibility of your content and your results could potentially explode.
With these three strategies, you’ll be able to start attracting more clients without the rigmarole associated with the outbound “hunting” method. This isn’t to say that traditional sales strategies don’t work, or aren’t worth the effort they require—in fact, some industries still thrive on these as a means of achieving sales success. If you want to attract and retain the greatest number of relevant clients, you’ll need to research your target market and come up with a balanced strategy that works for you.