Your business exists to serve people—customers and clients. But to stay in business and keep growing, you need to find new clients to serve.
There’s no magic formula for this, but there are some tried and true methods for finding and tracking new clients for your business.
Finding Clients
1. Referrals
- How can you encourage and appreciate your referral sources?
- This could be from other clients or business partners.
- Refer back: this makes you look better to the potential client, too.
- Using a gift tool like Thnks to surprise and delight.
2. Networking
- Business associations
- Professional groups: eg. AMA, Chamber
- Conferences: We’ve got a lot of work from these kinds of groups over the years, but mostly as referrals further out.
3. SEO
- Let your website work for you
- More passive than active
- What if this isn’t generating the right clients?
- Tighten your messaging.
- Ask more difficult questions on your contact form.
4. Content
- Blogging, speaking, podcasting
- Social & email is more promotional
- All of it into a marketing funnel
- Educating and thought leadership is one of our core values, and leads are a positive consequence of that content
Tracking
1. Forecasting potential revenue
- How do you weigh the value of a client?
- Initial spend or monthly x12.
- In our system, we also weigh the odds of a win and track that metric.
2. Follow-up into interested leads
- What is an interested lead?
- We don’t use cold marketing—only follow up with warm leads.
- How do you follow up without being obnoxious?
- Initial follow-up: Just connect on LinkedIn
- For interested leads: Offer value and have a reason to follow up
