Are you at a point in your business where you’re receptive to growing your clientele?

Do you also find it’s easier to state a goal than actually do it?

Is ‘marketing’ more of a mystery than a mastery for you?

If you said, “Yes” to any of the above, you’re going to like what follows.

OBJECTIVE:

Before we dig into the meat of this matter, it will help if you have a clear goal or objective for new clients and revenue to help you measure your progress in marketing.

Got that?  Good.

STRATEGY:

I’m assuming that you provide a service.  If so, your marketing success will reflect the quantity and quality of the relationships you develop with people who are important to your success. Specifically, you’ll want to focus on three (3) specific groups of people:

1.  Suspects

People you have some reason to believe may have or develop a need for the beneficial difference you can create in their life BUT . . . you have never approached them in the past.

2.  Prospects & Clients

Let’s keep them together.  Why?  Because any client with any remaining lifetime value is also a prospect.  With a strategic viewpoint, they are truly indistinguishable, aren’t they?

These are people you believe are likely to buy your services, and . . .

• have already been approached by you in the past
• have given their permission to you to ‘keep in touch’
• may (or, may not) have done business with you in the past

3.  Centers-of-Influence

These are those people who have come to know, like and trust you on a personal level.  They have also come to respect you on a professional basis, as well.

Whether they’ll ever do business with you is secondary to their value as  people who will promote awareness of you and your services to others who may develop a need-to-know for the services and benefits you offer.

GOALS:

So far, so good.  Now it’s time to identify the specific things you’ll want to be doing to develop the potential business the above groups should suggest to you.  May I offer . . .

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

These are basics.  But you’d be surprised how many people haven’t got them.  Hope you’re not one of them.  And, if you are . . . not for much longer.  Let’s continue . . .

TACTICS:

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

#1.  Articulate your ONE BREATH COMMERCIAL

30 second commercials have their place. But most people don’t have the time or attention span to catch that much information.  Enter, the ‘One Breath Commercial’. This is as critical as almost anything else you may do to achieve your objectives.

What you want to do is be able to provide a ‘sound bite’ that reveals the beneficial difference  you can create in the life of a qualified suspect for your services.

Keep in mind that this should reveal both WHO you want to work with as well as WHAT you can do for a client . . . not how you do it.  For example:

“I help CPA’s, Attorneys and other professionals . . . convert their competence and relationships . . . into greater levels of compensation”

“I help business owners . . . to have a company where their employees are happy, their customers are loyal and their competitors are very, very nervous”

“I help pet owners . . . to have a pet who will live a long and healthy life”

The ultimate ‘test’ of an effective ‘commercial’ is that, after hearing it, a suspect for your services will qualify himself by asking, “Really?  And HOW do you do THAT?”  That’s when the fun really begins, doesn’t it?

#2.  Define Your IDEAL PROSPECT

Once you have your ‘commercial’ message defined and deliver-able, you’ll find that not everyone will care about it.  However, some people will be more likely to ask you, ‘HOW, do you do THAT?” than others.  The person who responds  favorably is probably a good candidate to be your Ideal Prospect.

In general, you want to use visible characteristics to define your Ideal Prospect.  Why?  Because you’ll use this profile to help other people help you identify people they know who are more qualified than others for your services. 

Unless you can tell them what you’re looking for (or, who they know that you would like to meet), it’s likely that they won’t be able to help you as well as you’d like.

The better profiles I’ve seen are based on two kinds of information:

1.  Visible Characteristics

 . . . that are easily observable and don’t require someone to have any psychic ability or make a subjective judgment about whether someone needs your benefits . . . today. 

E.G. “Who do you know that has an outside service cut their lawn?”

2.  Visible Situations

 . . . again, any situation that someone may find him or herself in which can be determined based upon an objective observation rather than a subjective judgment or unsupported guesstimate

E. G. “Who has a yard so big it would make sense to have an outside service come in and cut it?”

#3.  Profile Your Problem-Solving SERVICE/S

Have you ever heard, “People don’t buy products and services . .. they buy solutions”?  Absolutely correct!  That’s why it’s so important that you know what your services mean to a client.  Profiling your service/s makes this possible.

What’s involved?  Thankfully, very little.  But, it’s all essential.

Basically, you want to complete a profile of each service or product you offer in terms of the following:

  •  Name . . . pretty obvious, isn’t it?

  •  Features . . . the ‘hard’ characteristics . . . e.g. “12 sessions”

  •  Benefits . . . the ‘beneficial difference’ this makes in a client’s life

  •  PAINS . . . the consequential damages people have to live with if they don’t have that beneficial difference that your service provides

  •  Prospect . . . the kind of person who can best relate to the PAINS you have just described above

  •  Market . . . the connection . . . the location . . . where your prospects are likely to be found

 

Having done all this –– and it IS easier said than done –– for each service you offer, will do much to make promoting and marketing your services much, much easier and far more effective, too.

At this point, we’ve covered 3 out of 10 things you can do to help you grow your clientele and revenues.

Next month, I’ll discuss 3 more of the 10 tactics that can help you achieve your objectives for developing more clients, revenues and profits. 

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