How To Attract More Clients Quicker With Less Effort
If you’re a consultant, coach, speaker, or service professional, one of your biggest challenges is attracting enough good clients without spending too much time on marketing.
Here are the keys to attracting more clients quicker–without wasting money on advertising (which usually doesn’t work), without turning yourself into a pushy sales person (which you probably would hate), and without having to wait for months to get the clients you need.
Be Strategic.
There are three main keys to attracting more clients quicker–and you’re probably not doing any of them correctly right now (sorry to be so blunt!):
Key 1: Create and Communicate An Appealing Offering.
When I ask coaches what they do, the typical answer is something like: “I do life coaching” or “I do business coaching” or “I help people succeed in relationships.” When I ask them how they work, the answer is often “I meet with my clients, in person or by phone, 2 to 4 times a month and we work on the issues they’d like to improve or change.”
I’m sure you would give better answers to those questions, but I almost never meet a coach, consultant, or service professional with a truly appealing offering. That is, an offering that is clear, addressed to solve a problem I have, described in a way that focuses on the specific benefits I would get, and that makes it clear and easy to get started.
That’s one reason they struggle to get enough clients.
Key #2: Develop relationships with qualified prospects and partners.
A qualified prospect is someone who has a problem that your services help solve, who recognizes that they have a need, and who has money and is motivated to spend it in solving that problem. A qualified prospect is also someone you can contact or meet and develop a relationship with. A partner is someone who already has a relationship with potential prospects for your services and who could refer or recommend you if they came to know, like, and trust you as a competent service provider.
Notice that there are two main elements in this key: 1. Identify who your ideal prospects are and how to reach them. 2. Develop a relationship with them.
If you’re like many service professionals, you’ve been trying to do that through networking. You meet 3 or 4 prospects every time you attend a meeting. But it is often a slow painful process of helping them decide whether they’ll become clients. And too often you spend far too much time answering their questions and giving them free information or even consulting, without their ever signing up for your services.
One of the keys to attracting more clients quicker is to leverage your time by developing relationships with many people at the same time either by using social media efficiently or by being able to speak to groups of prospects all at once through in-person or online presentations.
Whichever method you choose, you must be able to develop and nurture relationships over time since the majority of people you meet will not immediately be interested in signing up for your services. One of the best ways to do this is through follow up emails that you send to your list of prospects using an automated email newsletter system called an autoresponder.
Key #3: Create and Use an Effective Enrollment Process.
The process in which someone goes from stranger to prospect to client is not a haphazard series of events. It involves a delicate dance of developing trust, discovering needs, and deciding to take action.
Most service providers err in one of two ways. They either fly by the seat of their pants and hope their people skills and enthusiasm about what they do will be enough to win people over to becoming clients. Or they press their case too quickly and too strongly when they sense someone would be a good prospective client. In their enthusiasm they try to convince the prospect of what wonderful service they provide and how much they would enjoy working with the other person. But in the process they push the prospect away with subtle pressure instead of letting the prospect discover and decide that this is what they need and want.
Learning and using effective methods for client enrollment conversations can dramatically increase the number of prospects who decide to be clients. And you will quit wasting hour after hour trying to woo prospects who will probably never become clients, no matter what you do.
If this overview of how to attract more clients quicker resonates for you and sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, I invite you to sign up for the free teleseminar and webinar invitations elsewhere on this web site (any of the optin forms will get you the same free information). I offer free introductory webinars on a fairly regular basis as well as a couple of free QandA calls each month where you can submit a question and I’ll answer it on the call.
Feel free also to reach out to me on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter as a way to stay in touch and be uptodate about upcoming programs that I offer. In all these ways you can get a taste of what I offer in depth and detail through the More Clients Mastermind coaching program.
I look forward to meeting you soon.
Wishing you much success,
Dan
Dan Grandstaff, PCC
Small Business Marketing Expert
Founder of the “More Clients Mastermind” Program
You can sign up below to receive a free teleseminar recording on “10 Ways To Build Rapport Quicker Online or In Person” and receive invitations to future free webinars on “How To Get More Clients Quicker With Less Effort:”