Get Clients Now! (TM)

C. Hayden

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814432464
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Learn the secrets professionals use to dramatically increase their client base by learning how to replace scattershot marketing and networking efforts with proven, targeted tactics.

Knowing where to spend your marketing dollars was a lot easier in the days when the choices were commercials, magazines, and billboards. Now, life in twenty-first-century America has become one gigantic 24/7 commercial with no limit of ways to get your brand in front of your customers. Has marketing become just a game of throwing darts in the dark, or is it still possible to effectively target your audience?

Using a simple cookbook model, the book helps you identify the ingredients missing from their current marketing activities, select the right strategies and tools from a menu of options, and create a completely customized action plan that can be fully implemented in only 28 days!

In Get Clients Now!, you will learn:

• How to choose the best marketing tactics for their situation and personality
• Hands-on approaches for replacing unproductive cold-calling with the power of relationship marketing
• Proven and effective online networking and prospecting, social media, and internet marketing strategies
• Advice on integrating online and offline tactics
• Tips for dealing with fear, resistance, and procrastination

Now in its third edition, Get Clients Now! has been updated with worksheets, exercises, all-new examples, and tried-and-true marketing practices for reaching new clients. Stop throwing a hundred fishing poles out into the vast ocean. Instead, learn where to most effectively take the net and scoop up your customers!

PART I

The Setup

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

CHAPTER 1

What Really Works?

Effective Marketing Strategies

MARKETING MADE SIMPLE

Marketing is telling people what you do, over and over. There are many ways of telling people—in person, by phone, in writing, on the Web, through the media—but you do have to tell them. You can’t just wait for the phone to start ringing. You have to tell them over and over. Studies estimate that the typical urban citizen is exposed to thousands of marketing messages per day. Where is your message in all that communication? What will make others remember you if they hear about you only once?

Getting prospective clients to pay attention to what you have to offer and remember you until they need your services can seem like an enormous challenge. So how do people in your line of work—consulting, coaching, and other professional services—get clients? Ask any successful businessperson that question, and this is what you will hear: “Referrals.” “Networking.” “Making contacts and following up.” “Word of mouth.”

It’s simple stuff; you probably already knew these answers. So why don’t you have all the clients you need? If you’re like most other first-time users of the Get Clients Now! system, one or all of the following reasons will sound familiar:

➤ You can’t decide where to begin. Marketing your business seems like an overwhelming project. There are so many ideas to consider and so many choices to make, and you want to make sure you are doing it right. So you worry about how best to spend your time and money. Struck by “analysis paralysis,” you start and stop, sit and stew, or just do nothing.

➤ You aren’t sure how to put the pieces together. You think you should be making phone calls but wonder if you need to finish your website first. You suspect it might be time to identify some new prospects, but what about those follow-up e-mails you’ve been meaning to send? You wonder if all the networking will ever pay off, and whether that speaking engagement will really generate any clients. You don’t have a system, a program, or a plan.

➤ You can’t stay motivated. Even when you know exactly what you need to do, often you just don’t do it. With no boss looking over your shoulder, it’s too easy to avoid marketing and sales. When you don’t see immediate results, you get discouraged. When someone rejects your sales pitch, it’s hard not to take it personally. It’s so tempting just to wait for the phone to ring, and blame your lack of business on the economy, the competition, or the time of year.

If any or all of these obstacles have stopped you in your tracks, you are not alone. People who market professional services rarely fail due to lack of information about effective sales and marketing techniques. They fail because they don’t make use of the information that is right at their fingertips. This is why the Get Clients Now! system works; it provides both a structure and a tool kit to turn your marketing goals and ideas into productive action—and it helps eliminate the roadblocks.

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Marketing Is a System, Not an Event

John Jantsch, www.ducttapemarketing.com

“Small business marketers love the chase,” declares John Jantsch, a marketing coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing. Jantsch explains,

They love a newfangled way to make the phone ring. But they often think of a marketing promotion as a single event. It’s precisely this view of marketing that holds most small businesses back. They fall prey to the “marketing idea of the week” and never fully explore what it takes to create and build a completely functioning, consistently performing, marketing system.

Small business owners have no problem thinking systems when it comes to say, accounting or hiring. When it comes to marketing though, all bets are off. It’s as if they are waiting for magic fairy dust to fall upon them with the next great marketing innovation.

Effective marketing is little more than creating and operating an effective marketing system. When I use the word system I mean several things: (1) the system is documented; you can’t have a system unless you write it down, (2) the system is built on sound marketing principles, and (3) you constantly measure, innovate, and refine the system.

Once you have spent the time and energy to create a plan, you need to commit your plan to a marketing calendar and then allocate the money it will take to implement your plan. When you create a calendar it is much more likely that you will look at the tasks like a “to-do” list. So, instead of worrying that you should do more marketing, you simply scratch each item off your list and plan for the next. It’s an amazingly simple but effective device.

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HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS

Get Clients Now! breaks down the marketing and sales process into a series of simple steps so you will know exactly where to begin to get clients today. It organizes the steps into a proven system built around three powerful elements: effective, personalized marketing strategies; an action-oriented, 28-day program; and approaches for managing the fear, resistance, and procrastination that may hinder your marketing efforts. The program shows you how all the pieces of the sales and marketing puzzle fit together: what to do, when to do it, and how to measure your results.

Designing and implementing a successful sales and marketing campaign is a lot like cooking a nutritious meal. When you are cooking, you need to decide what’s on the menu, shop for ingredients, and make sure your food choices combine to make a healthful diet. In the first five chapters of this book, you will be guided to select a regular menu of marketing activities that fit your personal tastes, prepare the essential ingredients for sales and marketing success, and evaluate your choices to create a balanced marketing approach.

When your personal marketing action plan is ready for consumption, you’ll begin the 28-day program. You’ll start each day with a specific list of things to do, and get daily advice for working through internal and external barriers to effective action.

To make the best use of this program, you should read Chapters 1 through 5 in sequence, completing the exercises as you go. When you are ready to begin the 28-day program, start reading Chapter 6, one section per day. Two rest days per week are built into the program. Chapters 7 through 10 contain essential marketing “recipes.” You can use these for reference while you are designing your action plan, or for help in implementing your plan as you go. Each of these chapters covers one stage of the Universal Marketing Cycle that you will learn about in Chapter 2. You will choose a single stage to focus on during the program and will need to read only the chapter that pertains to the stage you select.

Since this a 28-day program, does that mean you will find all the clients you need in twenty-eight days? In some cases, yes. Since 1995, when this program first became available, many Get Clients Now! participants have landed as many clients as they could handle in less than twenty-eight days. But because everyone’s situation and starting place is different, your immediate results may produce fewer clients than the total you want. You may choose to keep going with the program for a second twenty-eight days, or more, to further improve your sales. That’s okay; the program is designed with this intention.

After completing the program, you may choose to repeat it using the same action plan for another twenty-eight days, or begin again starting in Chapter 2 to design a revised plan. Either way, you will continue to benefit from the improved strategy, focus, and motivation that the system provides.

Key Components of the Program

The Get Clients Now! Action Worksheet is the principal planning tool for designing your personal 28-day program. (See the Completed Action Worksheet in Figure 1-1.) Here are the six components of the program included on the worksheet:

1. Marketing Strategies—the two to four strategies you will be using during the twenty-eight days of the program.

2. Marketing Stage—the stage of the Universal Marketing Cycle where you are stuck or on which you need more work.

3. Program Goal—the goal of your program; that is, the results you plan to achieve in the next twenty-eight days. You will set this goal in Chapter 3.

4. Success Ingredients—the missing ingredients you need to be successful in your marketing and that you plan to create during the program. You will discover these in Chapter 4.

5. Daily Actions—ten specific steps you plan to take on a daily or weekly basis during the p...