When I started my business, many people had opinions on what I should do to get clients — speak to groups, join the Chamber of Commerce, attend a networking group, etc. One of the suggestions that came up often was doing promotional events, which can mean different things. It might mean getting a booth at a trade show, or hosting a free one or two hour event to introduce yourself and your services while delivering a snack-size portion to the attendees, sort of like a Tupperware party. It could mean creating a longer event, half a day or day-long, where again you deliver value and charge a nominal fee, making it easy for people to attend. It might be hosting a meet-and-greet reception, holding a complimentary teleclass, or having a Twitter chat party. Read more

You know about the 80/20 rule, right? It’s the guideline that 80% of your return comes from 20% of your investment. For example, 80% of your referrals come from 20% of the people in your network. 80% of your new business comes from 20% of your prospects. 80% of your new contacts come from 20% of the networking activities you engage in. And so on. Read more

Our lives as professionals marketing our own services would be much easier if clients would simply read our sales copy and decide to hire us. But in the real world, it rarely works that way. Instead, we must have conversations with our prospects before a sale takes place -– sometimes several conversations. Read more

Most of the information and effort aimed at getting more clients focuses on promotion and attraction. You’ll find plenty of advice on how to tell the world about your business, make the phone ring, or get inquiries to arrive in your email inbox. But once you’ve been marketing yourself for a while, you discover that turning those prospects into paying clients can be pretty darned difficult. I find that many professionals are simply not prepared to sell to the prospects they attract. Read more

What’s stopping you from getting all the clients you want? Do you know? The answer to this one question may be the key to making your marketing more successful.

It would seem from the questions people ask me about marketing that everyone is trying to fix just one type of problem — how to fill their marketing pipeline with more new prospects. Read more

If you’ve used the Get Clients Now! 28-Day Program, you know there are two different types of action-oriented elements you can include: Success Ingredients and Daily Actions. Recently I’ve gotten several questions about the distinctions between these two, so let’s take a closer look. Read more

Last week I was having coffee with a client and he told me a story about one of his former customers. She was reading his newsletter, which goes out every month, and was surprised to learn that his company did stairs (that particular newsletter featured a stair remodel his company had done for someone else). His former customer was looking for someone to do stair work for her, yet it never occurred to her to call him for that type of job. Read more

We talk quite a bit in sales and marketing about, well, talking. We examine how to get our message across, what to say to potential clients, how to present our businesses, etc. But sometimes, listening can be considerably more productive than talking. Here are five ways you just might be able to get more clients by listening. Read more

Self-introduction. Elevator speech. Ten-second introduction. Thirty-second commercial. Whatever you call it, you need one to be an effective marketer, salesperson, or even jobseeker. Here are six tips to creating one that produces the results you are seeking. Read more

“Will this marketing approach be worth my while?” It’s a question independent professionals often ask. But there’s a related question that, unfortunately, they ask much less often: “How much will it cost compared to what it brings in?” Surprisingly few professionals know the answer to this crucial question, and many admit it had simply never occurred to them. Read more