How to Gain New Clients-without the Cold Call
By Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr.
One of the greatest challenges facing independent professionals
today is how to generate new business. Professionals are
not salespeople, nor do they want to be; in addition, actively
attempting to sell oneself can easily tarnish one’s
professional image. How, then, to attract new clients, without
the sales pitch?
A principle I consistently teach sales reps, one that is
at the core of my sales philosophy, is establishing yourself
as the recognized expert and authority figure in your field.
By doing so, you gain the immediate respect and trust of
your prospects. For salespeople, this can be a lengthy process
that takes quite a bit of preparation and positioning. For
a professional, however, this step is the easiest; therefore,
you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to
self-marketing.
What I specifically recommend to independent professionals
is a multi-step system that:
- Establishes you as the undisputed leader and authority
figure in your field of expertise;
- Induces prospective clients to “opt-in”
to your marketing system;
- Keeps your name and your credentials in front of
prospective clients at all times;
- Provides easy and direct access to you and/or your
office when the time comes for a prospect to hire you.
So, with that in mind, let’s go into the specifics
of how to accomplish this, using a system that has worked
wonders for professionals I’ve coached. In fact, one
of my attorneys was already using this method when I was
researching attorneys, and that is exactly how I found him,
and why I hired him.
Step one: Establish yourself as the recognized
expert in your field.
Building a presence for yourself as the leader in your
field of expertise lays the foundation for the rest of your
self-marketing strategy. The easiest, and best, way to accomplish
this is on the Internet. A professional-looking Web site,
full of valuable content of use to prospective clients,
is the key. I’m not talking about a corporate site,
or a firm’s site—I’m talking about your
very own personal Web site that focuses on you and your
credibility. In fact, the attorney I mentioned had done
an excellent job of maintaining a site that was a treasure
trove of information on trademark law. It was his own site,
separate and distinct from his firm’s, and it was
the vast amount of knowledge on that site, public and accessible
to anyone, that induced me to call him.
The point here is to avoid a sales pitch and to provide
useful information to prospective clients. You want to establish
your credentials, and provide your contact information,
on your home page; however, the power of this type of site
lies in the free information it provides to the public.
That’s what attracts people to it, gets them coming
back, and, even more importantly, gets the site a high ranking
in online search engines. Include several articles relevant
to your field and provide links on your home page to those
articles.
You’re not a writer, you say? No problem. There are
thousands of free-reprint articles available all over the
Internet. Check out ezinearticles.com as a starting point.
You will find dozens, if not hundreds, of great articles
on your topic of expertise that you can reprint for free.
All you are required to do is include the original author’s
bio at the end. And, in case you’re wondering, this
actually will not cause people to call that author instead
of you. In fact, by including another person’s article
and bio, you actually gain credibility by showing
a total lack of insecurity about including someone else’s
material.
(While we’re on the subject, if you are
a good writer, it doesn’t hurt to contribute articles
to ezinearticles.com and other free-reprint directories.
It can only help you in the long run to have others publishing
your work.)
Step two: Induce prospective clients to “opt-in”
to your marketing system.
Marketing guru Seth Godin refers to this as getting prospects
to “raise their hands” and give you permission
to maintain ongoing contact with them. I recommend doing
this through a free monthly e-mail newsletter, again including
valuable free content for your readers—namely, relevant
articles. These can be written by yourself, or can be free-reprint
articles taken from article directories, keeping in mind
that the newsletter is coming from you and you
are the expert your prospects hear from on a regular basis.
A monthly newsletter accomplishes several things at once:
First of all, it continues to build your credibility as
the undisputed “go-to” person in your field.
Second, it keeps your name and contact information in front
of your prospective clients on an ongoing basis. In other
words, when they do have a need for your services, it’s
a no-brainer for them to pull up your most recent newsletter
and either call or e-mail you. Finally, but perhaps most
importantly, an e-mail newsletter cumulatively builds a
database of prospective clients, thereby setting a snowball
effect into motion.
Think of it this way: Let’s say 1,000 new contacts
are made each month through your current marketing efforts,
with a 1 percent response rate, for ten new clients per
month. What if you added 1,000 new contacts to your list
each month, rather than just making a single contact only
to never be heard from again? At the end of three months
you have 3,000 prospects. At the end of six months you have
6,000. With the same 1 percent response rate, that’s
sixty new clients—in one month! (And believe me, with
the credibility-building aspect of this system taken into
account, your response rate will not be a mere 1 percent.
It will go up dramatically.)
How to get started on creating your monthly newsletter?
Don’t worry: you don’t have to be a Web designer
or computer guru to do it. Sign up for a service specifically
geared toward that end. I use prosender.com. It’s
fully automated, and it’s fully CAN-SPAM compliant
so you know your e-mail newsletter will be 100 percent legal.
The best part is that it provides the code you will insert
into your Web site, automatically placing a sign-up form
on your home page, or wherever else you want it. If you
don’t want to do this yourself, your Web administrator
or an IT consultant can do it for you for a fee.
How to get people to sign up for your free newsletter? Simple:
Let them know you’ll be providing free, valuable content
of use to them. Even better, give away a free e-book upon
signup. This can be as short as twenty pages or so, written
by you, or as a collection of free articles. It’s
another incentive to get people to opt-in to your system.
By following this simple self-marketing system, you will
see a huge increase in new clients, almost immediately,
but even more so in the long term due to the amazing cumulative
nature of this process.
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Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the New York Times bestseller,
Never Cold Call Again: Achieve Sales Greatness
Without Cold Calling. He has taught over 30,000
salespeople how to become top producers without cold calling,
and is a highly sought-after speaker and consultant. For
Frank’s free Sales Tips newsletter, please visit www.NeverColdCall.com.
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