How To Get Clients

The biggest challenge most business owners have isn’t the quality of product or service they offer, it’s that they don’t know how to get clients.

If your business exists to serve a client by offering a product or service, how do you find those “clients” to actually serve?

Let’s start this conversation about the process of getting clients from attraction to conversion.

Here’s the thing:

• You cannot get clients if you are a best-kept secret.
• You cannot get clients if you fail to do any marketing.
• You cannot get clients if you don’t know how to actually convert someone who’s interested into a buyer.

Attracting Leads

The first part of getting clients is attracting people to your business so they can make a buying decision. The art of attracting potential clients is called lead generation. 

Once you have a lead, you’re on the way to converting that lead into a client… However, keep in mind that not all leads become clients. What does this mean?

It means that your marketing strategy needs to attract more leads than you need in order to meet your client-goals.

Since quitting my corporate job in 2006, I’ve been experimenting with tactics to attract leads in order to determine what works and what doesn’t. As a business owner, you need to pay attention to your own experiments so you can double down on what works and do more of it.

Without further ado, here are some field notes on how to get clients:

How to get Clients – What DOESN’T Work.

These are the easy, promising-but-empty and methods that don’t generate leads:

1. Newspaper ads
2. Direct Mail via the postal service
3. Coupon books
4. Advertorials
5. Fancy write-ups about your business in magazines
6. Giving your power to someone else who promised to get your leads in exchange for some type of service

The key lesson here: it takes work to get clients.

I wish it was this easy… but it’s not. You must be willing to do the work.

How to get Clients – What DOES Work.

When it comes to attracting clients, here’s what has worked over and over again:

1. In-person networking and attending events – where you got to talk to people face-to-face and build relationships.
2. Speaking engagements – where you can show up and offer tremendous value (not selling from the stage).
3. Creating content – every single week for over a decade, as well as writing a book.
4. Word of mouth referrals and endorsements –  when you do great work for your clients, they tell other clients about you and referrals become a big part of your lead generation strategy, except, someone else does the heavy lifting for you – and they do it with joy. This is so key.
5. Showing up on social media and engaging with people regularly – This is the unsexy, time-consuming work. It includes responding to comments, inbox messages, and offering value when other people are asking for help. It means being a generous and friendly person, which is relatively easy to do but many people fail to show up often enough and long enough for it to make a difference.

Sure, you can generate leads through other methods. But if you don’t know how to get clients, know this: these five, tried and true ways have worked consistently not only for me but hundreds of entrepreneurs I’ve worked with as well.

Know Who Your “Client” Is

One more thing to mention: if you know who your buyer is, this will help you tremendously.

Why does this matter so much? When a lead appears, you need to be able to recognize that lead and treat the individual with the respect and urgency they deserve.

That’s right, not everyone is your potential “client” – nor do you want them to be.

There are many ways to generate leads, but it’s important for you to determine what strategy works for you. You are you. This is your business, your approach, your energy and technique will be different from everyone else.

Pay attention to where your best customers come from and where you can find them – then do more of whatever it was that attracted them to you in the first place.

In next week’s blog, we’ll be sharing three strategies for converting leads into clients.

Tell me – which one of the 5 strategies for getting clients are you most comfortable incorporating?