email		print
	report

Related Tags

audience   blogging   business   business_development   businesses   client   clients   community   customer   customers   direct_mail   homework   ideas   listen   listening   networking   new-business   readers   tools

Show all Tags

Like this topic?
Write Advice
Advice that links to this one

This week I have two important potential client meetings. Both of these businesses contacted me last week and asked for a meeting. Here's how I reached them.

Over several decades in business I have learned a few things about getting new business, mostly from times when I didn't get it. If you are like me, I learn more from periods of stupidity than I do from glimpses of brilliance. Here are a few ideas that work:

1. Only go after those businesses that look like your ideal customer and that are a good fit.
2. The best ways to get the first meeting include networking and direct mail campaigns.
3. Learn as much about your potential client as possible before you introduce yourself in person or through marketing techniques. Do your homework.
4. Once the meeting is scheduled, prepare yourself to listen more than you talk. For me, that means reminding myself before and during the meeting to put the focus on them, not me.
5. At the meeting, be prepared to offer solutions not tools.
6. Be yourself.
7. Be polite and concerned about your potential clients wants and needs.
8. Follow-up with white papers and other useful information, whether or not you get the job.

In the past six months, this blog has reached more than a few people who have since become clients. Because blogs are broadcast tools instead of targeted ones, there are several things we can do to invite the right customers to call us, as well as to write for the community that we are reaching out to, both potential customers and readers who will never become customers:

1. Write to a narrowly defined audience, choosing subjects that you and they care about..
2. Talk to them and with them.
3. Listen to them and respond to what you hear.
4. Focus on the ideas that will help your audience be better at what they do.
5. Let readers know how much you appreciate them.
6. Reach out to other bloggers with whom you want to communicate and to form community. Begin by reading and commenting on their blogs.

This is a broad sketch. What kinds of ideas to you implement to grow new business and to keep in touch with your current customers?