How to Create a Plan That Attracts More Clients

After my last article on ways you are sabotaging your own marketing efforts, I got a few requests to write an article on follow-up. Follow-up is part of the structure or process of marketing. If you don't have this structure in place, everything falls apart. To understand how to make follow-up work, you first need to understand the process a client goes through before they become your client.  1. First a prospect is a stranger. You don't know them and they don't know you. Efforts to market to strangers are not very efficient or effective. Instead, you want to market to those you are affiliated with.  2. You create affiliations through networks, groups, organizations, chambers of commerce and communities, offline and online (like Biznik). You start to participate in these communities and get known. Over time you build a degree of visibility, credibility, and trust.  3. Next, you need to communicate about your business in such a way that people want to know more. Perhaps they'll visit your web site or you'll have a conversation with them. For this you need a very clear marketing message and some written marketing materials. (More information on this below.) Up to this point there's not a lot of proactive marketing activity. You're not selling anything; you're not pushing your services. You're simply in a community that is getting to know you and you are communicating to some degree about what you do and how you help your clients.  4. An important next step is to invite those in your community to opt-in to some kind of ongoing communication with you. For me, It's my weekly email newsletter, More Clients. This is a big key that many people miss.  Once people are interested, they want more information.  When people join your list, they are saying, in essence, "I'm interested in knowing more. I'd like to take advantage of the value you offer. I'm not ready to buy yet, but please keep in touch." 5. As you grow your list, you are starting to gather people who might be real prospects for your service. These are the people with whom you can initiate selling conversations. Exactly what you do here depends on the service you offer, but one principle is key: Don't sell your service, sell the opportunity to engage with you.  Let me explain how I do this in my business: I have a marketing coaching program, called the Marketing Mastery Program that I do once a year. I send an email to my list telling them about the program and then invite them to have a complimentary "Business Building Strategy Session" with me.  I send them to my web page about the Marketing Mastery Program and ask them to fill out a questionnaire at the bottom of the page so I can learn more about them and also determine if they are qualified for the program.  I get the questionnaires through email and then follow up with them and set up the Strategy Sessions. The follow-up is key, but it comes at the end of a series of steps that I've taken to build a relationship with, and provide valuable information to, these prospects. They already feel they know me by the time they've set up their Strategy Sessions.  6. Finally, I conduct the Strategy Sessions and talk to prospects about their business and marketing goals and challenges. Then I ask them if they'd like to hear about the Mastery Program, which virtually all do. Then I explain the program in detail (they've already read about it) and answer any questions they may have. About 50% of those I meet with join the Mastery Program.  Let me boil down these six detailed steps into four basic steps:  1. Join organizations/communities (online and off) and get known. Build familiarity and trust.  2. Invite people to join your e-list and keep them informed with valuable information.  3. Invite subscribers to take advantage of a complimentary Strategy Session.  4. Hold the Strategy Sessions and convert prospects into clients.  This marketing outreach and follow-up plan can be adapted and customized to just about any professional service business. If you're a consultant, coach, trainer, workshop leader, financial professional, etc. this can work for you. It also works for a large number of business services from web designers to insurance salespeople. Note that this takes some time and patience. It's not a flash in the pan.  We often think of meeting someone at a networking event who shows some interest and then following up with them until they "buy or die." Or conversely, we make a lot of contacts and build relationships but never take any proactive steps to invite our contacts to learn more about our services.  We then wait for people to call us. Unfortunately those calls don't come often enough. I noticed that when I waited around, nobody was calling me and asking me for a one-year Marketing Mastery Program! I had to create it and market it proactively as I've outlined above.   To succeed at this marking plan, you need to do several things you're not doing now. Of the four basic steps listed above, most are only doing step number one. But if you take the time to develop your e-list, and then launch a campaign to meet with prospects in Strategy Sessions, you will grow your business by leaps and bounds.  Your Online Sales Letter An important part of this process is your "marketing information piece" or "online sales letter." For samples of the online letters I use to take people to the next step, see the following: Marketing Mastery Program - www.actionplan.com/apmmm.html - This is a program I'll be doing annually. It is full for this year. Action Plan Marketing Club - www.actionplan.com/actionplanclub.html - This is my online marketing membership site which teaches the foundational information this article is based on.  It's useful to study these online letters as they can be emulated (not copied!) for your own business. By working at building your e-lsit and then directing subscribers to these kind of letters, you can market and sell both high-end services and very affordable services, or even products.  The Challenge: Implementation As I said in my last article, making all of this happen successfully is a challenge because of three things:  1. Lack of a plan and skills to carry out the plan.  2. Disorganization and the inability to stay on track.  3. Fear of rejection or of doing things wrong.  In this article I've given you the framework for a plan. It's now up to you to adapt this plan and learn how to make it work for your business. In future articles I'll talk about getting organized and going beyond fear.      2009-04-13T22:35:38Z

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how-to-create-a-plan-that-attracts-more-clients

2009-04-15T18:19:26Z

2009-04-15T17:19:45Z

Are you wondering why you are not getting consistent results from your marketing? It's because you don't have a plan that reliably moves people from being prospects to being clients. Here's a plan that will help you do exactly that.

How to Create a Plan That Attracts More Clients

2009-04-15T17:19:45Z