How to Get More Clients RIGHT NOW

Getting more clients is the key to gaining leverage in your business. You can get more contracts, feel freer to approach new areas, and have a better experience creating growth in your life. Client acquisition is not only a business goal, but a personal goal for many people. They want to be surrounded by quality people, and since we spend so much time with our clients – they become a part and parcel of life.

This is why it’s so important to get more clients but get quality ones too. You need to focus on getting more quality clients that have a positive impact on your professional and personal well-being.

Sometimes we’re too quick to take the money, but the ones that give us long-term work and appreciation are the ones that have a solid approach to what they seek from you. Here’s how you can realistically get more clients right now!

1. Focus on Your Past Clients

When you can get a better idea by analysing your past clients, you can project better in the future. You can even develop new networks based on the relationships you’ve had with your past clients. On the basis of this, you can get a much clearer idea as to what it is that you want to do when acquiring customers.

Whether they are from new companies, industries or geographies, you can associate yourself with them better when you can display past client work. Therefore, it becomes important to engage with them about the work you’ve done in terms of finishing assignments on time, giving them quality and ultimately having long-term relationships.

Past clients also serve as a great barometer for future recommendations. IF you’ve worked with someone for years on end, and they like/love your work, they’ll be more than happy to give you more work if you ask them. Asking is the first step to developing a great relationship with them, and taking advantage of the equity that you’ve developed over time with them.

There is also an ethereal quality when it comes to talking with your past clients as you can analyse your journey and how much you’ve done. That’s a confidence booster for yourself and your clients, which opens up discussions further.

2. Prepare a Strategy

You don’t want to go in willy-nilly and expect great results from day one. Acquiring clients takes time and effort and while you can invest a few hours every day on this task, you should really think about the overall ramifications of acquiring new clients.

Do you have the bandwidth to handle another customer? Do you have the right skills to execute properly? Do you have the right mindset to handle their particular inquiry? All these and many more questions come into play when you are preparing a strategy for client acquisition.

Next, you should go online and visit communities where your ideal client base hangs out. Whether that’s on social media, online forums or physical groups you should be located where your customer is and you need to network with them. If you don’t go outside of your comfort zone, then you’ll never be where you want to be.

It’s not so much as challenging yourself or proving the doubters wrong, it's more so about working and treating client acquisition as work and not a side-hustle. When you switch gears and focus on doing the work necessary to acquire clients, you’ll find yourself ‘in the zone’ and your inner-salesperson kicks in to guide you through tough challenges when pitching, promoting and closing deals.

3. Listen to the Client

You don’t want to bulldoze them with ideas or appear too soft at first glance. You want to have an elegant balance of listening and speaking and really connect with the customer at first-meet. This is an underrated skill, but one that’s typically treated as independent from client acquisition. The alternative couldn’t be truer.

You need to have strong listening skills so that you can listen to what the client wants and deliver. You can brainstorm all day and pitch hundreds of ideas to them, but if they don’t have the budget, the bandwidth or capacity to execute then your ideas are going in the wrong direction. They may even feel frustrated at your lack of impetus.

You need to focus on what they want and what they need for that need to be satisfied. You can pitch them a thousand things, but they only need one solution right now, so that you can bag the client right away. You shouldn’t invest too much time in talking. Listening is where you’ll be able to dig gold.

4. Negotiation, Closing, and Upsell

After you’ve agreed on the work to be done and the price at which it is going to be executed, you get to the next stage. This is the stage of negotiation. When a client comes back from a meeting and proposes different terms, you can either negotiate or walk-away. While walking away or discussing equality in client treatment may be the right moves in certain situations, if you’re looking for clients NOW then you need to negotiate.

Negotiation doesn’t have to be about fighting for a particular number or struggling to finish an argument. It's about understand where each party is coming from and preparing more favourable terms for them to close the deal. That’s all.

After you’ve closed the deal, comes up selling. If you’ve successfully managed to complete certain types of projects or retainer models, you can upsell your client into picking up new and unique services. E.g. if you’re an architect and you’re designing a building, you can upsell them to purchase some professionally done photographs.

Conclusion

Creating growth in your business isn’t’ hard, but it does take work ethic and patience. You need to create a personal brand that scales beyond industries and geographies and allows your potential clients to feel like they need to hire you for their next gig. Reach out to them and network actively so that you’re closing more deals than you think you could before.