How Do You Find New Clients?
"How do I find new clients?" This is one of the most common questions asked by agency owners and biz dev professionals. There are a number of common answers that your agency has probably come up with to this question, including:
1. Hiring sales people. Ideally, hiring GREAT sales people.
2. Calling prospects. (Cold calling? In 2017???)
3. Creating online content ("If you build it, they will come..." Right?)
4. Buying ads (TV, Radio, Billboards...)
5. Buying digital ads (AdWords, AdRoll, AdSense...)
6. Buying social media ads (Facebook, Snapchat, Woo-woo...)
7. Networking! Take a handful of cards to pass out at the local business lunch.
8. Playing golf. My sales team always assured me this would one day lead to sales.
9. Email blasts! I mean, if they have an email address, they probably want to be your client.
10. Asking for referrals. You never know who the guy you know, knows...
Some of these methods are better than others. But none of them are really a reliable, sustainable system that you can turn on, then ratchet up or down based on how many clients you can onboard at the moment.
Flip the Script
At Relevant Business Development, we flip the script and instead ask the question: How do the right new clients find your agency?
We start by building out the target audience that your agency is uniquely qualified to serve. And then we dare to ask the ultimate question for the business owner who wants to grow their agency: "Who do we WANT to work with?" Yes, you are allowed to only target the clients you want to work with. Why isn't "what we want" included in the usual business development equation? You work for clients that want to work with you. Shouldn't that be a two-way street?
Micro-target
We call this narrowly-defined target audience a "Micro-target." Now, "micro" has nothing to do with the size of the audience, a micro-targeted audience can be 2,000 or 2 million records. The key is that it's narrowly defined, such as "decision makers who will attend the PGA Show in Orlando this year" or "owners of businesses making between $10M-100M who want an ad agency specializing in outdoor marketing for the Pittsburgh metro."
For the audiences above, these micro-targets are narrowly defined enough that we can write messaging that shows them we understand their specific needs and are qualified to help solve their problems. We can create the proven advertising tactic of developing a "Pain Point and Solution" statement like this:
"Does your business need billboard placement in Pittsburgh? We can provide a sophisticated digital billboard campaign at the lowest cost for your company!"
Multi-touch
By simply creating that "Pain Point and Solution" statement, we are ready to craft a series of sales pieces that literally walk your micro-targeted prospects down the sales funnel. The easiest way to describe this is by saying, "Hey, why don't you take all of the info, charts, and FAQs you would give to a prospect once she has reached out to you and give them to her FIRST!"
That's right, instead of waiting for a prospect to raise his hand and say, "Can you tell me why I might become your client?" You just assume that your micro-targeted audience is interested and start helping them to sell themselves on your service.
Then, we build these sales pieces into a tight, automated funnel that allows the prospect to move at her own pace. We call this a "Multi-touch" campaign. And once it is built, tested, and optimized, it is like an automatic pipeline of business development leads that you simply need to point towards your top prospects and then lean back and watch them qualify themselves.
Sounds great, right? But would that work for your agency? I mean, your clients are especially hard to reach, right? Well, we've made it work for all sorts of hard-to-target audiences, and we never back away from a challenge!
Set up a 25 minute call and hear how our Micro-targeted Multi-touch System might be able to start getting your agency an automatic pipeline of new business leads from the types of clients you WANT to work with.