One thing seems to concern all small business owners, experienced and novice entrepreneurs alike: how to get more clients. Without clients or customers, your business can’t survive long, but you only have so much time to devote to chasing and nurturing leads.
What to do?
The trick, in my experience, is to learn how to get more clients and customers by working smarter. If you can maximize the impact that your decisions have on growing your customer base, you and your team won’t have to spend as much time trying to attract and close sales with people who need your products or services.
And trust me—if you’ve found a real need for your target market, your clients and customers are waiting for you. You just have to get your ideas in front of them!
Track Your Sales Funnel
One thing that you need to do when you run a small business is keep track of your sales funnel. Why? First of all, you need to know whether you’re going to make payroll. That’s pretty important, right?
But aside from ensuring that you have a happy team that gets paid on time, why else would you want to know where sales are coming from?
Maybe you’re thinking of expanding and opening a second or third location. Perhaps you’ve got a great idea for a new service that you want to offer your clients or customers. How do you know if and when you’re going to be able to afford it?
You need to know how many opportunities your business has to make a sale, what stage each of them is at in your sales funnel, and what percentage converts from each stage to the next.
Keeping track of your sales funnel will allow you to predict, and if you do things right, you’ll be able to predict with more than a little accuracy.
Be Accurate in Your Predictions
Your ability to predict where future sales will come from depends on the accuracy of your data. When it comes time to expand or offer a new service, you want to make sure that the numbers that you base your decisions on are an accurate representation of your business. To do that, you’re going to need to implement some tools that will help you see where your business is strongest and weakest—which services or products are doing the best and the worst.
But before we jump into that, I want to address how you’re reaching your audience and what you’re doing to get them to take the leap with you.
Be Nurturing
A critical way to learn how to get more clients for your business is to understand how to encourage each lead you have to move into the next stage of your sales funnel. We all have leads that start out kind of squishy at the beginning. You know the kind I’m talking about. Perhaps you met someone at a networking event and talked about what your business has to offer. Your lead might have expressed some level of interest, but you probably have a bit more work to do before that person passes from the lead phase into the customer phase of your professional relationship.
Just because a lead has not bought from you yet does not mean that that relationship does not have value. You need to nurture that relationship and see where it takes you. Making the sale could be as simple as discovering a need that your lead has and that you can fill.
Now that your lead is aware that you can solve their problem, you’re starting to discuss price and whether you are a good fit to work together. One of the primary goals of nurturing a lead is to get them to buy something from you. But that’s not the only goal. You also want to ensure that your customer loves what you do and how you do it so that they will be an advocate for your business and refer you to others who have a need similar to theirs.
If you’re not getting enough leads from one stage of your funnel to the next, something in your strategy needs to change. You might not be networking enough. Perhaps you need to do more digital marketing.
Understand Cost Per Acquisition
Another thing that you need to track is what we in marketing call your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). Your CPA is essentially how much it costs you to acquire a new customer. The goal is to have a CPA that is less than the profit you will make from a certain customer. Having those numbers will help you determine whether it is worth the cost to get someone to buy your services or products. But you also need to consider more than the initial profit that you stand to make from a customer. Is the customer going to repeat their purchase, perhaps as part of a monthly contract? You need to understand their lifetime value to your business.
How to Get More Clients? Leverage Your Data
Keeping track of and nurturing your sales funnel is one important place to gather data. But it’s far from the only one. In fact, I suggest four primary data sources for small businesses to track—online citations, web traffic, phone inquiries, and social media.
To illustrate this point, let me talk briefly about online citations. Put simply, online citations are the virtual places online that your business shows up. These places (which list your name, address, and phone number) include your social media accounts and Google My Business page, travel and review sites, and local listings. You could spend hours and hours finding new places to add citations, but the important thing to remember is that your business information needs to be accurate and it needs to be consistent.
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