Show Me the Clients: Update Your Prospecting Strategy

Start with the easiest thing to change: the person in the mirror

5 min read

The Internet is full of marketers who will try to convince you that there is one silver bullet to buy yourself a million more prospects overnight. No offense to marketers, but that’s simply not true.

Assuming that you could send one perfect email to your mailing list and end up with a full client roster is like assuming you can do a couple of sit-ups and look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That’s just not how it works. (Marketing team, we still love you, we promise!)

More than likely, if your client roster doesn’t look the way you want it to look, it’s because you’re not taking the right steps to get the ideal people in the door. Keep reading to learn exactly how we maintain the appropriate client rosters for us. 

Start with the easiest thing to change: the person in the mirror

Look, we all wish we could program our prospects to be the ideal client fit for us, but we just can’t. To ensure that you get the right people in the door for the first time, and sitting in your office for repeated meetings, you need to think about how you are coming across. 

What are you conveying in your client meetings? Are you truly listening to their needs? Are you finding ways to add major value? We hope so! 

On the flip side of this, are you conveying your boundaries to clients? Are you explaining what they can expect if they choose you as an advisor? Just as we want to ensure we are the best fit for our clients, we want to ensure that the clients walking in our door are truly people that we can do our best work by, and if they aren’t, we want to politely refer them in a more appropriate direction. 

Your pitch isn’t perfect yet? That’s okay, ours wasn’t great at the beginning either! Practice in front of whoever will listen. Bug your wife, your kids, and heck, even your dog. The more you practice the cadence of your meetings, and the more you practice skills like active listening and note-taking, the better off you will be in any prospect situation the business throws at you. 

Get a little surge in your life: be intentional with your time

In surge meetings, we advise you to be as efficient as you possibly can to create the best results for yourself and for your clients. We advise you to take the ideals created by surge one step further and push yourself to make your lifestyle as efficient as you can in all possible areas. 

In other words, select between one of three marketing strategies and really see them through. We love all of the ideas, but you’ll never be able to see what works if you try to run twenty different plays at the same time. 

With that in mind, take the focus off of the fancy tracking spreadsheet, and onto the strategies, you’re interested in. Do you know someone who has had success with them? What information is out there that can inform the work you are doing? Take that information and run into your new marketing strategy. 

Pay attention to your efforts: measure input over output

It’s easy to dream about a strategy, and just like that trip to the gym, it’s easy to feel like you deserve results after the first visit. But we all know it takes more than that to see results. 

Commit to a strategy and really give it your all for a predetermined amount of time. (At a minimum, you need to try something for six weeks before you can determine whether or not it was effective). 

Try to implement a strategy with fidelity, and then, in the end, check the metrics. Was it successful? If it was, what made it so? Was it a flop? If it was, that’s okay! You learned what didn’t work, and you can hone your strategy before the next round begins. Either way, make some brief notes at the end of the day before you sunset the existing strategy–this way, you’ll be able to use your own tips and tricks to inform your future work! 

Happy Planning!