Issue 9: Where are the “leaks” in your business development process?

In this Issue:

Lead Article: Where are the "leaks" in your business development process? Part 1
Recommended Resource: WordPress
Blog Roundup

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Where are the "leaks" in your business development process?

Part 1

I often get called by potential clients who are struggling to grow their firm and aren’t quite sure where to start to get more new business.

Usually I’ll talk them through a very simple – yet powerful – diagnostic to identify where they need to be focusing their efforts. What I look for are "leaks" where potential clients drop out of their business development process.

The essence of the diagnostic is based on a simple model.

If you want to get more clients, you need to do three things well:

You need to "get in front" of high potential prospects for your business and initiate relationships with them.
You need to turn those relationships into genuine opportunities to win business.
You need to convert those opportunities into sales.

Let’s look at each of these three in turn to find out where there could be problems or opportunities for improvement.

Initiating Relationships

There are thee areas where I find professionals struggle when it comes to initiating relationships.

Firstly, they don’t know the right methods to use to find potential clients for their firm. Or in particular, they don’t know which ones work and which don’t.

Here are some guidelines on selecting the right lead generation approaches:

When clients hire professionals, they need to know two things: can the professional do the job? And can I trust them and work with them?

One part is a rational decision based on the demonstrated expertise of the professional. The more complex and important the work, the more expertise the client will require of the professional.

The second part is an emotional decision. In their interactions with the professional the client will get a feel for whether they will be able to work effectively with them. And often they’ll prefer to work with a professional they like rather than a better qualified one they don’t.

So if you want to initiate relationships with clients that are going to lead to sales -the best methods to use are those that let you demonstrate your expertise, and interact personally with the client so they get a sense of whether they’ll be able to do business with you.

To this end, the most effective approaches I’ve found are public speaking and running seminars, getting referrals, and strategically using your website.

When you present to a group of potential clients at an event – particularly a small-scale one, you’re both demonstrating your expertise, and interacting with them and showing your personality. They come away both with a sense of what you know, and who you are.

Referrals work through transferred trust. Someone they know and trust tells them you’re an expert and that you’d be great to work with – and that works as well as, or sometimes better, than you demonstrating it yourself.

Your website too can demonstrate your expertise through articles and blog posts you write. And if you do it well, your personality can come across in your writing – or nowadays in video or audio you showcase on the site too. And, of course, your website has the advantage of being able to get you in front of many more potential clients than you ever could physically.

Other approaches can work too. Networking allows you to meet potential clients and get to know them – but it takes much longer to demonstrate your expertise than running a seminar can. Direct mail – if done right – can demonstrate your expertise if you send useful information such as articles or reports – but it’s more difficult to get across what it would be like to work with you. Advertising can have its place to get your name heard of – but it’s often difficult to get across your expertise or personality an an advert.

Often the best use of these other approaches is to direct potential clients to your top-tier approaches: use direct mail to invite them to a seminar. use networking to identify people to invite to events. Include a direct-response element in your advertising to bring people to your website with the promise of a relevant free report.

Secondly, they don’t execute their lead generation activities well.

How many dull, dull presentations have you sat through from professionals? Or ones where you’ve cringed as the whole presentation has been a pitch for their services rather than a useful, informative talk?

Or have you ever been asked for a referral and asked who they’d like to be recommended to and got back the answer "oh, anyone"?

And how many times have you been to the website of a law, accounting or consulting firm and found nothing there of any value or interest other than pitches for their services and a list of their people? And that’s if you can find the site in the first place.

If you want to generate useful leads – you must invest in getting good at your top tier lead generation approaches.

If you’re going to use presentations or seminars, get along to your local Toastmasters group. It costs peanuts, you’ll have a load of fun, and more importantly: over time your confidence and your skills at speaking in public will grow tremendously. I guarantee it.

If you’re going to use referrals, make sure you’ve developed a plan, you know who to ask, who you want to be referred to, and how to ask. I shared a lot of information on how to do this in the free "Referral Masterclass" ebook you got when you subscribed to the newsletter. And in a few days time, you’ll be hearing from me about the launch of my new ebook and audio on getting more referrals which contains even more.

And if you want your website to generate leads for you, you must make it content rich and engaging for potential clients in the early stages of their decision-making process. In other words provide them useful information for when they’re still researching their problem or opportunity.

And, of course, you’ll need to get traffic to your site – either using search engine optimisation techniques, through pay-per-click, or through links and joint ventures with other sites.

The final mistake many professionals make is that they don’t convert their initial contact into a relationship.

They do a brilliant presentation, but don’t follow-up with the people who give them business cards.

They get a referral – but when they contact the person they’ve been referred to, they don’t have any immediate needs – so they don’t bother to keep in touch.

Or they get lots of visitors to their website, but they don’t capture their details so they can keep in touch and build the relationship.

In short, what many professionals do is chase "hot leads". They pay attention to potential clients who they think may be ready to buy immediately. But when they find they’re not ready yet, they stop communicating with them and go chasing after other hot leads.

The end result is that the professional firm finds itself constantly
hunting for fresh leads with urgent needs. Whereas if it had nurtured
it’s "not so hot" leads over time, it would not only have hot leads -
but would have been able to build its credibility and trust over time to
position itself more effectively for a win.

The key is to have a consistent process for keeping in touch with potential clients so that you’re top of mind with them when their initial problem progresses to a stage where they’re ready to take action. I’ll discuss that lead nurturing process in the next issue. But the first step is to be able to drop initial contacts into that process.

If you’re doing a presentation at an event, you must think through how you will get the contact details of attendees and initiate communication with them. For example, you might produce a more detailed report on the topic of your presentation and ask attendees to give you their business card if they’d like you to send them a copy and keep them in touch with further ideas on the subject.

If you get referred to a high potential prospect who’s not yet ready to buy, get him on your priority list and think through every week: what can I do of value that would be useful for him? Perhaps send him a relevant article. Invite him to an event where he may meet useful people. Introduce him to good contacts. Phone him up with some useful industry news. Anything to stay top of mind as someone who’s an expert, valuable resource.

On your website, make sure you have a "bribe" – something of value to give away in return for visitors giving you their email address to keep in touch. And make the bribe prominent.

In the Next Issue…

I’ll be covering the second big area: turning relationships into opportunities to win work.

Recommended Resource: WordPress

I’m surprised I haven’t recommended wordpress before. WordPress is the free blogging platform that I use to run my website(s).

Over the years it’s evolved from a pure blogging system to a sophisticated content management system. Yet it’s still free.

WordPress is now used by some huge corporates – and some sites don’t look in the remotest like blogs – witness the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts UK site which actually uses the exact same theme as I use on my blog.

For small professional firms and sole practitioners I recommend using WordPress to power your website. There are hundreds of professional themes and plugins to do everything from contact forms to podcasts to search engine optimisation. You can have a highly professional site running for a few hundred dollars that you can keep adding content to yourself.

Find out more at WordPress.

Blog Roundup

I’ve put up a number of posts on the blog since the last issue, here are some of the highlights:

Are Traditional Websites Dead? was a blog post based on an interview I did with Raintoday.com. I showed how my move from a traditional "brochure" website to a content-rich blog radically increased my website traffic and the number of clients I started getting through the web.
In Are You Exploiting This Key Strategy To Get More Clients I looked at the importance of running structure marketing and business development campaigns rather than just one-off activities.
Both Vertical Differentiation and Authority Marketing explored the concept of establishing yourself and your firm as an authority in your niche – and how that is a much more valuable market position than trying to differentiate yourself in other ways.
Have You Forgotten How to Listen was a plea to professionals to stop trying to "pitch" to clients and to spend more time listening to them. It was also one of my most re-tweeted posts ever and generated a lot of buzz on Twitter.
Finally, the Top 10 Ways To Screw Up A Client Relationship was a (partially) lighthearted look at the ways professionals manage to mess up relationships with clients. It’s a good watch-out list for things not to do – and there are some useful suggestions in the comments too.