Digging this one up to re-inspire! What are you doing this week to move your business forward?
Reshared post from +Lynette Young
One New Client Challenge – Day 1
If you had to find one new client this week … could you do it? If you couldn't pay your mortgage or feed your family unless you landed a new client this week could you get a brand new client? Would your sales process have to change? How? Would you need to postpone existing work to 'hit the street' to find prospects? Do you even know where to look?
Sometimes I feel as independent business owners / freelancers we get a bit stagnent. The 'feast or famine' cycle of either prospecting like crazy to find new clients and then burning the candle at both ends to do the work is holding us back. We forget we need to be doing both at the same time – always. Exhausting, I know. We need to build the systems now to prospect and produce simultaneously.
Just like you can't expect to jump in LinkedIn after you've lost a job or all your clients and magically have the network be productive for you – we can't expect to ignore our sales pipe and think that we can turn it on anytime we please. Let's brainstorm here & challenge ourselves to put a fire under our butt and get a new client this week. Found a lead that just doesn't work for you – find someone in your network you trust and refer it out… don't look at it as lost work but a future opportunity!
Ready… Set… GO!
Inbox and outbox on desk — Image by © Cooper Mears/Corbis
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I am a member of the local Chamber of Commerce and their IT Manager. Once, I decided that I would get a list of their emails and all my mast clients/prospects together and throw them into a mailing list. Each week I was sending out an enewsletter to all of them and each week I had those prospects contacting me again, old clients needing new work and people that never heard of me needing ideas.
MailChimp.com is a fantastic way to do this if you would just take a little bit of time and write. If you charge $65 an hour, it takes you 2 hours to write your newsletter each week and you get at least 1 $1,500 client out of it you've just made $1,370.
I do my best each week to follow the 3 foot rule. Anybody (especially business owners) get my business card and elevator speech. Thanks for the motivating post.
That's a great idea +Jeff Ragan. I just ordered new cards o this will be something I do when they come in.
+Shawn Terry I'm curious how much spam flags you got for adding people that did not request to be added to an email list? That is SOOOO out of rules for CAN-SPAM!
+Lynette Young The emails were freely available. They were listed with the local chamber and the others I had collected opening the door for communication. And clearly inside the emails I state why they were added. I actually didn't trigger any spam issues and didn't get any complaints out of about 300 people. I did have about 15 unsubscribe but that's it. My read rate was actually quite high too.
I have considerably high business ethics and even just went through an internet law course that covered spam law. I believe I did things properly.
Good to know I was just curious, MailChimp has pretty easy import abilities.