FARUKI

A great question a guy once asked me was about how to get business clients. The guy was a consultant - i.e. he was selling products and services to companies and he wanted to know if I could give him ideas how to get more business clients. Sure, I can give him and everybody else lots of ideas how to get more business clients and that is why I wrote this article.

The first step to getting more business clients is to make a list of your existing business partners. You can ask your existing business partners to introduce you to companies and individuals they work with. In some cases existing vendors or customers of your partners could be interested in doing business with you, too.

For instance, one of my business partners is a speaker who makes presentations mainly to companies but also to associations. One of the benefits of establishing contacts with an association is that this is an organization of people from many different companies, so you get a lot of exposure.

When he makes a presentation for the association, he uses some cute marketing tactics, such as a referral campaign and contests. If a person wants to take part in the contest, he or she has to write a testimonial and give his or her name and contact information and then a lottery is drawn. The winners receive gift certificates, which give them the right to hire him again, so he manages to get repetitive gigs.

For example, I think he charges $5000 per presentation, so he was giving gift certificates for like $500 and I think $250 but here is the key point in this. They have to be redeemed within a certain window of time. It could be three months, four months, or six months but that is really the trigger point there because that gets people moving that gets people into action.

If the winner does not redeem the gift certificate, this is as if he or she had burned money. This moment is critical because this is the trigger for action - redeem or lose money. Everybody is happy with this arrangement because people enjoy his presentations and they get a gift certificate, which has a value and gives them one more excuse to hire him again.

You always want to give people a good reason to hire you again. I would look to challenge you to think of some creative ways to incorporate that into the way you sell. When people are there you want to capture that experience and then you want to remind them of that experience afterward and the benefits that they got from it and look to followup when they are excited about you and their experience.