Relationship Marketing

So what did I say to him?

“Get a grip! The odds of that actually happening to you are about the same as having the wing of the space shuttle drop off and hit your car as your cruising down the highway. The reality is that it just won’t happen.”

His first reaction was that he thought a marketing coach should have more empathy. Unfortunately my belief is that when in doubt…fall back on the truth.

But the reality is so what if he got “overwhelmed with clients?” Of all the business problems one can have in this world that is he one to have. Should miracles happen and in fact you did get overwhelmed with new business, the solution is rather simple.

Raise your prices and/or create a waiting list.

There. Problem solved.

But this attitude is a real issue. And it causes a lot of problems. The biggest of which is that because people erroneously think that they are going to get overwhelmed, they approach marketing services very tentatively. They fail to do everything they should to get business visibility for themselves.

And as a result, rather than having too many clients…they have too few.

Or none at all.

Here’s the reality.

There are lots of people who offer similar or exactly the same services as you do. It is a very competitive marketplace out there.

And…(and this is going to depress a lot of you) it makes absolutely no difference that you think you provide a better service than your competitors.

And the reason that it makes absolutely no difference is because people who have never worked with you before…who don’t know you from the proverbial hole in the ground…also don’t know how good you are.

That is something people can only learn (and this is a really important point) AFTER THE FACT.

So if you’re going to play this game you need to go into it realizing that it is going to be a battle for new clients. And don’t let the few referrals you have…or the nice kind words of friends that they will “certainly do business with you” lull you into a false sense of complacency. (Which it probably will.)

Because the referrals that you get in the beginning are nice, but they won’t be enough to sustain you in the long term. What you want to do…the really smart move…is to use the short breathing room that these initial referrals offer you to build a marketing machine that will consistently generate new prospects to you and then put in place a stay in touch system so that you can turn large percentages of them into paying clients.

But in my experience as a marketing coach, very few people do this.

Instead they say to themselves, “Gee I don’t understand why all these people are saying that it’s difficult to get clients. I’m doing just fine.”

But sooner or later, that one client dries up. And then they discover that consistently (which is a word you will hear me use a lot) getting clients is a completely different task.

And I know this to be true not only because in the 16 years of being a marketing consultant I’ve listened the stories of woe that dozens and dozens of people have shared, but also I was a victim of this same hubris myself.

More next time.