How do you get clients?

Why dont you ask Homer what to do?
This was his genius way of promoting a bowling alley
he was put in charge of..



I just couldnt resist posting this.

The first thing I'd encourage is to not jump into so many different services at once. Pick one niche, become great at it, and stick with it. From there, as your clients request various services start to branch out your offerings.

Finding your first client/s can be difficult if you don't know where to find them. What methods have you used in terms of prospecting and marketing your services?

Don't get discouraged - It's all about testing, tweaking and perfecting the process.

Open up your local newspaper, find whoever's paying for that ancient dinosaur mass marketing and tell them their audience has evolved. Show them proof; keyword searches, consumer data (people shifting to google when looking for a business). "YOU ARE LOSING ALL THESE TARGET MARKET CLIENTS!"

Get to them with a cold call and explain that you're interested in working for a plumber/whatever their niche is in that area. Get them thinking, "oh if I don't take an interest in this guy he's just going to help out my competitors."

Don't ever offer something for free, it completely devalues you in their opinion. It comes off scammy, professionals don't work for free in their minds.

Also don't use a cold calling script, it makes it more easy for them to dismiss you as a telemarketer that's selling them garbage in their opinion. Don't procrastinate with what you're going to say. Instead just have a simple conversation, they should be talking more than you... Ask them questions about their website performance, is it even making them money? There's always room for growth.

It isn't the darn services.

It's how you're communicating with prospects.

You've been sending a lot of emails, yes? Have you tried talking to anyone?

EDIT: I'm not being smart. I'm saying there's a process to selling, and if you're using email alone you're going to have to send an awful lot of them and wait. If you talk to people, following a consistent sales process, you can get some quick answers.

It's wrong targeting. Not just that, but that is where most go wrong the most. Targeting small business owners who don't have grand dreams of doing this and that or the hyped up selling points we use, or having a high converting website, a mobile optimised site, blah, blah, blah, and when someone is talking about something they have no immediate, visceral, relevant emotional connection with you get brushed off. Particularly in Britain.

Plus virtually every guy who purchased an offline course teaching you to offer all these services are approaching these targets. And have had it drilled into them through the bad advice of people here of just pick a niche and dial, dial, dial. ''Just pick up the phone and go for it''.

Think to yourself, if you were up to your eyeballs running your business in tough times and you get a phone call asking you ''Hi Jane, is now a good time? OK, great. Real quick, I own a mobile website company and I'm just calling around to see if...''. Really, if you're that business owner, does a mobile website or a website revamp really feature on your immediate radar all that much. Is it relevant? 95% it isn't. Yet people still think those are good odds and spend most of the week just trying to get a sale or 2.




You have to target relevant people with services immediately relevant to them to sell more with far greater frequency, otherwise you can't sustain a business when most of your time is spent calling. I get this when I have to enter my details into Hubspot to get their great material. I have to enter my website, my number of employees, biggest challenges and act like a big company ready to implement a $100,000 marketing campaign. And then later on a salesperson from their team will contact me (by email because I give a fake number as otherwise they would phone me) talking about things that are relevant to businesses with lots of employees or expensive marketing campaigns. It has no relevance to me and I wouldn't even begin to enter into a sales calls. It's might be great to use their services, it probably would bring in more leads, this that and the other, but it's not where I'm at. This is exactly how we are when we think any old business owner is fair game without properly researching them and finding what they need.

Or if we adopt the needle in a haystack approach each day.



Even the best cold callers on this place have to go through hundreds of calls to get a few customers. Those numbers are just too high. Anyone happy with them is not someone to take seriously as an expert and you should not follow their advice.

Whereas people who target the right people with a proper methology, can generate 5 to 8 £3000-6000 clients a month from a pool of 50 people. Or 15 leads from 50 calls like a guy got for me a few days ago. But because I was making the mistakes I talk about here with target the wrong people, conversions are low. But trust me, hiring a a professional who got that amount of leads has made come to my senses very quick and realize that if I had something they couldn't overlook and was far more relevant, that my business would explode with those kinds of numbers leads from just 50 calls when I scale up and target ultra-qualified people with something of relevance to them.

Trouble is, most Offline WSO's are made by amateurs for amatuers. Learning the skills to be able to target a market before hand, properly consult with businesses, address their real needs in a tailored way, get them real results, improve what they are currently doing, is hard on this place. Rarely do people teach them, but it's so worth it.

90% of the people are contacting businesses doing what you are doing. And have to burn through 90-99% just to get heard. Me too. I know how hard it is doing it that way. Statistically, you aren't going to sell much for your efforts.


We are all trying to make 'us' money, and find people willing to give us it. Opposed to finding out how we can really find businesses we can offer greater value than they pay to us.


There is a thread that got posted yesterday on the Offline section about how to consistently get £2000 a month clients. The guy presenting his methods is ... well, look check out his accomplishments and pedigree for yourself here, then check out that thread. He lays out how you can sell more. This is consummate display from a real pro of how to go about things properly.

It's pretty good, but the background images are a little too clustered toward the center of the page and really add nothing. They were a distraction. Overall, nice effort though.

I had the same problem. have tried an array of services...no go on most of them. Maybe it's my selling ability--I dunno. But I will tell you I picked up the Bob Ross 9x12 WSO and have already made about $1000 in just 3 days work selling ad spots to local business owners on a giant postcard. What I've found is that since biz owners can actually see this card--it's a tangible thing---they've seen the value a lot quicker without a lot of "selling". And it's budget-friendly and they get fast, effective results with it.
what's worked well for me & my husband is just targeting new businesses (you can get these sort of lists from infofree.com), and targeting biz that are already doing direct mail coupons (like Valpak), or who are spending money in Yellowpages/yellowbook or spending money with PPC.
I will say with this biz model it definitely works fast if you just beat the pavement--plan your routes and walk in cold. And if I can do this or my husband--ANYONE can. My husband has NO sales training at all--and killed it today with just a few hours of going out into the community & meeting with local business owners. And we always mention the other services we offer (online marketing services) & many of these biz owners say they will want to touch base with us in the near future about online marketing. so it's a great foot-in-the door strategy that you can focus on solely and really scale (making $2k-$5k per card on average pure profit) or use it to build relationships with local biz owners and upsell them on your other services in the future.

Generally speaking business owners aren't interested in any of those
things.

What they want is more sales and more profits.

And when they see that a particular service can help them bring in
more sales and profits (which usually takes some education) they'll
hire someone they trust to do it for them.


So the first part of the process really is building trust and educating
your prospects about how a service you offer can benefit them.

Often the best way of doing this if you're talking to a business owner
in person is to ask a lot of questions and listen.

People who listen and are genuinely interested are so rare you'll
stand out.

And the more information you gather about a business and what's
important to the business owner the easier it is to customize a
solution that you know the business owner will get excited about.

From there you can establish the potential dollar value of the
solution you've offered and get paid to get started.

But you can't go straight from A to Z.

You need to go through the steps if you want to get paying
clients and take your focus off what you want and put it on
what your prospects want.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

I'm from Scotland and have had no problem selling these services in the past, so there must be a problem with your approach as there are definitely plenty of people you can sell these services to in the UK.

Pick one service and concentrate on that. Then look at the best ways to promote that one service, this alone will bring you more success. Once you then start getting clients on board and have delivered and gained their trust, then you can start cross promoting other services to them.

It would be helpful if you posted more info about how you actually approach these businesses. Then we can tell you how to improve.

I'd actually recommend putting up a warrior for hire ads. Build up a portfolio with adoring customers, then use that to leverage offline leads.