MAKING YOUR STRATEGIES WORK

Filling your marketing pipeline with prospects, contacts, leads, and referrals will be an ongoing process for as long as you are in business. By choosing to focus on this stage of the marketing cycle now, you are acknowledging that this is the area of your marketing that currently needs the most effort. Later on, when you have overcome some of your pipeline-filling challenges, you may decide to focus more energy on one of the other stages. But it is important to recognize that you will always need to keep your pipeline full.

This means that whatever marketing strategies you decide on for filling the pipeline, you should be willing to keep them up over an extended period of time. In marketing, more of the same works much better than a little of everything. Ideally, your pipeline-filling activities should become automatic and habitual. Even when you are busy, you should always allow time for making new contacts, networking, speaking, or whatever your chosen strategies are.

It’s natural to wonder whether the strategies you have selected are the best choices. You may find yourself wanting to switch around just to see if something else might work better. Be patient and don’t change your pipeline-filling strategies during the twenty-eight days of the Get Clients Now! program. It simply isn’t enough time for you to judge your results accurately. It’s okay to change individual tactics if it seems appropriate; you might switch from cold calling to warm calling, for example. But don’t alter your overall strategies, from say, networking and referral building to promotional events.

The best way to determine how well a particular strategy is working to fill your pipeline is to track your results over time. There are three statistics that will be helpful to you in evaluating the strategies you are using:

1. How many prospects did each strategy generate?

2. How many sales resulted from those prospects?

3. What was the dollar value of those sales?

If you carefully note the exact source of each prospect, you can easily track these statistics for the month of the program. If you keep tracking your results for three months, six months, or a year, you will have a much more accurate perspective on which marketing strategies work best. Then if you decide to make a change, choose just one new strategy at a time to try out. And remember to keep tracking.