WHERE DO THE CLIENTS COME FROM?

The final—and most important—piece of designing your own personal Get Clients Now! program is to select the specific marketing and sales action steps you plan to take on a regular basis over the next month. These are the actions that will generate business for you.

At the beginning of this book, you learned the most important secret of professional services marketing and sales: The magic formula is choosing a set of simple, effective things to do, and doing them consistently. That’s where the clients come from.

You are about to do exactly this. You are going to choose ten specific actions to take, and perform them daily or weekly for the next twenty-eight days. Your choices will be based on the “stuck” place you uncovered with the Universal Marketing Cycle, as well as the marketing strategies you selected to address that area in need of more work. These action steps are designed to enable you to dramatically improve your marketing. But you need to actually do them in order to find clients.

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs when you get serious about marketing in a focused, consistent way. You begin to get results in unexpected places. The telephone rings, and it’s a prospect you spoke to three months ago saying he is suddenly interested in working with you. You go to a networking meeting that seems like a complete waste of time while you are there, and run into a hot new prospect in the elevator on your way out. You get an exciting referral from someone whose name you don’t even recognize. It’s almost as if the universe has noticed how hard you are working and decided to reward you.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these out-of-the-blue opportunities are accidents. There is a direct connection between the level of effort you put into marketing and the results you get out of it, even when it seems as if the results are completely unrelated to your efforts. This phenomenon is so common with people who use the Get Clients Now! program that it has a name: the Persistence Effect. If you persist in making ten calls a day, every day, you will get business, but it won’t all come from the calls you made. If you consistently attend one networking event per week, clients will appear, but not necessarily from the events you attended. Don’t worry about why it works; just know that it works.

The existence of the Persistence Effect can help you enormously in choosing the Daily Actions for your program, because there is one more secret to successful marketing: It doesn’t matter so much what you choose as it does that you choose.

Picking ten things you can do about marketing—and actually doing them—will break you out of analysis paralysis, give you a plan, and get you into action. Even if you picked the “wrong” ten actions, the Persistence Effect would make this focused activity pay off for you in some way. Would it pay off as well as picking the “right” ten things? Probably not. That’s why you are about to choose only actions that represent the stage of the marketing cycle you are focusing on and the marketing strategies you already selected.