5 Reasons You Should Never Give Up Pursuing Your Dream Client

It can feel like a complete waste of time and energy to pursue one of your dream clients when they are locked down in a contract with one of your competitors. When years and years pass, with no change, it doesn’t seem to make sense to continue to call and ask for a meeting with someone who has never shown the slightest inclination towards changing. Here are five reasons why you should never give up pursuing your dream client.

1. Current Partner Fails: Your competitor may have won the business a long time ago and may have done a tremendous job solving the problem they were hired to solve. They may be doing an outstanding job right now. However, commercial relationships have ups and downs, and if you are not communicating through the ups and downs, you’ll miss the opportunity to have a conversation when they are struggling or failing to produce results.
2. Current Partner Apathy: Over time, it’s possible for your competitor to become apathetic about serving their existing client, your dream client. They were “gung ho” at the beginning, but now they worked with your dream client long enough that they are apathetic about making changes, solving systemic problems, or going the extra mile. You will not know when this happens, in your dream client will not know you’re there to solve their problem if you do not continue to pursue them.
3. Decision-makers Change: At any company, people change jobs and move on. This is true for your dream client as well. Even though the decision-makers that you’ve called on for years have expressed to you they have no intention of changing partners, at some point, some of them will leave their company to pursue a new opportunity or retire. You can monitor these things on the social channels, but to make sure that you know when changes occur, you must continue to pursue the clients you want most of all.
4. Client Needs Change: Your competitor may have been doing an excellent job for the last 6.5 years. But those 6.5 years are now over, and your dream client may, in fact, have new challenges, new opportunities, and the new needs that accompany them. Your competitor may or may not be able to help them with those new needs. You want to be known before this happens. You make that unlikely or impossible if you give up on your dream client.
5. Persistence Pays: Persistence pays off over time. It’s an installment plan. When your competitor has your dream client locked down, persistence matters most of all. You don’t expect to win this week. You don’t even expect to win this quarter. But you are future-oriented, and you are playing the longest of long games with the most important prospects in your territory. When there is a change in circumstances or events that trigger some new need, you want to be known, and you want to be someone who has persisted long enough to have earned the right to be considered as a potential replacement for your dream clients existing partner.

 You are already going to spend part of your week nurturing your dream clients. You are also going to be prospecting, doing the work to create new opportunities. Even though your attempts to communicate with your dream client may be less frequent, they should be no less persistent than your efforts to create opportunities in what you might consider being warmer leads and easier clients in which to create opportunities.

Note: If you are new here you may not know what a dream client is. It’s a client who will perceive what you do as massive value and will allow you to capture some of the value that you create. They are unlike regular prospects, and the fact that winning one makes a significant difference to you and your company, and it makes a considerable difference to your dream client.