How to Acquire New Clients

If you want to lose weight, there are a few disciplines that you must keep. You need to eat certain foods while avoiding others, always in certain amounts, and increase the amount of time and energy you spend moving your body. There are no secrets to producing that result. What you need to know has been known for a long time.

If you want to create greater wealth, the disciplines that produce that result include saving and investing money. For some with lofty goals, it often means starting or buying businesses. Spending less than you make can be difficult, but it is an age-old recipe with a long history of working.

If you want to acquire new clients, there is a single discipline that will ensure you achieve that outcome. That discipline is prospecting. This discipline might include any number of activities, but the behavior it requires is the same regardless of method: You must ask the client for a meeting to explore helping them do something different.

When you ask someone you know to call and ask someone they know to meet with you, you are prospecting.

When you call someone you believe you could help produce a better result, you are also prospecting.

Showing up at an event where the kind of people you intend to help congregate and asking them for the opportunity to meet with them, is also a form of prospecting.

Even though it lacks the same effectiveness as asking another person in a medium in which a conversation is possible, many people try to ask for a meeting over email. Even though the effectiveness is very low—and will likely be lower in the future because it is being abused by those who seek efficiency over effectiveness—it is still prospecting.

Inbound Marketing is not prospecting. While it is related to prospecting, content builds awareness and can cause people to reach out to you directly, it is not prospecting. It is excellent for building a brand and nurturing relationships with the people who you serve. Unless the content requests that a person schedule a meeting, it is above the funnel, making it marketing, not prospecting.