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44 Ways to Follow Up with Your Prospects

You know you need to follow up with prospective clients, but you often find yourself putting it off. “I already called them three times,” you think. Or, “They never answer my emails anyway.” Or, “I hate hearing no.” Or, “I don’t want to bug them.” Or, “What do I say that’s new?”

It’s only natural to resist placing phone calls or sending more emails to prospects who didn’t return your last call, never seem to reply, may not be ready to buy, or might say they’re not interested. But here’s the good news. Calling and emailing prospects and asking them to hire you is not the only way to follow up!

Yes, you can call or email your prospects and ask if they’re ready to work with you, but you can also send a letter or note by postal mail, overnight them a package, send a text message, tweet them, tag them on social media, or instant message them online. And those are just different communication channels you might use. The type of messages you deliver can be much more varied than simply asking prospects to do business.

Come in from the Cold: Warm Up Your Marketing

by C.J. Hayden | Sales Conversations

Do you feel uncomfortable trying to market your business to strangers? Most of us do. Making cold calls, knocking on doors, or attending networking mixers where you don’t know a soul can be challenging or even painful. Happily, cold approaches like these are not all there is to marketing. In fact, you may never need to use them at all.

Perhaps you already know this, and have been marketing your business in other ways. For example, launching a website, exhibiting at trade shows, running pay-per-click ads, distributing flyers, sending emails and letters to people who don’t know you, or posting promos on social media. But all of those approaches are “cold” as well, and many of them can be expensive.

Whenever you are trying to start a marketing conversation with a stranger — with no introduction, referral, or shared connection to help you — it’s a cold approach, whether you make it on the phone, in a room, by mail, or online. And cold approaches, across the board, are less effective than warm ones.

Why Your Marketing Recipes Need the Right Ingredients

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

I use a cookbook metaphor in my Get Clients Now! system to illustrate how to go about creating an effective marketing plan for a self-employed professional. An essential element of that plan is what I call Success Ingredients — the missing ingredients your marketing and sales activities need in order to be successful.

Why is this important? Let’s say you decide you’re going to market your business by attending live networking events in your area. You’re not sure where to begin, but you’ve just received an email invitation for a Chamber of Commerce mixer, so you decide to go.

Arriving at the mixer, you discover that everyone you meet is either a salesperson for a local corporation, or a solo professional who is looking for business from those companies. But you are (for example) an acupuncturist.

Your Market Niche: an Essential Key to Success

by C.J. Hayden | Success Ingredients & Tools

How important is it that you have a clearly defined market niche for your professional services? Can’t you simply make yourself available to work for anyone who might need you? Doesn’t having a niche limit you to serving only a small portion of possible clients? Why would you want to rule out any possible sources of business? Discovering the answers to these questions can have a powerful impact on the success or failure of your business.

When you have a market niche, it defines either your target market — who you wish to target as prospective clients -– or your professional specialty –- the services you specialize in providing within the broader scope of your profession. The most effective niches define both these elements.

Your Marketing: One-to-One or One-to-Many?

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

It seems like there’s a new way to market your business appearing every five minutes here in the 21st century. How can self-employed professionals know which marketing methods will make the most sense for them?

When evaluating possible ways to market your business, it can help significantly to apply a quick test — is the marketing method you’re considering “one-to-one” or “one-to many?” Here’s how they’re different.

Get More Clients by Doing Less

by C.J. Hayden | Getting Things Done

I’ve been hearing from a lot of overworked entrepreneurs lately. “I’m worn out from going to networking events,” they say, or, “I’m tired of always having to think up new stuff to post online.” They’re working pretty hard at marketing, it seems -– networking, blogging, posting to social media, speaking, making calls, sending out email blasts, and more.

When they don’t get the results they want from marketing, entrepreneurs usually try to take on more. If their focus has been on in-person marketing, they begin marketing online. Or if they have been writing articles and blogging and being active on social media, they decide to start speaking and giving workshops. Or if they’ve been going to lots of events and lunches and coffee dates, they add in a call-mail-call campaign.

Huff, puff… it makes me tired just to write about all that activity.

Find Your Marketing Muse: 5 Types You Can Choose

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Mindset

Are your marketing activities in need of a boost? Motivation? Inspiration? Consider adopting a muse.

A muse is a person or being that serves as a source of inspiration. To adopt a muse means to intentionally choose a model individual to inspire your work. Following a chosen muse can guide you as a self-employed professional to sort out what you need to do in order to market yourself successfully.

Here are five Marketing Muses you might consider adopting. Each one embodies a different set of abilities and personal qualities which you might be able to relate to, or to emulate.

4 Ways to Market in Your Sleep

by C.J. Hayden | Marketing Plans & Strategies

As a self-employed professional, the demands of marketing your business have the potential to give you many sleepless nights. It often seems that the list of things to do is endless, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to market your business, serve your clients, run your office, and keep up in your field.

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