1. Offer an assessment. An assessment is an excellent way to engage prospective customers in a way that doesn’t feel like selling and is value-added. It could be as simple as a questionnaire that you score and interpret, to an on-site, half-day working session to assess their needs and come up with the outline of a solution. You can charge for the assessment (people value what they pay for more than something that is free!), offer it for nothing, or refund the price if the customer goes ahead with a purchase.
2. Lower the risk of trusting you. A guarantee is of course the most basic way of making it easy to trust you and your products or services. There are other things you can do as well. For example:
3. For new customers, offer to hold back 15% of your fee based on the customer being satisfied. No complicated metrics—just, “Are you satisfied?”
4. Try to get prospective customers to speak to an existing, satisfied customer. Carry with you a list of half a dozen satisfied customers, and their phone numbers, that you can share with any prospect.
5. If you provide a service, break your work into smaller chunks, with checkpoints along the way.
6. Give a free sample. If you offer coaching services, give a free session; if you’re a landscape gardener, draw up a plan to revitalize a small portion of a prospect’s garden.
7. Consider a value-added email newsletter or report that you send to all past, current, and prospective customers. A real estate broker I know issues a very well-researched quarterly report on the state of home and land sales in my hometown—a document I find quite useful. I personally write a monthly article on building long-term client relationships, which is emailed to my newsletter list. Not infrequently, someone will get my newsletter and write back, “Andrew, give me a ring, I’ve been meaning to speak to you about an issue…” The key word here is value-added, which many newsletters just are not.
8. Use collaborators. One banker I interviewed told me that one lawyer he knew had referred 20% of his lifetime revenue to him. Reciprocal relationships with other small business owners can provide a significant leadstream for you. I have found that developing just a few of these types of relationships—and really building mutual loyalty and respect—is more productive than having dozens of them.
9. Focus your marketing efforts. Sending a postcard to 10,000 people in your city (I get plenty of these, believe me!) is not a useful strategy unless you know that those individuals may clearly have a need for what you do. Most small businesses have a focused niche, and they need to create mechanisms to reach their target customers efficiently, not spend money on broad-based advertising or mailings.
10. Build your network before you need it. Asking near-strangers for a referral is awkward and a waste of time. Start with your 20 most important professional relationships, and include on your list clients, colleagues, influencers, mentors, and others—I call them “catalysts”—who can introduce you to people and help make a deal happen. Identify a priority or goal that each person has, and think about how you can help them achieve it. Devise a staying in touch plan for these 20. Then keep going, and think about the next 20.
11. Be a collector of marketing best practices. There are some excellent books out there on marketing and customer development, but don’t ignore what’s right in front of your nose: other successful small businesses that are innovative marketers. Some of the most successful workshops I have ever facilitated have involved me getting out of the way and letting a group of clients from different industries share what does and does not work for them when it comes to building client and customer relationships. Identify the fastest-growing, most customer-centric businesses in your community, and take the owner out for coffee or lunch to pick his or her brain about what they are doing to grow their customer base.
12. Leverage your existing, loyal customers. Ask your top twenty customers to write a testimonial for you. Yes—20, because some will forget to do it or won’t have time. Then, ask the ten best if you could videotape their testimonial. Put these short (1-2 minutes) videos on your web site or on a DVD to hand out to prospective customers. Create compressed versions that you can then also email. Also ask each of the twenty if they know of one or two people who could benefit from your services.

  Andrew Sobel is the leading authority on client relationships and the skills and strategies required to earn enduring client loyalty. Andrew is the author of the newly released “All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships” as well as the business bestsellers "Clients for Life" and "Making Rain".

You can reach Andrew at:

www.andrewsobel.com

Tel: 505.982.0211