Even professions that traditionally don't engage in prospecting, such as lawyers and notaries, are increasingly seeking ways to attract new clients!
However, there are ways to optimize your actions and attract customers without (too much) effort!
To know, to like, to trust!
Being known, being appreciated, and having a capital of trust, these are the three indicators that must be greenlit to successfully conclude a sales conversation. Also, if you want to minimize your prospecting efforts, you will primarily seek to engage in a commercial approach with a target that already trusts you, that already knows you, or with whom you will be recommended.
To achieve this, you need to rely on your networks, whether online or offline. If your goal is to find new clients in a relatively short time while minimizing effort, it's best to start with those who already appreciate you!
8 tips to attract your customers effortlessly
1. Take stock! List the people you are or have been in contact with, classify them by relationship history, and identify those who could become clients. Don't forget that you may have relationships in your network, even close ones (friends, sports, cultural contexts, etc.) who may never have considered what you can offer them professionally, simply because that was not the context of your meeting. And yet...
2. Adopt an attraction approach: this involves meeting your contact to get to know them better, making contact, warming up the relationship, and sharing information. Be interesting before being interested!
3. Look for connectors, those who have a culture of networking and connecting people. Because getting in touch with them also allows you to access their network. They are quite easy to identify: just look at how they came to you. These connectors are relationship pointers, they like it, they function like "hubs"!
4. Multiply contacts. At each meeting you have, ask for a recommendation, 1 or 2 names that you can contact on behalf of your contact! If you have 10 lunches, you potentially end up with twenty names!
5. Restart an impactful approach, that is, think about what you can give in return, seek reciprocity. Being too self-centered is counterproductive and would attack the bond of trust.
6. Set yourself some benchmarks not of results but of means. For example, the time spent per week, the number of contacts, lunches...
7. Prepare the ingredients for success! Know how to pitch your product or service offer, prepare a brochure, a website or at least a business card. Be ready!
8. Adopt a follow-up approach: even if it doesn't lead to an immediate sale, maintain a relationship of trust.
Online: volume with less effort
With digital technology, the relationship between effort and efficiency is changing significantly: social networks, especially LinkedIn (see our article '4 tips to increase sales with social selling'), the professional network, allow your actions to be reproduced infinitely and without additional cost. In the real world, you can do at best 200, 220 lunches per year. With digital, there is no limit.
With a well-crafted post offering interesting content, you can reach your entire first-degree network or even your second-degree network, resulting in a rapid impact on 500 to 2,000 people ! Of course, it's less engaging than a lunch meeting, but repetition will help you increase the 'to know', 'to like', and finally 'to trust' indicators.
We can see it clearly: while attracting customers effortlessly isn't possible, doing it at a lower cost is still feasible if you do it the right way!
The advent of new technologies has enabled the evolution of business in many areas, especially in communication and prospecting. To optimize business activity, it is essential to integrate these new prospecting methods into your strategy. Find out how with this webinar:
