There are only 6 ways to get clients.
Some are faster than others.
1 requires cash.
The rest — require time, consistency and volume.
They all work.
You shouldn’t use only one.
But you shouldn’t start by trying to do all of them.
Which will you focus on?
Comment below and let me know.
Oh, and if you want help applying these to your business let me know and we can chat.
Transcript / MP3
The number one question I get is Greg, how do I get more clients to which I usually answer? Well, what client getting activities are you spending your time on to which I usually get a response of, huh? Now in this video, I want to break down six client getting activities that is really where you should be spending your time in order to get clients and how you should approach them depending upon what your cashflow looks like. Let’s get it going. … What’s going on, guys, Greg Hickman here with all agency at all, agency.com. And in this video, I want to talk about activities that you could be doing in order to get clients, let’s call it client, getting activities. This is where you should be spending your time. Possibly. We’ll talk about how much time you should be spending on each of these activities and how you can make sure that they’re happening each and every day so that you can always have clients coming in. Now, if you are new here, go ahead and click that subscribe button and that notification bell, because we release a new video every every Thursday. But I got a little surprise for you. If you stay till the end, I want to get you this workbook. And there’s an accompanying training video that walks you through how to use this. And this workbook will take you through one of the exercises. We take our clients through on how to unpack their expertise so that they can start getting paid for their thinking, not just their labor. So we call it the agency product Heizer, and you can click the link below this video to download it and the walkthrough video, uh, if you want to start getting paid for your know-how and getting paid for your thinking, all right, so client getting activities, what are they, where should I be spending my time, Greg? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about. So there are six. Now, first I need to give a shout out where shout outs are due. Cause um, I actually was putting together, uh, this video and someone who I respect and admire Alex mosey over at gym launch wrote an organic post. Uh, I think in one of his free Facebook groups talking about these six forms of media and how they only started with one and how you kind of need all of them, but you, you know, all these things. So he kind of helped me take my concept and flesh it out a little bit more. So shout out to Alex, hormoz@gymlaunchatgymlaunch.com. So the six client getting activities, what are they? Let’s just dive right in. The first one is paid media. What is paid media, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Google display ads, anywhere where you can pay money to get eyeballs. So just like in this little picture, you pay money, you run an ad and you get put in front of some eyeballs, uh, hopefully a lot of eyeballs and hopefully your ads good. And has those eyeballs interested, clicking and moving through into a sales funnel? So paid media is a way to go. You could look at paid media, being sponsored at a conference where you get the booth and you get the signage and they put you in emails and they put your logo up on all the things like you’re paying to have your brand, your message, um, all your products in front of your ideal audience and or, uh, in order to gain an audience and build an audience. So paid media is the first one. Now, if you have no cash, you’re probably not going to use paid media. So you’re going to want to focus on all of the following methods. So that means that obviously in order to do paid media, you need to have the cash flow, uh, available in order to invest in paid ads. But I will tell you paid ads is one of the fastest ways to start building an audience, generating leads and generating sales. But I understand that it’s not for everybody and it’s not for everybody in the beginning, you should be able to get your business to 10, 15, many cases, 20 K a month, without any sort of paid advertising. And in that case, then you should be utilizing these other options that I’m going to be talking about. Now, the next one is called owned media. My drawing here shows a newsletter going out to a bunch of people and you know, a percentage of those people will open the email, click the yes, and follow the call to action of that media. So own immediate is, you know, I’m paying Facebook or I’m paying YouTube to get in front of these eyeballs. Well, at some point I’m capturing this attention and I’m putting it on an email list and I own the email list. So I get to communicate with that email list, how I see fit to me. I believe that you should be emailing your list at least two to three times a week. If not more, some people have, uh, you know, their own little mental issues with that. But if you want to harvest opportunities and there’s a way to do this, right with, by giving value and leading with value, you can really take that own media, that the email subscribers, the people inside your Facebook group, any sort of other kind of lists that you have access to. Those are assets that you can marketing to YouTube subscribers, right? That’s right. Actually another one, which is the next, which is earned media. So each and every week, I’m putting out a video like this. And over time that is seen by more eyeballs. So if you click the link in the description below this video, where I shared the workbook, you’re going to get onto my email list, which now you’re in my email list, which is that owned media. I earned your attention by showing me up every single Thursday, releasing videos like this. I sh I earned turn your attention by releasing a podcast. All of these things now obviously earned media takes more time. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit. So we have paid media, we have owned media, we have earned media. The next one is referral partners. So you’ve all heard of referral partners, referral partners. I look at as more of the strategic referral partners, not like an affiliate program, anything like that, a referral partners. I think a lot of people try to get too many referral partners. And if you could have a small handful of two to three under 10 really solid referral partners that constantly feed you, your ideal prospect is better than having a hundred people that are like meth that maybe send you one person every once in awhile. So referral partners is a another way that you could focus on getting more clients. Uh, when we first launched our agency, when we were building funnels for people, we focus mostly on people that use infusion soft. So we went and spoke with infusion soft, and we created a partnership where they would send leads our way, and we’d have conversations with infusion soft certified partners. So maybe there’s a software company that you, you know, your ideal prospect uses that you can partner with. Maybe there’s another agency that has a complimentary service. Those would be kind of strategic alliances that would allow you to create a referral partner relationship. Now, the next one is client referrals. So like I alluded to, this is a little bit different client referrals is where you create hopefully a client referral engine that allows your existing clients to introduce you to people just like them. If you’re not currently doing this, this is a great way to get new clients. Um, having an engine that facilitates these conversations is really helpful. And also depending upon who you are, you might incentivize your clients. So I know that if we have a client that has, you know, invested in our coaching and training programs, if they introduce us to someone just like them, and that person ends up becoming a client, we will give our client a referral, kickback, whatever you want to call it, a referral payout fee, a commission fee, a kickback, whatever. Um, I’ve heard tons of names for it, but that is a client referral. So you can install an engine inside of your client fulfillment system. Your clients have so many experience that allows you to do that, uh, and kind of make that more systematic and more repeatable. Now the last path of client getting activities is to do outbound marketing. Well, outbound marketing is really like cold calling, cold emailing. Um, you’re probably seeing a lot of this in your LinkedIn feed right now, where there are messages coming in. And yes, there’s plenty of people doing this incorrectly and doing this in a sleazy way and you might not want to do it. That’s fine. You don’t have to. It’s just one of the six ways to go get clients, but there is a way to do it correctly and there is value to it. It’s actually very similar to paid media. You have someone reaching out to businesses on your behalf, and it’s about volume. It’s about how many people can they connect with and, and how many conversations can be started. It’s the same as you paying money to get it in front of eyeballs. And in many ways they’re, they could convert pretty similar. I think you’d be surprised when you look at some of the numbers, like 1% conversion, 1% click through on your ads. And a 1% response rate on, on outbound are pretty common, but you’re paying for someone to do the outbound and you’re paying, or you’re paying for your ad places to be on Facebook. Now, the thing with outbound is there again, there are ways to do it correctly. We’ve dabbled in it. We haven’t kind of focused too much effort on this yet because we didn’t give it the volume that it needs. Now brings me to a really important point of these six. So we had paid media, we had, um, owned media, earned media, referral partners, client referrals, and outbound of all of those, the latter. So everything but paid media, they all require consistent high volume effort and they really require more time to pay off. So you got to think about the long game, which is why kind of a mixture of these things is really going to be important for you over time. But a pro tip on this is don’t try to do all of these at once. You’re probably not. It’s going to be too much for you, especially if you’re a one-man or one-woman shop and you don’t have help. So focus on a couple of these that make sense for you. For us. We double down on paid media and we doubled down on our, our earned and owned media. And just recently, multiple years in, like we’re really developing our client referral engine. Uh, we’re revisiting our referral partner relationships. And, uh, lastly, we’re probably going to get back into trying some outbound. That’s going to be the last one we focus on because, uh, I just enjoy the other ones more right now. And we’re able to hit our targets, utilizing those, but the key, the key is, and again for you, if you’re just getting started with this, don’t try to do all of these at once. My recommendation would be to pick one and focus on it for the next 90 days. Again, especially if you’re using the options that are the non-paid, it’s going to take some time. So you can’t say, Hey, Greg, I released one YouTube video like this. Didn’t get me clients like go release one to two videos a week every week for 90 days. And then come back and answer that question, go add value to the marketplace, go start building an email list and emailing them two to three times a week with value and inviting them to speak with you about your programs, products, and services. These are all things that you should be doing in order to get clients, hence client getting activities. Now the easiest way I’ve found to roll this in to my, uh, my habits is to add it to my morning Workday routine. So I don’t know about you, but when you wake up, you might have your morning ritual, your coffee, taking the kids to school. Like I do maybe reading, doing some self development, but then you get to your office and you have that, hopefully that 30 minutes to 60 minutes of like your Workday startup ritual. Well, I would just tack one of these activities into that ritual. Um, if you’re doing outbound, do the outbound, but remember these are high volume. If you’re going to be doing outbound, what I’ve found is that if you’re not doing a hundred outbound touches a day, it’s probably not going to deliver you the results that you need. So like when I’m saying outbound, it is high volume with email two to three emails a week, that’s higher volume with your content, that consistency, all of these things, high volume, high effort over time, which I think is why some people that have the monies like to get into ads earlier, because it’s an accelerant, but here’s the deal. If you have a bad program, a bad service, and you don’t know who you serve, you’re going to burn your money in ads too. And really, like I said, at the end of the day, it’s a combination of these six that are going to work best for you. And you might lean a little bit heavier in one or the other, but if you want to be a healthy business, a sustainable business and have longevity at some point in the evolution of your business, you’re going to be utilizing all of these, uh, at some point, and as your grower team, some people might be tied to each of these channels. He might have a media buyer doing paid media. You might have a content marketing team doing some of the earned and owned stuff, a copywriter, writing your emails. So there are ways to find and create leverage in these. I’m going to actually did a video about, uh, the wealthy agency owner, where I talk about three classes of leverage. You can check that out in the link, somewhere up here, uh, to learn more about that. But the point is, if you’re not spending time on client getting activities, you ain’t going to get clients. And the nature of the game is that the ones that don’t require you to pay money, money, like paid media are going to really down to you, sticking with it longterm. So you got to give it at least, you know, 90 days and you gotta be consistent and you gotta be as high volume as possible. So a weekly video, two weekly videos, two to three emails a week I put in that higher volume category. If you’re doing outbound messaging, LinkedIn cold calling high volume is like a hundred a day guys. So you know, 10, 10 a day. Yeah, that’s great. But like, it’s good. It’s going to take you even longer. If that’s the only channel you’re utilizing. And if you follow what we preach here at all agency, which is getting paid for your thinking, if you’re not out there getting known, which is the earned media side, people probably, aren’t going to look at you as an authority, which means you’re going to have to build more trust, probably need to lean more into the referrals so you can see how all of these compliment each other and would benefit you to not be reliant on any one of them. You see plenty of people on Facebook that are like all in, on Facebook ads and then their Facebook ad account gets down. And then they’re in a tough spot because they don’t have any of the other ways of getting clients. So my recommendation is don’t try to do all at once, but you also, over time, you don’t want to be dependent upon only one in order to survive. So our goal at all, agencies, to be able to get clients using all six of these methods and ways. And I think you should too, but to get started, focus on one and get after it for 90 days. And if it’s one of the ones that’s not paid media, high volume, high consistency, give it 90 days and then come back and report on this video. I’d love to hear how that went. And don’t forget in the links below I put together a great workbook for you called the agency productize. Or if my iPad ever opens up, you can download that there. And it’s the first steps towards you packaging up your expertise so that you can get paid for your thinking. And we’ll see you in the next one. [inaudible].
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