Over-Fill Your Client Pipeline

We were recently talking to an acquaintance about his business.

"It's just so lumpy..." he sighed, "I work really hard to get a new client, look after them well, focus all my energy on them, finish my work for them successfully and then find that there is not new flow of work. I have to start working hard again to find a new client (and starve in the meantime) and then the cycle starts again..."

Sound familiar? It's the old rollercoaster of feast or famine. And peculiarly, it's often more successful entrepreneurs that suffer with it.

No Excuses

The number one rule you absolutely MUST have in your business is that you msut do SOMETHING to bring in clients or client referrals every single day. Otherwise, no matter how good you are at your business, your pipeline will run dry.

Overfill

Most service professionals are just happy to have some prospects floating around in their sales pipeline. Not good enough. You need to constantly aim for something far bigger than this. You want to be able to cherry pick your clients from a string of potentials, don't you?

Too Many Prospects

You're joking aren't you? Is having too many potential clients really that big a concern?

You have two choices with too many prospects:

• Put them on a waiting list, a subtle yet powerful way to raise excitement in what you do in your prospects.
• Leverage your time and effort, by creating group programs and charging less than your regular fee for one on one time, improving your rate per hour.

Time To Get Disciplined

There is no easy way around this. You need to allow yourself no excuses. Set up your marketing systems, get organised and master the discipline of attracting new clients and prospects every day.

That means, doing some marketing every day no matter how bogged down you are. Get your newsletter out the door, do the press release, get emails out to associations to see if you can present to them, write thank you notes... whatever is going to keep you in the face of your clients.

Overfill your pipeline by doing the little things every day. Make the time for it, even when you are busy. Make a commitment to doing this for the rest of your career and just do it.