Going Direct to Your Dream Clients
When I first started in consulting, I was fortunate to have amassed over 10 years’ worth of great relationships and contacts within the surfing industry.
These included relationships with companies I had both worked for and represented, retail clients I had sold product to, and for whom I had conducted specific product sales training, as well as a number of wholesalers I had become well acquainted with whom I had either worked for or become friends with.
As national sales manager of the sunglass company, I traveled interstate regularly throughout Australia plus travelled to America twice a year.
Because of this, I had developed a sizable and warm market of people I could contact and arrange to speak to regarding our new business.
When we originally set up Blue Rocket, it was primarily niched in the action sports or surf market, so we were almost inundated with companies we could work with.
Gradually, I worked my way through almost every single company in the surfing industry both in retail and wholesale.
For four years, we were kept very busy from my existing list of contacts.
It was fantastic. It worked. But after those golden years, the surf business transitioned into a mature market.
Warm Market Gone Cold
Suddenly, we found our niche market had gone cold and our contacts were leaving the surf clothing industry.
My business partner and I were now working on a new niche and direction we could move into.
We tried a variety of different things. We started to run more training events. We endeavored to make some of our products available online.
We found there was little we could do to give us the same deal flow we had experienced in the previous four years from our warm market, which had been made up primarily of repeat business and referrals.
We had tried some fax marketing and even done some cold calling. We attempted many different marketing methods to develop relationships with new people and companies we wanted to deal with.
We’d had some success with our marketing, but found the clients that were coming to us were less than our ideal clients. We would run online ads, or speak from the stage, and then get enquiries. But often, these leads didn’t comprise the type of businesses we felt were optimal.
We needed to gain exposure from our marketing to attract dream clients in new industries, but our existing marketing was not reaching them.
By chance, I was listening to a program by Dan Kennedy one day. He talked about the idea of creating a pack of information that you could send to a potential client. Doing so, would establish credibility prior to even executing the first contact with them.
The Contact Power Pack
The pack he spoke of included a book, or a free report written by the business. It would also contain an audio program, perhaps an interview and some video testimonials on a DVD.
A business would add into the packet, a list of frequently asked questions and other education-based marketing pieces of information, that were designed to position them as an expert. Because of this expert educator positioning, you would also be preconditioning your potential client prior to even speaking to them.
I listened to it all on audio. I didn’t attend any of his trainings. I didn’t see the video side of what he was doing. I just listened as he described what it was he would put together and how it worked.
I started doing what he recommended for our business. The first thing we did was to decide what we were going to include in our package. Then we started to market our business by sending these packages to people in decision making roles.
As a result, we started to connect with some bigger clients that would have been unlikely to come to us through our prior marketing efforts. We had shown up differently to our competitors who were still cold calling or cold emailing. We introduced ourselves with good information and as the experts and so established authority and a good connection.
Consequently, we were then able to get through to the decision makers on the phone, and make appointments so we could have a real conversation about the possibility of working together.
In the coming chapters, I’ll explain more about how to go direct to your dream clients, and what to include in your package.
We Called That List “The Dream 100”
I learned about The Dream 100 from another gentleman I had studied under, Chet Holmes. Sadly, he passed away a couple of years ago. He was extraordinarily brilliant as it related to simply encouraging people to go after a better pedigree of client.
We would look and see who was advertising. We would also check out the weekend magazines included with the paper.
We would also go online to see which companies were advertising for salespeople, because typically, if people were advertising for staff, it meant their business was growing. If their business was growing, then they would likely need more systemization, training and more scalability.
We built a strong list of 100 companies we wanted to do business with. We researched who the decision makers were and how their companies were performing.
We would then put packages together and send them to those targets we had identified as being potential strong leads.
For this effort, we were able to get in front of key clients with high turnover and teams of salespeople who were an ideal fit for our services.
Walking in on Your Own Project
Because we were positioning ourselves with these packages so cleverly as experts in sales consulting, on a couple of occasions we would get meetings with potential clients, and because of what we had sent them, and because of how powerful it was, they had already made the decision to engage our services prior to our arrival.
It was almost like walking in on your own project that had started without you.
I have now introduced and implemented the Dream 100 process to over 80 of my clients, and they are enjoying spectacular results.
