Too many small business owners get stuck thinking that “marketing” their business can’t be organized into a repeatable system, but it’s essential for building and scaling a profitable business.
All too often, they find themselves caught in a cycle of: find a new client, serve the client, and then go back to find the next client. Creating a Client Acquisition System prevents these cash flow peaks and valleys and is essential for building and scaling a successful business. Additionally, a good client acquisition system takes into account your goals, strengths, how you deliver on your promises, and the tactics that work best for your target audience.
Here are the five key steps to creating such a system:
Step 1: Build a Solid Foundation
Building a solid foundation starts with having profitable offers and knowing how to deliver them to your clients efficiently. Small businesses typically have small teams, so it’s essential to have a system in place for delivering on your promises. If something goes wrong, you should be able to fix it quickly and easily, without disrupting your entire business.
By starting with a solid foundation, you can avoid the stress and chaos of running around with your hair on fire trying to solve problems that could have been avoided and instead focus on growing your business while serving your clients at the highest level.
The second part of your foundation is your unique value proposition (UVP). This is the language you use to describe who you help and how you help them. Your UVP should cut through the noise and make you stand out from your competitors. It should also be backed up in all your marketing efforts by your content pillars.
The third part of your foundation is your visual brand. This is the visual identity of your business, including your logo, colors, and fonts. Your visual brand should evoke the emotions you want to elicit from your audience and help you become visually identifiable.
A common mistake I see, for example, is people wanting to upgrade their client avatar and work with higher-level clients, but then not upgrading their visuals to match. This can create an inconsistency between what you’re saying and how you look.
Having dialed-in offers, a clear UVP and your visual brand all pointing in the same direction is how you create a brand that supports your growth plans instead of one you have to overcome to succeed.
Step 2: Attract an Audience
What strategies do you have in place to bring new people into your business’s ecosystem? The key is to choose the right strategies for your unique business, based on what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.
Focus on strategies that allow you to leverage your assets and reach more people with less effort. This means using tools and systems to automate tasks and streamline your workflow. It also means building a team to help you with marketing and other tasks. When you choose the right strategies and leverage your time, money, and team, you can grow your audience in a more scalable way.
Small business owners often underestimate the importance of having a large enough audience at the top of their funnel. This means that they need to build awareness of their brand so that the right people can filter down through the sales process and become clients.
A word of warning…..don’t buy into having to use tactics that you actually hate just because it looks like they’re successful for other people. There’s a difference between pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone and adopting a tactic that is the bane of your existence. The latter is setting yourself up for failure. Let’s avoid that for you.
Step 3: Nurture and re engage your audience
Step three is about nurturing and reengagement. It’s not enough to meet someone once and then never interact with them again. You need to stay in touch and build a relationship with them over time.
I understand that it can feel overwhelming to even think about having to keep in touch with everyone you meet. But there is a way to systematize and automate this process so that it becomes a seamless part of your business.
Just like there are leveraged steps to bringing new people into your business ecosystem, there are also leveraged opportunities to re-engage and nurture relationships. You can absolutely “systematize” these processes while leaving space for personalization.
Step 4: Have conversations that close clients
Step four is all about having high-integrity sales conversations where you are comfortable and confident, and that you put the needs of your prospects first. A really good Client Acquisition System is designed to turn sales conversations into confirmation conversations, not consideration conversations. The goal is to always be on the same side of the table as your prospect and working towards a mutually beneficial outcome.
The supporting activities around your conversation can also be systematized so that your quality approach is what happens time and time again.
Step 5: Track data and tweak the system
Step five is tracking and tweaking the system. This is something that most people neglect, but it’s essential for success. You need to track your results, both positive and negative, so that you can identify what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments to your system.
The goal is to strike a balance between quitting too soon and throwing good money after bad. If you’re not seeing results, don’t be afraid to make changes. But don’t give up too easily. It takes time to build a successful client acquisition system.
Think of it overall as each step being its own lever. If you’re not seeing the results you want, you need to find which lever needs to be adjusted in order to succeed. Tracking the data at every step is what helps you zero in on the problem instead of randomly trying the next idea to pop into your head but has you basically starting over unnecessarily.
Why These Steps Go Together
Learning how to sell from the stage, for example, is a great leveraged strategy that when done correctly can give your prospects a great experience and help them determine if you’re the right person for them.
Unfortunately,I’ve also seen people get very good at the tactic of selling from the stage without having a solid foundation around client fulfillment in place so they’re not able to deliver on their promises to their clients. This can lead to refunds and a damaged reputation.
Another common mistake is focusing too much on nurturing and reengagement without attracting enough new people. Even if you’re great at nurturing your existing relationships, you’ll eventually hit a financial plateau if you’re not bringing in new leads.
Even though my description of a Client Acquisition System is laid out linearly to make it easy to understand, it’s important to remember that it can go wrong at any point. This is why it’s more important to build a solid, evenly performing system than to get really good at one piece and lag at another. You will grow further and faster by doing an increasingly good job at all five steps than by getting really good at one step and failing in other places.
Creating a client acquisition system for the front end of your business is completely possible, doable, and highly recommended. It will allow you to continually grow your audience, reengage with your audience, have high-integrity sales conversations, and create predictable income so that you can scale.
Leveraged! Client Acquisition System Program
If you want more information on getting our help with exactly how to do this, and more detail on what goes into each step, please visit (link). We’re very excited to launch our 12-week leveraged program on October 5th. This hyper-focused program will walk you through all five steps of creating your own client acquisition system.
Why do this NOW?
It’s the “OH CRAP” time of year, when we realize that we only have 12 weeks before the holidays and it’s time to get some work done.
The results we have today are a reflection of the activities we were partaking in 90 days ago. This means that the fourth quarter is the perfect time to make sure we’re going into next year strong.
If you want to know more about how to go into next year strong and make the most of the “OH CRAP” time of year to put a client acquisition system together for your business, please click here to learn more about Leveraged. We will teach you how to create a strategy and system that will work for your business, time and time again.
