A Client Acquisition System is essential for a thriving business, but it can feel absolutely daunting to have to create one, especially when the entire thing seems like a moving target. One of the toughest decisions involved is choosing the marketing tactics that will help you meet potential clients. With so many options available, it’s hard to know where to start and what will be most effective for your business.
To help you make informed decisions, I want to share a decision-making framework that I use. It’s a simple but powerful tool that can be applied to many areas of your business, including client acquisition.
Putting Bumpers In Your Gutters Analogy
You’ve probably heard me say the phrase “putting bumpers in your gutters” before. It’s an analogy from bowling. And yes, there were years I spent bowling on a regular basis with my mother. And to help you get the gist of my analogy here, you know that the ball must travel down a long, narrow alley to knock down the pins. On either side of the alley is a gutter, where the ball can roll away and miss the pins entirely if you’re not careful….or any good at bowling.
When your bowling ball falls into the gutter, you’ve wasted that throw. However, most alleys have mechanisms that you can opt to put into the gutters so the ball cannot fall in. This makes it easier – and almost inevitable – to knock down at least a few pins. This option is usually for novice bowlers or children, though I often wished they would let me use them.
In business, putting bumpers in your gutters means using strategies that will help you avoid missing your goals entirely and make it easier for your efforts to achieve a result. So when I talk about putting bumpers in your gutters, I mean we want to keep you from going too far in a particular direction that becomes counterproductive for your business goals.
Choosing Tactics to Attract Your Audience
Choosing the specific tactics to use to attract your audience is one of the hardest decisions to make. To truly scale your business, you need more than one way that attracts an audience and brings people into your ecosystem. The best way to do this is to choose one or two tactics, get them dialed in so that you are good at them, growing your capacity and bandwidth with your experience and then add the next tactic.
Unfortunately, most small business owners try new tactics for the wrong reasons. Instead of adding onto successful systems, they find themselves spread too thin constantly trying to learn new things, and their energy and focus gets diverted from anything else that they had started to try.
This happens for several reasons:
Humans tend to think in all-or-nothing terms and then pile that problem onto the fact that we live in a society that has taught us to demand instant gratification. If something does not work immediately, people feel as though it is not working at all. In reality, most business owners simply have not given it enough time to get any results, or time to tweak it slightly, before giving up.
Failure to track any actual data means there is no way to know if something is working or not. You have to be careful because the stress of growing a business creates situations where your feelings will lie to you, and the overwhelm and frustration can have you “feeling” like you need to just do something else. We’ve discussed this previously on the live show Erin Marcus LIVE: Are Your Feelings Lying To You? and explained why it is so important to base your decisions on data instead of your feelings and emotions.
Finally, marketing is one of the most fear-inducing aspects of running a business. Marketing often means getting visible, putting yourself out in front of others, asking them for money, and positioning yourself as a thought leader in your niche. All of these things can be daunting, and it’s easy for your subconscious to find ways to keep you safely in your comfort zone instead.
Distracting you and keeping you in constant “learn how to do something” mode rather than “take action” mode is one of the most effective ways to just stop you in your tracks. This can be a vicious cycle, as the more you learn about marketing, the more you may start to feel overwhelmed and insecure.
Having bumpers in your gutters when it comes to choosing client acquisition tactics means making informed decisions based on data and unbiased observation, rather than potentially unreliable feelings and emotions. This is how you determine if a tactic is right for your business and when to not give up on something too soon. It’s the difference between giving up too soon or throwing good money after bad.
Choosing If Your Business Is Ready for The Next Step
Bumpers in your gutters help you make decisions about which opportunities to pursue and which ones to avoid.
To grow your business, you need to make decisions based on where you want to be in the future, not where you are right now. Think of it as dressing for the job you want, not the job you have. If you want to have a million-dollar business, you need to make decisions like a million-dollar business owner, even if your business is only generating $100,000 right now.
However, it’s important to avoid jumping into tactics that your business isn’t ready for. This can lead to wasted time and money. Bumpers in your gutters can help you make informed decisions about which opportunities to pursue and which ones to avoid. They can help you balance the need to take risks with the need to protect your resources.
Why does this happen?
Many business owners are looking for an easy button, not because they are lazy or are not hard workers, but because as a society we have been led to believe that everything we want should be achieved instantly. There was even an entire marketing campaign with an actual easy button, telling us, “That was easy!” We see the marketing that advertises “just do this one thing” and we see the social media accounts of business owners who are pretending to be successful, and it all looks so easy.
Many business owners have such an entrepreneurial spirit and want success so badly that they will try almost anything to make it happen. And while that is not inherently a bad way to be, it can cause problems when we start to grab onto insta-tactics or try to implement things that we are not ready to do.
How to Increase the Speed of Your Business Growth
Imagine your business as a bowling ball. The gutter is wasted time and resources. The pins are your goals. To accelerate your business growth, you need to narrow down the alley and keep your ball from rolling off into the gutter. Two bumpers that can help you do this are data-driven decision-making and self-reflection.
Data-driven decision-making helps you identify the strategies that are working and those that aren’t. This allows you to focus your efforts on the most effective activities and avoid wasting time and money on things that aren’t moving the needle.
Self-reflection helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your limiting beliefs and fears. By addressing these issues, you can become the best version of yourself and lead your business to success.
Being able to combine these concepts when you are making the next decision about what to do to move your business forward, is what helps you stand a chance at making the right decision.
As a business coach, I work at the intersection of what my clients need to do and who they need to be to do it. I’ve seen too many business owners go too far in one direction or another because they don’t know what to do or because they’re letting their limiting beliefs and fears hold them back. If you want to accelerate your business growth, you need to put bumpers in your gutters. Data-driven decision-making and self-reflection can help you stay on track and achieve your goals.
Leveraged Client Acquisition System
Ready to learn how to create a Client Acquisition System and build bumpers in your gutters to avoid derailments? Join us in Leveraged and learn my 5-step approach to scaling your business.
Our 12-week Leveraged program will teach you how to create a Client Acquisition System that you can replicate over and over again as your business grows. This is not a course, it’s a program where we’ll be there live to help you every step of the way.
Click here to learn more about Leveraged. Let’s get started and be done by Christmas!
