Good communication is the cornerstone of every client relationship. Heck, it’s the cornerstone of any type of relationship—whether it’s with your spouse, partner, child, best friend, neighbor, you name it. Fail to communicate well, and a whole range of misunderstandings can pop up and possibly damage the relationship.

Think about the last time you had an argument with your significant other. Did you keep your mouth shut while they aired their concerns and really listen to what they said? Or did you interrupt them, trying to show that you—and only you—are right? Or maybe you “yes-ed” them without caring about what they said just to get them to stop talking and make them think that you care.

Unfortunately professionals use those same bad tactics when communicating with prospects and clients. With client relationships, however, you have the added risk of loss of business and revenue.

If you don’t address a prospect’s objection, for example, you could find yourself out of the running for the job. You could finish your presentation to your own satisfaction but turn the prospect off because they felt you didn’t care about their concerns.

“If you don’t get a sale, it is oftentimes because there was still a roadblock between where you wanted to take the prospect and where they thought they should go—they didn’t see the need, they didn’t see the urgency, they didn’t have trust in you, they couldn’t find a way to do the funding,” says Mike Schultz in his podcast interview, Dealing with a Client Objection? Don’t Do This. ” The problem is if you leave it unsaid and you leave it unasked about, then it will block your sale and you won’t even have had a chance to face it.”

You must unearth all concerns and address them, Schultz says. Ask questions, air the concern, confirm it, respond to it, and make sure they agree with what you’re saying.

Strategic Questioning Critical

Michael W. McLaughlin agrees that asking strategic questions is critical. That’s because your prospect’s face might portray a certain sentiment, but inside they could be thinking the opposite. In many cases, our perceptions of people are way off base, he says.

“Like you, I’ve heard the advice that we should listen carefully and observe the behavior of others,” McLaughlin writes in his article, Your Perceptions of Clients Are Probably No Where Near Reality. “But active listening and observation don’t necessarily tell you what motivates the people you’re working with. Why? Because a person’s beliefs and motivations take shape at the emotional level, so you can’t always understand those motivations simply by observing behavior.”

Ask prospects and clients to think about their roles and the reasons for their actions and beliefs, advises McLaughlin. Stay away from lame questions such as, “What worries you about X?” or “What keeps you awake at night?”

Effective Email Communication

Communicating via email can bring its own list of problems. We’ve all run into the problem where our tone wasn’t appropriately conveyed and the recipient mistook what we were trying to say—hence the increased use of emoticons to make sure a joke or sarcasm is interpreted correctly.

When conducting email campaigns with prospects, however, you need to be extra careful. The point is to get them interested in you and your services, not have them block your email and report you for spamming them.

You want your email to be valuable and not “Buy Now” messages that go nowhere but into the delete folder.

“You want people to look forward to getting your email, not dread it. You want them to stop everything and take a few minutes to read it,” writes Todd Schnick in his article, How to Conduct an Effective Email Campaign: 11 Pieces of Real World Advice.

Prospects are more likely to buy from you if your email provides help, guidance, and advice. When you do that, you build trust for when the prospect is ready to buy, Schnick says.

Schnick is also a strong believer in auto-responders, which allow you to schedule email for lead nurturing campaigns.

“For example, no matter when a new subscriber joins the list, they will receive the first email after seven days, the second email after 14 days, etc. This allows predetermined—and valuable—content to be distributed on a preset schedule,” he says.

Lumension benefited greatly from an automated lead nurturing campaign. Its marketing team needed to increase the volume of qualified leads by 12% to help the company meet its revenue goals s, but budgets had been cut and it had little money to spend on the effort. So, it developed a comprehensive lead-nurturing program to improve its ability to convert top-of-the-funnel leads into sales-qualified leads. The results were more than it expected: a 105% increase in sales-accepted leads, writes Stephanie Tilton in her case study about Lumension.

“The goal of the program was to deliver relevant and contextual content to contacts based on their specific business challenges, and to then drive them to a product trial to accelerate their movement through the demand funnel,” says Sam Erdheim, Director of Marketing Programs at Lumension.

Lumension’s marketing team tailored the content based on the role of the prospect (executive, end user, technical evaluator, etc.) and where the prospect was in the buying cycle. They personalized the emails as much as possible, and they sent additional email to people only if they responded to offers in a previous email.

“Many companies talk about engaging contacts based on behavior, but [they] end up bothering these people with irrelevant and unwanted content. That’s because organizations fail to pay attention to what contacts are not doing. The actions that prospects do not take, such as not responding to offers, are just as important as the ones they do take. By watching and listening to our prospects, we know better when to re-engage them,” Erdheim says.

The Importance of Goals

Lumension’s success can be attributed in part to the fact that it had goals. With its marketing team being given a clear role in generating leads and therefore revenue, it knew it had to come up with goals and plans for meeting those goals. It could have, like so many businesses, flitted around trying this or trying that based on whims or someone’s latest idea. But that butterfly tactic is far from effective.

“Rainmakers, those in the top 10% of all sales performers, believe in the power of goals and action plans,” say Mike Schultz and John Doerr in their article, Live by Goals to Achieve Sales Success. “They live by goals, and they are committed to doing what they need to do to achieve them.”

To get started, all you need is a target. It can be as simple as the Lumension marketing team’s goal for a certain number of leads, it can be a revenue goal, or it can be as lofty as wanting to purchase another company. Once you know where you want to go, commit to a goals routine and stick with it, Schultz and Doerr say.

Don’t let potholes and detours keep you off your road to success. Go around them and get back on the road.

“Remember that the road to success is always under repair. Live by goals and you won’t get lost on the side streets wondering why you’re not there yet,” Schultz and Doerr say.

Photo by: larrysphatpage

From lead to client: Do we have a deal?

We all love referrals—if they’re good. When they’re good, they can lead to satisfied clients and long-lasting relationships. But it takes a little work to ensure you get good referrals, starting with the people you get them from.

In fact, when looking for people to give you referrals (or referral partners), you have to put on your sales hat, says Colleen Stanley in her article, How You Could Be Hurting Your Referral System.

“Good [referral] partners are like good prospects; they must be qualified or disqualified. One of the key qualifiers for referral partners is how well they align with your company values, goals, and objectives,” she says.

For if they don’t align and don’t follow the same client practices as you, you may find the referrals they give you aren’t worth a dime. It’s imperative, therefore, that you make sure their target clients match yours, that they have good relationships with their clients, and that you trust them.

Prospecting via LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be another good source for leads, but again it takes some effort. You can’t simply join the social network and expect prospects to find you. You must reach out to others, and there are some simple ways to do so, writes Kristina Jaramillo in her article 3 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Attract More Clients:

• Update your status regularly
• Start discussions in groups
• Answer questions in the Q&A section
• Publish content and share it with your groups

Do those things, and “you will begin to build your list of connections and prospects. Continue the conversation, and you will turn these prospects into paying clients,” Jaramillo says.

Prospecting Phone Calls

You might prefer generating leads via referrals and social media, but do not discard prospecting phone calls. They might be the most dreaded tool in your selling toolbox, but they are powerful. Again, that’s provided you do them correctly. The key thing is to avoid sounding like a self-serving salesperson, which many service professionals accidentally do in their attempts to not sound that way.

Consider this example from Jill Konrath’s article Are You Making This Prospecting Mistake?

Hi Pat. This is Jane Kerry calling. I’m with Big Deal Strategies, a leading marketing firm in the Minneapolis area. We offer a wide range of services, including branding, collateral development, as well as packaging and web design—one-stop shopping for all your marketing needs.

I’d love to set up a time to find out about your needs and tell you a bit about how we might help your company. Please give me a call at your earliest convenience. My number is 123-456-7890. I look forward to meeting you. Have a great day!

It sounds gracious and far from pushy. But guess what? You sound self-serving.

“When you talk about your company, you’re selling—even if you do it nicely. You really cross the line if you use verbiage like one-stop shopping, industry leader, user-friendly, scalable, best-in-class, robust, or innovative,” Konrath says.

If you want to get more sales, you have to stop selling, she says. You have to sound like a professional who brings substantial value and is worth meeting.

Build Relationships with Clients

Konrath’s sentiments align with what author and speaker Michael Port says. If you want new clients, you have to develop relationships with prospects and get them to trust you.

Use marketing to create awareness for you and your services, but then have a system that allows prospects to get to know you and your services over time. Give them an opportunity to earn your trust, Port says in his podcast interview Marketing Doesn’t Get You Clients. Trust Does.

“Then once you’ve earned enough trust to make sales offers, you will make sales offers that are proportionate to the amount of trust that you’ve earned,” he says. “If you know how to price your offers in the in the sweet spot of the customer’s desire, and you know how to have simple sales conversations that work at the right time, then you can book the business.”

Consultative Approach Draws New Clients

IT company rackAID, LLC applied a similar approach when it saw its business steadily dropping off. Overseas firms and freelance IT professionals were charging significantly less, but founder Jeff Huckaby didn’t want to be the cheapest IT firm, providing sketchy service and trying to make a living on volume. So he reinvented the firm to be far more consultative. He decided he would differentiate his firm by truly partnering with his clients, looking at the long-term needs of these businesses and making recommendations and sales based on a deep understanding of his clients’ needs.

“We use consultative calls in our question-based selling process,” Huckaby says in Gwen Moran’s case study IT Company Reinvents Itself for Growth, Increases Average Deal Size by 46%. “Instead of initially saying here’s this package and here’s what it is, we listen to that person’s needs and you definitely connect those needs to a package that we have that says, based on what you have described to us, this is the package that fits your needs.”

Huckaby says that by uncovering the client’s goals, he is able to better adopt that partner model that has transformed his business. In addition, he can spot opportunities to sell additional services that the client might need.

Don Draper knows a thing or two about communicating with clients

You’ve been invited to a party where you will be socializing with executives from companies you’d like to add to your client list. Do you use the event as an opportunity to pitch them your services? If you said yes, think again.

Even Don Draper from TV’s Mad Men knows it isn’t the right place to give your elevator pitch. As Don said in a season 3 episode to co-head of accounts Pete Campbell, when Pete was drooling over the CEOs present at a party, “Don’t hand out your card.”

There is a time and place for such conversations, and social events are not one of them, agrees Charles H. Green in his article, When to Ditch the Elevator Speech and Take the Escalator or the Stairs. In those situations, it’s better to avoid the Elevator Speech and instead use what he calls The Stairs Speech.

“In this situation, if someone says, ‘What do you do?’ they’re not inviting you to assess their business, much less pitch your own. And remember, they probably don’t care much about your answer. “Their question was a social nicety; they didn’t come to this event looking for business contacts,” Green says.

Keep your answer brief and simple, and “toss the conversational ball back to the other side,” he says. The dialogue is back and forth, taking the conversation one step at a time. If they want to continue the conversation, then do so later—away from the event.

Should the person turn out to be a promising lead, be prepared to nurture that relationship. It can take several “touches” (sometimes as many as 10) before the person decides to purchase your services, John Doerr and Mike Schultz write in their blog post, Prospecting 101: How to Improve Prospecting Success. In addition, each person responds differently to different types of touches, so be prepared to do more than send one email.

“Use a variety of touches to reach out and warm up your prospects—and make sure each touch has value in and of itself,” they say. “When you think about providing value, don’t think only about the value you will eventually provide when the prospect buys from you. Think about the value they’ll get just from speaking with you.”

Conversations with Clients

Should your prospect become a satisfied client, don’t be afraid to ask for a testimonial of your services or to ask for referrals. If you dread cold calling, a referral or testimonial can warm prospects up, giving you an in with prospective buyers.

“Referrals are the preferred way to generate leads and to win new business, yet well over 80% of salespeople just aren’t asking. They worry that if they ask for referrals that they will appear desperate and needy,” says Colleen Francis, president of Engage Selling. “But studies show that 85-90% of your clients, when they’re satisfied with your work, would gladly give you referrals.”

The key is to ask for referrals correctly, says Francis in her podcast interview, Mistakes that Keep You from Getting the Referrals You Deserve. “The key is to be very specific and to give direction and to be directive with your clients,” she says.

The same applies to testimonials, which should be on every firm’s website to help persuade potential buyers to purchase your services. Testimonials build trust and give insight into your company, your services, and you as a professional.

Testimonials, like case studies, demonstrate that your solution works—that others have used it successfully to improve their business. This type of content appeals especially to website visitors who know their business issue and have narrowed down the solution to a handful of providers, says Jon Baer in his article, Offers that Convert Website Visitors into Qualified Leads.

Successful websites should have several offers that appeal to various visitors, stresses Baer. In addition to case studies and testimonials, offer an opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter so people early in the sales cycle can learn more about you. You should also provide an easy way to contact you once they’re ready to speak with you.

Communicate Your Value with Content

You should also provide content—articles, research, white papers, etc.—that communicates the value you offer and pulls prospects to you. More often than not, buyers are turning to search engines when starting the sales process. Having such content on your website will help draw those buyers to you.

Peak Cost Containment greatly improved its lead generation from its website after publishing search-optimized content on its website. It developed case studies, executive briefs, and blog material to spread the word about new developments.

Traffic to the website steadily increased—attracted by the informational content—and those website visitors began to convert to leads, according Van Haas, founder and CEO of the company.

In a case study about the company, How a Consulting Firm Quadrupled Its Client Base and New Business Opportunities in Six Months, Haas says he also used email to nurture leads. He wanted to follow up with prospects in a tactful way with useful information to deepen their understanding of his services and build trust.

The efforts paid off. Visitors who came to the site from organic search had a conversion rate of more than 3% by August 2010. And within six months, Peak gained 130 leads.

When it comes to selling your services, do not underestimate the power of communication. Whether you’re meeting someone for the first time at an event, following up with potential buyers via phone calls or email, or communicating with current clients, what you say can lead to new opportunities or to closed doors.

Follow these 5 steps to improve your prospecting success

About 50% of sales people won’t prospect. That’s the research. In our experience, the percentage of consultants who won’t prospect is even higher.

While most people will tell you that creating conversations is important and must happen if you want to succeed in practice growth, the dynamics of how it works baffles many. Where should you start? What tactics will work for you? How do you reach out to prospects who don’t know you?

To help to improve your prospecting success, follow these five steps.

5 Steps to Improve Prospecting Success

1. Refine Your Targets

The foundation that underpins prospecting success is the strength of your list and the precision of your targeting. Professionals and salespeople often call too low in the organization and try to start a groundswell by working their way up. Reach high to the decision makers. Make sure that your list is clean and ready to go before you start, or you’ll find that your day is lost in fits and starts.

2. Provide Value in Every Touch

When you sell, no one wants to hear your capability pitch, your history, or your life story right off the bat. They’re looking to find out how their lives can be enriched by working with you.

When you think about providing value, don’t think only about the value you will eventually provide when the prospect buys from you. Think about the value they’ll get just from speaking with you. Eventually you’ll sell your company, your offering, and yourself. But first, sell the idea that the prospect’s time will be well-spent if they elect to speak with you.

3. Make the Right Offer

Your ultimate offer might be a particular consulting methodology, a type of software, legal advice, operations plan, or marketing tactic. But the interim offers—the offers you make and they accept before they buy from you—must be crafted with the utmost care.

4. Don’t Use Tricks

Plenty of business success awaits you with your high-integrity approach. There is no need to use tricks, bend the truth, or cut corners to generate an initial conversation. Anything that you wouldn’t feel comfortable telling your children about when you tuck them in bed at night, leave out of your prospecting efforts.

5. Touch Prospects Multiple Times in a Variety of Ways

It takes more attempts than most people think to get through to top prospects. It can often take seven, eight, nine, or more touches to get through to someone. That number goes up and down—across different industries and when you reach out at different levels. What’s always true, though, is that it takes more attempts to get through to your targets than you think.

Cold calling works well alone, but it works even better with mail (yes, we are talking snail mail here) and email touches. Use a variety of touches to reach out and warm up your prospects—and make sure each touch has value in and of itself (see #2).

Follow these five steps, and you’ll be well on your way to prospecting success. At the very least, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the 50% of people who will not prospect at all.

Photo by: galessa’s plastics

Earlier this year, we asked you to share your selling services challenges. You flooded us with your challenges and concerns, which included communicating the value of your services, client relationship management, cold calling, and qualifying leads. In this blog series we identify 12 of the major selling obstacles you are struggling with the most and offer advice and suggestions for overcoming them.

Today’s challenge: keeping the pipeline full with leads.

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Generating leads is a top challenge many professional services businesses face. After all, how do you find time to prospect when you have to manage clients, deliver work, manage people, and run the business? How do you find time to maintain a full pipeline and a full roster of active clients?

The fact is: you can’t afford not to make lead generation a top priority. New leads are the life blood of your business. If you aren’t constantly filling the pipeline, you will not be able to sustain the business over the long term.

When it comes to generating leads, too many service providers have it all wrong. They are looking for the silver bullet, the one thing they can do that will bring in a flood of new leads. Unfortunately that silver bullet doesn’t exist. In fact, in our recent Lead Generation Benchmark Report we found that all tactics work for some firms (that’s right, even television advertising works for some).

The question, however, is not which tactics work best for others. The question is which tactics will work best for you? When choosing your tactics, you have to ask yourself a few questions:

• Does this sound right for my target audience?
• Will my prospects come to an event (or read a white paper or respond to my direct mail efforts)?
• Do I know who my targets are and how to reach them (names, mail and email addresses, phone numbers)?
• Do I understand my audience’s industry and specific business issues?
• Do I know what the objective is if we implement this tactic (e.g., increase brand awareness, cross-sell or up-sell to existing clients, nurture leads)?
• Can we do this well based on our skills, knowledge, and experience?
• Will we consistently pursue this long enough to be successful?

If you can answer yes to all of those questions, then the tactic is worth considering. Beyond that, you must also adhere to the three keys of lead generation success.

3 Keys to Lead Generation Success:

1. Consistency: Consistency is crucial. You have to have a well-planned, well-integrated lead generation strategy that feeds the pipeline over time. You can’t write one article, speak at one event, send one direct mail piece, leave one voice mail, reach out to those in your network one time, etc. You must have a consistent lead generation plan running on all thrusters to continuously fill the pipeline. As Jeremy Epstein, founder of Never Stop Marketing says: marketing must be at the core of a firm’s day-to-day activities, with all employees involved.

Each and every day you need to be working to generate new leads. This can be through reaching out to your network, inviting a current client to lunch, following up to a recent speech you gave, answering questions on LinkedIn, or working on a new white paper.

The amount of effort you put in over time directly correlates to the amount of new leads and new business you get.

2. Implementation: When it comes to implementing lead generation tactics, the devil is in the details. Much lead generation success and failure is determined not by the tactic choice, but by how well that tactic is implemented.

For example, if you decide to run a direct mail campaign, you must have:

• A clean and well-targeted list
• A compelling message and offer that resonates with the audience
• A well-written direct response piece
• A process for following up with everyone who responds to the offer and everyone who received the mailing
• A good tracking mechanism

It’s not as simple as writing a letter and plopping it in the mail. If you can’t implement a tactic well, find someone who can do it for you or learn how to do it well!

3. Patience, persistence, and follow-up: Lead generation, marketing, and sales take time. I’ve seen it take 8, 10, and 12 months just for a firm to get a first meeting with a prospect. Now, this meeting could lead to tens of millions of dollars, but just to get through to the decision maker takes a great deal of effort.

And that is just the beginning of the relationship; don’t forget the long sales cycle in professional services, which can add years to this time line. You need to be patient and persistent to nurture these leads and build the relationship to a point where the prospect is ready to pull the trigger with you.

It is easy on the seventh month to get frustrated and proclaim that your efforts aren’t working. However, marketing is cumulative, and overtime the efforts and investments you make early on will pay off.

Lead generation is an ongoing process. You can’t do one marketing push, get a flood of leads and new business, and then put your head down to work for three months. Do this and you’ll put yourself in a viscous cycle of feast or famine. Consistency paired with strong implementation and patience will help you keep your pipeline full with qualified leads.

Is online lead generation relevant to you and your company if you sell B2B services? Or is online marketing just another shiny-new-object distraction?

Rather than building online communities and optimizing your website, should you be making phone calls and attending events? Should you rely on proven, offline lead generation tactics?

The short answer: different lead generation approaches work well for different companies, depending on the target audience, where the prospect is in the buying process, and how well the company implements the lead generation program.

Should you use online lead generation or is it just a shiny, new object?

Sorry to disappoint, but there’s no one-size-fits-all tactic here.

You’ll need to figure out which approaches work for you—based on your targets and your abilities. Who is your ideal customer? How do they buy? Where do they gather? Once you answer those questions, then you can move on to find the prospects for your services and build relationships with them to develop potential new business opportunities or “leads” for your services. In other words, you’re ready for lead generation—online or offline.

Which Online Lead Generation Tactics Work?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, it’s helpful to see which tactics other B2B service providers use and which ones are proving most effective. Here’s some data from research RainToday.com conducted in partnership with ITSMA (2010).

Top 4 online tactics used.

We asked B2B service providers which online tactics and strategies they used to reach potential leads. Email (90%), social networks (78%), and website search engine optimization (SEO) (used by 76%) topped the list.

Most effective online tactics for lead generation.

But when we asked respondents to rate the effectiveness of these tactics in generating leads for their services, company-authored content published in their own online publications moved to the top of the list—with 27% rating this tactic as very or extremely effective.

In fact, the most effective online tactics are all content driven.

We also found that the best performing companies—in terms of profitability and lead generation success—shared a best practice: the use of content that is relevant (focused on the business issues), provides support for claims (proof points), and builds credibility.

This content can take different forms—based on your service, the audience, and where the prospect is in the buying process—such as white papers, custom content, ebooks, articles, blog posts, videos, case studies, and more.

But, remember, before you jump on board with content creation and online lead generation plans, make sure you have a good understanding of your target audience and their buying process. Map your content to your buyers’ needs based on where they are in the buying process. Then, take a lesson from the best performing companies and build your lead generation around content that is relevant, substantiates your claims, and builds credibility.

And, if the only thing holding you back then is your ability to implement… get help!

What do you think? Do you find your most effective tactics are driven by content?

(Photo by Ravenwood)

How are you reaching prospects and clients? If you’ve settled on one tactic (email, social media, or phone calls, for example), you might want to reconsider that. Chances are that one tactic doesn’t allow you to reach your entire audience. Different people like different approaches, and you owe it to yourself and your business to figure out what those are and use them.

What tactics are working for B2B professional services firms? Let’s take a look:

Online video: Prospects, when they don’t have a referral, turn to the web for advice, solutions to their problems, and companies who can help them solve their problems. Even if they get a referral, they will still go to your website to learn about you before meeting you in person. They’re trying to get a feel for you and if you are a right fit for them, and online video can help win them over.

“Videos are a strong marketing tactic for any type of professional services firm,” writes Sharon Berman in her article, How to Use Video to Get Up Front and Personal with Your Prospects.

You can create videos that show the people behind the firm, as well as video testimonials that have clients telling powerful success stories. Either strategy will allow you to connect with website visitors on a personal level, Berman says.

Webinars: Webinars take the online experience for prospects up a level. They allow you to demonstrate your expertise and skills, as well as interact with attendees through Q&A segments. For an hour you can help attendees work out a problem and give them an opportunity to get to know you and start to trust you. At the same time, you help build your brand and establish your thought leadership.

When done well, webinars can result in new clients. But the key is to do them well, stresses Lee Salz, author of Stop Speaking for Free: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with Webinars. For example, you can’t write a white paper (which people can download for free) and then do a webinar on that white paper. That’s because you’re basically giving an infomercial on the paper, which people already have access to. No one will attend a free webinar on that topic, let alone pay to attend.

Salz explains in his podcast interview, How to Attract Clients and Make Money Using Webinars, strategies for producing webinars that not only get people’s attention but lead to new business and revenue for your firm.

Mobile devices/smartphones: These days when nearly every professional has a BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, or some other smartphone, you can count on those people to use those devices to access information quickly while they’re on the go. It could be to check email, get directions to your office, or learn more about your services after their friend recommends you. Is your marketing email mobile-friendly? Is your website optimized for mobile access? Can they easily find your phone number and address on your site?

Those are just a few things to consider when devising your mobile marketing strategy, writes Jessica Wilganowski in her article, The Rise of the Smartphone: Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Presence. If you have loyal clients, you might also want to consider developing a mobile application to keep them engaged with you and your firm.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming your prospects and clients aren’t interested in or won’t respond to mobile marketing techniques. Do the research to find out for sure. If there’s interest, and your competitors aren’t using them, this is your chance to distinguish yourself from the pack.

Articles and white papers: Increasingly traditional advertising and PR campaigns fail to generate new leads. There’s too much competition and what prospects see doesn’t help them connect with providers. They’re seeking advice and solutions, and articles and white papers provide that while at the same time put your name in front of them.

e-LYNXX Corporation, a high-tech firm that helps organizations with print projects, has seen significant success with that type of content, writes Karen E. Klein in her case study, How a Specialized High-Tech Company Used Monthly Articles and White Papers to Reach C-Level Execs. The company is leveraging in-house expertise to write monthly articles, building media relationships, and taking advantage of free online posting opportunities.

“We feel that an article or an interview carries more influence than a paid-for advertisement, and that is another reason why we develop editorial content as tools for telling our story,” says company founder William Gindlesperger.
The effort is paying off for e-LYNXX. As a result, it gets its expertise in front of thousands of c-level executives and it ranks at the top of search engine results.

What Doesn’t Work

If prospects and clients think Requests for Proposals (RFPs) will help them make a good decision about which provider is best for them, they are greatly mistaken, writes Charles H. Green in his article, Open Letter to Clients: Why You Should Drop the RFP.

While RFPs serve a purpose for government contracts, where “the appearance of improper influence is per se destructive of our faith in government,” and in private organizations where there’s a history of buying abuse, in most other cases they are used “to the detriment of the buying organization,” Green says. For example, they prevent prospects and clients from having open dialogues with providers. With RFPs clients shut themselves off from any advice and guidance a provider could offer—usually for free.

Fear is often the motive for RFPs, as buyers are afraid that weasely sales people will talk them into something they don’t need. But any professional worth his grain will stay away from doing that and instead provide “some level of insight, perspective, and information that the client didn’t have, if only to demonstrate their competence,” Green says.

Your goal as a services professional is to help prospects and clients understand that.

Are you doing the right things to turn cold prospects into new clients?

There’s a distinct difference between those prospects who contact you to learn more about your services (we’ll call these inbound leads) and those prospects whom you contact and secure a meeting with to talk about your services (we’ll call these outbound leads).

When it’s an inbound lead, the prospect comes to you because they have a need and already have an understanding that you are someone who could help them.

When generating outbound leads through your marketing and selling efforts the dynamics are very different. The prospect often is unsure of the need, the value you bring to the table, and if it’s worthwhile to engage in a conversation with you.

The differences are obvious, yet our marketing and sales process and communication for both types of leads is often the same. This leads to unproductive conversations with cold prospects that go nowhere. Outbound-generated leads can and do result in new clients; however, the process requires a different approach. Here are five tips to help you turn those cold prospects into new clients:

1. Be patient with the prospect.

Don’t expect the prospect to go from a first conversation to a new client in 30 days. It rarely happens that quickly. Remember, this is a “cold” prospect, he’s never heard of you before, and you are initiating the conversation.

Have patience with these prospects, and be prepared to shepherd them through a long buying cycle. Trust, credibility, and expertise are essential elements to a professional services sale and do not happen overnight. Be prepared to invest time in the relationship to help it grow.

2. Stay in touch with the prospect.

Nurturing and planned follow-up is required. Refer to tip #1—it is a long buying cycle. Develop a touch plan where you reach out to the prospect monthly through direct mail, phone, and email. Stay top of mind, and when the prospect’s elusive time of need does arise, you’ll be the first person they think of.

3. Provide value in each contact.

With every touch provide some piece of value. Following up just to “see how it’s going” will not enhance the relationship. Instead, answer questions and send articles. Have a reason to reach out. Provide examples of how you helped similar companies with case studies and stories.

If it is a first conversation, have questions that start a dialogue and uncover needs related to your services. Then share some best practices based on your experience working with companies in similar situations.

These types of value touches help build the credibility and trust necessary to win an initial engagement with any prospect.

4. Focus your energy on leads that will be a good fit for you and your services.

Your first task when initiating a conversation with a cold prospect is to determine if they are a good fit. This involves knowing your ideal client profile, including industry, revenue size, and level/title of individuals within the company.

Beyond that, it also requires determining the prospect’s BANT—budget, authority, need, and timeline. Focus first and foremost on the authority and need. If you can uncover a need with a decision maker and move it up his priority list, that person can usually find or make a budget and develop a timeline.

5. Have a clear value proposition.

The goal with any prospect is to start a relationship, and all relationships start with a first conversation. The key is to have a compelling and succinct value proposition so the prospect understands the value you bring to the table and the areas where you can help. Demonstrate how you are different from the thousands of other accountants, lawyers, or consultants out there.

With these five tips you’ll eventually see the temperature of those cold prospects rise, along with your revenue.

Are you letting leads fall through the cracks? (Photo by Ti.mo)

In conversation after conversation with services firm leaders, I hear the common lament:

“We need more leads!”

However when I start asking them about their lead management and nurturing process and what happens when they have a new lead, I quickly learn that it may not be new leads they need, but a better process to handle the leads they already have.

In my experience, services firms are particularly bad at staying in touch with leads over the long term. They attend to short-term leads and work them hard only to let their long-term leads fall through the cracks. There are a number of ways to stay in touch with these leads and nurture them (read this blog post I wrote on the topic: Your No-Nonsense Lead Nurturing Plan).

There are also a number of places to look where you can find a whole slew of leads that you already have. So, you may not need new leads; you may just need to do a better job of handling the leads you already have.

5 Places to Find Leads

1. Lost proposals: A lost proposal is not the end of a relationship. Even when you lose a proposal, you should make a point to stay in touch with the prospect. Every three months or so check in and see how the project is going. Just because they didn’t choose you for phase one doesn’t mean they will not choose you for later phases of the project or other projects. If you keep in touch and remain up-to-date with what is going on and with the new challenges they are facing, you will have the inside track.

2. Leads that aren’t ready to close right now: These are the most common leads to get lost in the shuffle. On our priority list, these long-term leads fall to the bottom and receive little, if any, attention. The relationship is damaged and future opportunities disappear.

3. Current clients: Don’t neglect your current client base. They are the ones that, through repeat business, are going to make up a large portion of your business. (That is unless you are a turnaround consulting firm—in that case, you hope not to see any repeat business.) Just because you work with a firm doesn’t mean they know all about you and the various ways you can help. Often your client knows very little about your firm past the people and projects they are directly engaged in.

Tapping your current (and past) client base, introducing them to other services, and networking your way through the client firm are all ways to grow and get new projects. Your direct contact can act as an internal champion for you and your services to introduce you to other decision makers within their organization. Plus they can refer you to other businesses that may need your services.

4. Prospects that may not have been the perfect fit (two years ago): Businesses change at an amazingly fast clip. Maybe you had a conversation with a business two years ago that at the time was not ready to make the investment for your services, or was not the right size, or didn’t have the urgency to act right away. That doesn’t mean that they are in the same position today. Unless you stay in touch with these folks, you have no idea if their situation changes.

5. Web leads: What’s your firm’s process and policy for handling web leads? Does every lead that comes in over the web—every download, contact us form, email inquiry—get a response and get added to your database? If there are any gaps in the integration between your website and contact management system, you can be sure that leads are dropping out through them.

Long-term nurturing programs help you stay in touch with these leads on a regular basis. It keeps your message and brand in front of your prospects. Email, direct mail, and periodic phone calls are all great ways to keep the relationship alive so when the need does arise, you are the first ones they think of.

So, go run a report on your contact management system searching for lost proposals, old leads, current and past clients, and web leads. I’m sure you’ll find leads that have been sitting right beneath your nose this entire time.

Fail to nurture leads and money will slip away (Photo by Brooks Elliot)

Here’s the scenario: You have a great conversation with a prospect, you uncover needs and know your services can help. They’re the right size firm, and you’re talking to the decision maker. But the prospect is not looking to do anything right away. Despite your efforts to move your project up the priority list, there are too many things in front of it. You know eventually the need will get so bad they have to address it, it’s just not going to happen right now. It’s a long-term lead.

This is a scenario we all can relate to. In our lead generation research we found that only 25% of leads are “sales ready.” That means that the other 75% are either not qualified or require further nurturing.

In my experience, professional services firms are inherently bad at staying in front of and top of mind with these long-term leads, and they leave great opportunities for future revenue on the table. I often hear:

“We’re resource constrained and we don’t have the time to develop the follow-up required.”

“I’m great at starting the relationship, but it is tough to keep the momentum going when the sales process drags on.”

“I don’t want to be pushy by following up too often and asking, ‘Are you ready yet?’”

You can create a consistent follow-up touch plan, and it doesn’t have to be that hard (or expensive).

Here’s a system you can put in place and put on auto-pilot while you focus on client delivery, sales, and firm management.

1. Send a monthly e-newsletter. Add all clients, leads, referral sources, anyone you meet at conferences, etc. to your newsletter list. Whether you have five contacts, 500, or 50,000, sending a newsletter keeps you top of mind and allows you to demonstrate your knowledge by sharing expert insights, tips, and stories of how you’ve helped other clients. (Follow these email newsletter tips.)

With all the different technologies out there (Constant Contact, iContact, and MailChimp to name a few), sending a professionally designed email newsletter has never been easier or more economical.

2. Call leads quarterly. Make a point to call all of your long-term leads on a quarterly basis (at least). You never know when their priorities might shift. Staying in touch, one-to-one, on a regular basis allows you to strengthen the relationship and probe to see if there’s been a change in the prospect’s organization. Remember, half of business development success is timing.

3. Send a direct mail piece quarterly. Reaching out to long-term leads in multiple ways will give you a better chance of breaking through the noise. Direct mail letters do work, as do hand-written notes. If you see an article that might be of interest to a prospect, send it to them along with a hand-written note. This can be very powerful. If you write a new white paper, send prospects a letter letting them know it is available to download on your website.

4. Connect on social media sites. When it comes to social media, at the very least you should be on LinkedIn. Look to connect with your prospects here. Become an active participant by answering questions and posting updates. Watch what your prospects are doing and whom they connect with. You can learn a lot about them simply by following their updates.

Twitter is another great tool to connect with prospects. Simply by following them you’ll start to get a sense of what’s important to them. You can build the relationship by commenting on something they’ve posted. In turn, prospects can get a sense that you are indeed an industry expert by following you back and seeing that you are active participant.

5. Start a blog and post a couple of times a month. A blog can be a very powerful lead nurturing (and lead generation) tool. It provides you with the fuel (content) for your newsletters, your social media updates, and the direct mail pieces. Each touch leads the prospect back to the blog. It allows you to build a pool of thought leadership that you can use to keep prospects warm and excited about your services and more importantly you. Not to mention that search engines index all of the content on your blog, which makes it easier for those searching for your type of services online to find you.

And did I mention that setting up a blog does not have to be time consuming or expensive. I’m a big fan of WordPress (this blog uses the Thesis Theme on WordPress), and there are plenty of designers who will design and set up a straightforward site for you for short money.

The Devil is in the Details

I know what you’re thinking, “This all sounds well and good, but there’s no way I can get all of this done.”

Fooey. Take one weekend and map it out (I’m a whiteboard person). You’ll see it’s not as overwhelming as you think, and you can get help setting up. Assign someone at your firm to help manage the technology and process or hire a virtual assistant.

Nurturing leads will pay off in the long run. It requires an up-front investment in time, but once you have the pieces in place you can essentially put it on auto-pilot. Many of the tasks, such as putting together and sending out the newsletter, editing and publishing the posts on your blog, and sending out the direct mail letters, you can hand off to someone else.

It doesn’t have to be that hard; it just takes a bit of forward thinking and planning. With a lead nurturing plan in place, you’ll surely win more than your fair share of those long-term leads.