How To Find Clients For Your Business

It’s no secret, finding clients is the hardest part to any business and everybody wants to know how to find clients.

Glowing start actually posted an article that explains how customers are the MOST important part to any business, because without them, there is no business!

Anyways… there are factors that can play a large role in your clientele capturing capabilities, such as product, location of your office, employees, etc.

But what if you don’t have these things or just want the basics on how to find clients?

No worries, we will discuss this in length below.

With that said, let’s break this topic down into 3 sections:

1. Knowing
2. Searching
3. Acquiring

 

1. How To Find Clients: Knowing

I think that it goes without saying; if you don’t know your business, you’re going to have a hard time succeeding in the first place, especially when it comes to the original question of how to find clients for your business.

But what does it mean to know your business?

It means knowing your business like you know information about something before you buy it; you do your research.

You have to understand your market and you have to understand your client.

What I mean by this is that you don’t know the kind of client you want to attract, you aren’t going to be able to attract anyone.

The internet, major cities and social media, are far too vast these days to simply search generically for people based upon a location or the fact that your business is in the same market of what you are searching for.

This is not a good way to find clients for your business.

Taking it a step further and knowing who your clients are, such as what they are searching for, their age, the part of the city they live in (targeted ads), etc. are all factors at knowing your clientele.

But to know them, is to know your business. It all circles around this concept of knowing the business that you’re in.

The best way I can help to make sense of this, is to put it into a real world example.

We have a client that works in the real estate business, we help him to market his homes after he renovates them.

The quality of work that he does is some of the best in his entire region, there are few companies that are able to be as detailed and high quality as he is, for the same price that he is.

This goes to the part where I mentioned “There are factors that can play a large role in your clientele capturing capabilities, such as product...”, our client we are talking about has the product down.

And it was working great for him, until the market got more and more saturated and he was having a harder time finding people to buy his homes over his competitors.

We looked at Google Trends and saw the upward popularity spike for the search term San Francisco Real Estate, which affirmed our ideas of a growing market and higher demand.

The days of my client being essentially a monopoly, were over. His niche was no longer his and to aid him through this newfound hardship, he was going to have to take more drastic marketing measures to find new clients to buy his homes.

It wasn’t that his competitors homes were nicer, or even in a better location; it’s that they were being marketed better and to the right people.

Our client knows his business, but that’s as far as it went, he didn’t have the slightest idea of who he wanted his clientele to be.

Seeing as he is a friend, my advice was to really focus on the area for the specific home: i.e., is it on the water, is it modern, is it 10 bedrooms or 20, what is the neighborhood like… you get the point.

Then, we started looking into keywords for those particular niches; ultra modern, ocean view Palo Alto, upcoming listings San Francisco, etc., until we were able to tell which terms were more popular.

Through making a lengthy list of keywords, all of which fit his location, his product and his price range, we could then start to understand how much interest there was: there was a lot.

Why was he still having trouble then?

Because that was only half of the “knowing” equation. The other half comes from knowing where these clients are.

He knew he wanted established families, as they were going to be more attracted to the specific neighborhood of this particular home, substantially more than a bachelor would be.

Right away we knew that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were not going to be where these clients were most easily found.

This is the other part of knowing.

Quick Recap:

Knowing is the first part of the process to finding clients for your business.

It is broken down into 2 main parts: knowing your businesses market and what kind of clients you want to attract, and also knowing where those clients are likely to be found.

Remember, if you don’t know what it is that you’re looking for, how will you ever find it?

 

2. How To Find Clients: Searching

Let’s say that you are in the market to buy a new car.

You already know what kind of vehicle you want; color, mileage, price, location, options, etc.

What now?

Search for it.

Mind blowing… I know.

When you search for it, you’re going to have tons of potential vehicles, since you know the parameters and almost all of them are going to match what it is that you want to buy.

So where to go from here?

This is going to be the part that intertwines with #3 on our list, in that the acquisition process and searching can often times go hand in hand.

Needless to say, you can’t acquire until you search.

So… back to the searching concept, you now have a list of hundreds of potential matches.

It’s time to dig into these results and find out more about the vehicle you want to buy.

This is no different than when you are starting a business and want to acquire clients.

Once you know the client that you want to work with, where they’re located, what industry they’re in, etc., you can begin to dig into the results and start seeing if they could be the match that you’re looking to find.

You’re search query for a possible client and whether they will be a match, is going to consist of items such as their budget, their business, location, level of trouble their having, type of work they want done, IF they want any work done, etc.

These are questions that you will come up with based upon your own specific business.

This is part of the search because you are looking for a specific result: in the case of a vehicle, it’s the car you end up buying. In business, it’s the client you end up working with.

The search isn’t over until you have found the match that you want to work with.

The hard work unfortunately, has just begun.

Now that you have found the client, you have to win them over. Sometimes they aren’t even looking for the service you’re selling, which is why you have to KNOW your business to begin with, or making it this far will amount to nothing once you get the prospect on the phone.

I can say though, that if you’ve made it this far, you already have so much going for you when you speak to this potential customer. We will touch on this in the acquisition process, which is next.

Quick Recap:

Searching is imperative when it comes to finding anything, as most of the time, what you’re looking for won’t just show up at your front door begging to be found (although, I wish it would… but what fun would that be?).

Searching goes beyond simply entering your parameters and clicking go. It is in depth research and finding out whether or not a match is going to truly be a match, it’s a search within a search, if you will.

 

3. How To Find Clients: Acquiring

Acquisition is the final piece to the puzzling question of “how to find clients”, as it is the closing sequence to locking in business.

We know that a true search brings us to the client we want to acquire, but that’s all it does. Our job is to explain to the client why we are of value to them and why they need us in their (business) lives.

As previously aforementioned, the search process takes care of some acquisition parts, as it really credits us and helps creating talking points that will show how we already know more than our competition, when speaking to potential clients.

When you do the search properly, you spend countless hours finding the clients you want, which gives you a wealth of information about the market and the person you are CALLING to acquire as a client!

Imagine that… getting a call from a business that has already taken the time to learn about you and your company and knows what you might be looking for, just based off of some search research that they did.

I would be impressed and so will the businesses you call.

We can tie all of these points together, as they all play off of one another.

I’ve already explained how the searching process, if done correctly, can provide tremendous value in the acquiring stage of how to find clients, but the knowing portion can as well.

Knowing your business and what you’re after (client wise), is going to provide value to the people that you wish to acquire as customers. It’s going to give you substantial credit over your competitors when you speak to potential clients, as you won’t beat around the bush and can say “this is why I called you… (then list your reasons from your searching and knowing your business/industry, that we went over earlier)”.

 

Conclusion

Breaking down the process of how to find clients, is essential to being successful at this topic in general. It is a big task and is often the hardest part of being a business owner.

Looking at it from a perspective of 3 simple steps, as opposed to one major task, will make your work load seem more management and less stressful.

You can and will succeed at the game of how to find clients for your business, as long as you follow these steps and really take your time throughout the process.

Once you get it down, it will become second nature and will be much less time consuming for you, as well as give you the ability to teach it to other people within your company and grow your business exponentially.