How Do Contacts Become Clients?

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Leveraging Existing Relationships Into Business

How do you use the network you have without compromising your relationships with friends and family?  How do you move existing networking relationships into business relationships?
Best Practices:

1.    Let go of the attachment to needing business.
2.    Focus on your strengths.
3.    Cultivate a culturally appropriate ability for shameless self-promotion.
4.    Do not seek to sell – seek to provide service.
5.    Share what you love most about what you do and the difference it makes for people.
6.    Share your profile of ideal clients and their struggles/problems that you can solve.
7.    Let everyone know you are building your practice entirely through word of mouth and that you value their referrals.
8.    Clearly articulate whom you help and what you help them to do in a way a 5-year old can understand and repeat to others.
9.    Be a strategic problem-solver who matches resources in your firm with challenges and issues people in your life are facing.
10. The goal is not to turn your existing contacts into clients, but to turn THEIR existing relationships into clients.
11. Give referrals, give leads, look for ways to connect people with their ideal clients while keeping them informed about who qualifies as your ideal clients.
12. Ask for referrals, ask for business, ask for introductions, ask for leads.
13. Humbly and authentically share wins, success stories, how you helped someone and what it meant to them while giving others credit.
14. Promote others more than yourself.
15. Build coalition with internal resources as well as industry peers.
16. Reach big and be a “yes” to all the work that can come your way, regardless of current capacity to serve that work.  Trust that you’ll figure it out later.
17. Make it work for you.  Build relationships in a way that is comfortable and authentic to your style and personality.
18. Think strategically about how and where to build relationships.
19. Focus more on others than yourself.
20. Listen for the opportunity to shift from a networking conversation into a sales conversation.

©2008 Suzi Pomerantz. All rights reserved.

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