Get customers to come to you

“Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual, everyday routine.”

Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki

As a continuation of the previous topic, the most powerful thing you can do in marketing your consulting business is this:

Get customers to come to you.

Cold-calling is bad business

Imagine this situation: You’re sitting there at work, and someone calls and says, “Hi, my name is Fred, and I’d like to sell you my services.” Personally, I hate receiving those kind of unsolicited calls. They make me want to never do business with that person.

Cold-calling on prospects has all sorts of problems and barriers:

  • The prospect may not need your service.
  • You may have interrupted something they were working on.
  • Even if they’ll listen to you, you have to sell yourself from scratch.
  • As in my case, you may have just lost a potential customer for life.
  • A million other problems ...

Now, if you flip this situation, and get prospects to call you:

  • You know they’re interested in your service.
  • More than that, they’re interested in your service right now.
  • They called you, you didn’t call them, so the selling process becomes much easier. They’re already “sold” enough to call you.

I could go on for a while, but I think you’ll agree that having prospects call you is a much more powerful technique than attempting to cold-call them. For techniques to get prospects to call you, please see the previous chapter.