Here is a great question that I was asked a little while back. “I am selling products to businesses and I am trying to get more clients. I sell consulting. Do you have any hints or suggestions?” I go into detail on my answer within this paragraph and I thought that it would be of great benefit to anyone who reads that is in a similar situation.

The first step to getting more business clients is to make a list of your existing business partners. You can ask your existing business partners to introduce you to companies and individuals they work with. In some cases existing vendors or customers of your partners could be interested in doing business with you, too.

For instance, one of my business partners is a speaker who makes presentations mainly to companies but also to associations. One of the benefits of establishing contacts with an association is that this is an organization of people from many different companies, so you get a lot of exposure.

His presentations include some advanced marketing tactics - i.e. a referral campaign and a lottery. Everybody, who gives a testimonial and gives his or her name and contact info, is eligible for the lottery. The lottery prizes are gift certificates with discounts for his presentations. This is great for him because this way he gets repetitive engagements.

The discounts he offers are not negligible - as far as I remember, his gift certificates were for $500 and $250. He usually charges $5,000 per presentation, so the discount is tangible. The catch is that if the certificate is not redeemed within a predefined period of time, for instance 3 or 6 months, it is voided. The risk to have the certificate expire makes people take action - in this case, to hire him for another presentation.

If the winners don’t redeem their certificate, it feels like they have lost money. When he started applying this strategy, his repeat business increased dramatically. The strategy is brilliant because it works for everybody involved - winners get a valuable piece of paper, the audience likes him anyway, and when somebody wins the certificate, this is one more reason to invite the speaker again.

You always want to give people a good reason to hire you again. I would look to challenge you to think of some creative ways to incorporate that into the way you sell. When people are there you want to capture that experience and then you want to remind them of that experience afterward and the benefits that they got from it and look to followup when they are excited about you and their experience.