How did you find your current clients?
Looking at your existing clients and reviewing how you came to be working with them is a great way to get a quick idea of which of your new business activities is working for you.
Clear Thought keeps a pretty tight client list, working within between two and four clients in a hands-on capacity at any one time. This means that we need to take great care in choosing who we work with – our time is a finite resource, and we want to make sure that we’re working with great people, for a fair profit. What’s interesting about our current client list is that it demonstrates the new business channels that we’ve consistently found to be the most rewarding. So, here they are…
LinkedIn: We’re just kicking off an exciting marketing transformation programme for a Barcelona-based CRM consulting company. This came our way via LinkedIn. When I left Experian some three years ago a sales person I’d worked with for about six months, who lives in Barcelona, wasn’t top of my list of people I imagined working with in the near future. However, over the years he’s seen my regular status updates, and despite not even clicking through, they’d been frequent enough for him to get the idea that I now offer strategic marketing services for small businesses. So, when he joined a small business in need of exactly that, he dropped me a line – via LinkedIn.
Twitter: Acting as a strategic sounding board for the MD of a Bristol-based document management software company is a role that I’m currently relishing. This one came our way via Twitter. A person with whom I’ve developed a Twitter rapport over the last two years met the MD of this company at a networking event, they got chatting about her marketing challenges. Knowing that we were both in Bristol, she put us in touch – via Twitter – and from there the client relationship developed.
Blogging: We’re just coming to the end of phase one of a marketing transformation programme for an Exeter-based small business IT services company. They came our way of the back of a Google search for ‘how to write a marketing brief’. The MD was scoping out some potential suppliers and was looking for some help in drafting the brief. He was delivered to our blog on the subject, used it to write his brief and sent it to us, along with some other possible providers.
Directory: We’ve just completed a marketing audit for an information risk consultancy in Gloucester, and we’re about to embark on a thorough marketing transformation programme with them. This came our way via the IOD Supplier Directory. The MD dropped us a line off the back of our listed details, and with a phone chat, follow-up with some relevant blog articles from the back catalogue and a coffee – the deal was sealed.
What’s even more interesting about these four new business channels is that only the directory cost us a penny in financial outlay. All of the others are elbow grease alone. On a pure financial ROI these four clients work out at £ 200:1 – and being as that assumes that the whole of our IOD membership is a marketing cost and it’s only been up for a month or so (i.e. all the other benefits aside), we’re pretty happy with that ratio.
On all but one of these projects we’ve also referred a team of marketing partners to deliver specific items. So, it’s not just Clear Thought benefiting from these new business techniques – it’s our network too.
By Bryony Thomas | Chief Clear Thinker | Clear Thought Consulting Ltd | @bryonythomas | www.clear-thought.co.uk
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:
- Blog: Who do you connect with on LinkedIn?
- Case Study: Fable Trading Online Community
- Blog: B2B social media: be there, be relevant, be proven
- Video: Social media and the sales funnel
Clear Thought Consulting works with small businesses, equipping them with the marketing strategies, suppliers, skills and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We do this by planning and delivering 12-month marketing transformation programmes – supporting a small business through a step-by-step process to making marketing pay. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend your competition, you have to out-think them.
Published on 22 June 2011
