An area that many people seem to find challenging is finding and engaging enough of the right clients. Naturally, there is a great deal of information and advice available in this area, however, if you feel you have diligently tried to find out what to do and yet continue to struggle then this article will help you unlock the key to better results.
Rather than looking at client new engagement as simply a function of what strategy, tactics or know-how to employ, the real secret of consistent success has far more to do with mindset. With a new understanding client acquisition can become one of the most enjoyable parts of your business instead of something that can feel like a chore.
There is no magic bullet
The most common conclusion that people come to, if they are struggling with client acquisition, is that they just need to know what to do. This often sends people on a continual search for the ‘magic bullet’ that will be the breakthrough they are looking for and yet, as far as I can tell, there is no magic bullet. It seems to me, based on twenty five years of owning my own consultancies, that consistently engaging enough of the right clients takes commitment, time, effort, risk and a willingness to continually up your game.
Just the acceptance if this fact alone is often a major leap forward for people because one of the principle reasons that people struggle is that they continually avoid doing what it really takes to get the results they want.
Once we begin to realise that the barriers are in our own minds then we start to get out of our own way and become free to take real action, which is what produces results. I saw a wonderful example of this of few years ago whilst participating in a six-month training programme for coaches.
It was a certification programme and a condition of the certification was that you had to engage a certain number of paying clients during the programme. For people like myself who already had an established business this was straight-forward but there were a significant number of people on the programme who had no experience whatsoever of engaging new clients. Some of these people were really worried about this part of the programme and who can blame them? There are plenty of people who have been in business for years and still worry about it!
Despite the concerns that people had about their ability to engage new clients the rule was crystal clear – if you wanted the certification (and people did) then you had to find a way to get over, past, or through whatever unhelpful thinking you have about getting clients.
There is only one barrier
What was fascinating to me was that people did get over their thinking and got paying clients. As soon as they stopped engaging with their insecure, unproductive thinking their minds were free to get creative and clearly focused upon achieving the outcome they wanted.
They realised that the ONLY barrier to their goal was their own thinking AND that they could stop engaging with this thinking immediately.
It can be quite astonishing what we can accomplish when we understand the relationship between state of mind and performance. In the sports world, as we know, psychologists are commonplace and routinely hired by individuals and teams. Although the business world has been slower to catch on I am noticing that more and more business people are realising that state of mind is a huge, and still relatively untapped, resource for creating step-change results.
The best activities for you and your business
You can take any business generating tactic – seminars, referrals, social media, third-party introducers, networking – and there will be people who get great results and, conversely, people who cannot make it work at all.
What you will find is that when people make something work it is because of the quality of mind they bring to it but this fact is missed by most people. They see someone doing really well with something and they think it is the activity that is successful when, in fact, what makes it successful is what you don’t see.
The secret to success is not in searching for the activities that will motivate you because this is a total misunderstanding of the source of our feelings. Something external to you cannot give you a feeling, which is why searching for the ‘magic bullet’ is futile. The magic bullet, rather than being something outside and independent of you, is in the understanding the link between thought and feeling. As we realise this link we naturally drop unhelpful thinking and get the kind of thinking that is really going to help us get the results we want.