Do have a business that has other businesses as clients (i.e. B2B), such as an accounting or law firm, printing, computer, wholesale or sign business, etc?
If you do you’ll know that your company deals with a mix of smaller and bigger clients. Most likely 20% of your clients are larger – and most often they’ll represent 80% of your revenue. The Parento Principle in action again!
At some point you’ll want to grow your business (or perhaps replace a big client that you lost) and you’ll need a new, big client FAST!
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Now for the not so great news… Unless you (or your sales team) have been grooming a number of good prospects over the past 12 months, it will be very unlikely you’ll score a BIG client cold from your current advertising right now. That may not be the news you want to hear so let’s look at what you could do about this.
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1) Open your accounting system or client database and list your top 10 (or 20) clients. Look back and write down HOW you obtained them. If you can find some commonality then perhaps you could relaunch or re-activate that particular strategy.
You’ll probably find most clients came in from referrals, or from a certain strategic alliance source, or perhaps from a past company salesperson that had a lot of contacts. Not an easy thing to duplicate.
2) Otherwise, you’ll need to put some good B2B marketing in place in your business so you get a healthy flow of new prospects coming through all the time. That way you’ll never be ‘too’ concerned if your company loses a big client – it happens sometimes as we know often at no fault of the supplier.
You and your management team will sleep better at night knowing that there is a system to generate more clients.