How To Get Clients: 61 Ways To Get More Clients For Your Business (That Work!)

Warning: None of these tactics will help you with your service. Make sure the service you’re offering is awesome to be begin with and clients will start snowballing.

If you already have a great service offering, keep reading and I guarantee you’ll find new ways to get more clients.

I’ve included tactics that work for B2B, B2C, boring industries, sexy industries and everything in between.

You may be wondering:

“How do I get bookkeeping clients? How do I get web design clients? How do I get clients for my consulting business? How do I get clients for my IT company? How do I get PR clients? How do I get clients?!?"

The tactics I’ve listed here work across all of them!

When it boils down to it, the tactics don’t change too much by industry. There are many tried and true methods that work regardless of what field you’re in.

Even if you have a marketing consultant or agency taking care of lead generation—it’s still worth reading this post—maybe you’ll see something they missed and you can ask them about it.

Meetup.com is the best place to find meetups in your area for almost any industry. You can use it to join groups for your own industry, but the real power comes when you go to meetups where your clients hang out. Just put yourself in the shoes of your target client and search for a group that they’d be interested in.

Don’t just go to meetups to sell though—nobody likes those people. Instead, try to make real connections with people and have good conversations. Try to learn about their industry and show interest in what they do. Hand them a business card after meeting and tell them to keep you in mind if they know anybody who needs your services. Maybe they’ll think of you next time it comes up!

Speaking at events not only makes you an authority figure in your field, but can also lead to clients reaching out to you directly afterwards. Make sure your talks deliver tons of value to your the audience and add a call to action at the end telling everyone that you’re taking on new clients.

Start small and don’t expect to get big speaking gigs right away. Large conferences usually have local events in the lead up that will take amateur speakers to fill their slots.

Once you get enough smaller gigs you can build up to the main stage and get paid for it! Speaking Lifestyle has written a great guide on getting speaking gigs so take a peek.

Business groups can be a fantastic way to get clients. Essentially, they’re a group of local business owners who support each other and use each other’s services. Each group could be made up of a lawyer, an accountant, a marketing specialist, a retailer, etc.—you get the idea.

The beauty of co-working spaces is that they are a big, eclectic group of businesses working in the same space. If you’re a small business consider working in one so you can meet others who may need your services. If you find the right one it can be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Even if you don’t want to work in a co-working space, many of them have events where you can socialize and meet the other members. That means you can just work there once a week when those events happen to scope out potential new clients.

This comes after co-working spaces because they work really well together.

Many co-working spaces give you the opportunity to run a workshop and teach people about your specialty—it could be “bookkeeping for dummies” or “how to PPC like the pros” or “the basics of design”—something related to your field that you can teach people about. Any space will really work though, don’t think you need a co-working space to run a workshop.

Buying a sponsored booth at a conference can be a great way to get new clients if you’re ready to drop the money and hustle hard. That’s simply not an option for many small businesses though.

There is an alternative.

Instead of getting a sponsored booth, consider hosting a breakout at a trade show. Just like a workshop, it’s a great way to deliver value to potential clients and close them after the show. Make sure you have some sort of printed material to hand out afterwards so people know what you’re offering. Also collect contact info from your audience and follow up post-event.

Paige Arnof-Fenn, the founder & CEO of Mavens & Moguls, has gotten new clients from going on listening tours:

"Politicians do it all the time and it is great for business too. Make a list the movers & shakers, people you admire and prospects, ask a few smart open ended questions then sit back and take notice.

They will be more than happy to tell you what is on their mind. If you listen to what they share with you there will be plenty of opportunities to help them. I did it when business slowed and picked up several new clients but you can do it any time.

It is a great way to connect and a lot of fun too. Start listening with no strings attached, you'll be amazed what you find. I did my listening tour the old fashioned way by sending out emails & picking up the phone then brought a pad & pen, asked a few open ended questions then shut up and started taking notes."

Freelancer marketplaces can be great places to find new clients. You can find people looking for a variety of work including marketing, design, accounting, bookkeeping, writing and everything in between. It’s not limited to single freelancers either, you can register as a business in most freelancer marketplaces.

The key to success is starting small and building up your reputation. As you get more reviews, you can find more clients and charge more for your work. After you do a great job for a client make sure you stay in touch and see if they need any work done down the line.

Christopher Early, an attorney at the Law Office of Christopher Early finds clients through Craigslist:

“I find Craigslist to be a powerful, free tool for finding clients. What has worked for me in the past has been to consistently post each day, and sometimes multiple times per day. In competitive categories, if your posting gets buried by your competitors' postings, then they will get the business you are pursuing.

In addition, having attention-grabbing post titles can also greatly help. Without clicks, your posts are just taking up space. Speak to your customers' needs in your posts, and always have a compelling call to action.

Finally, always tweak your ads to see what works. Never stop experimenting!”

Depending on your industry and niche, there are ‘marketplaces’ that connect businesses with the right clients. I’m hesitant to say marketplace because it’s more a matchmaking service, where the intermediary finds the perfect fit between the lead and the business.

Some examples:

Opencare hooks up clients with dentists in Canada. Credo connects businesses with marketing agencies. FindLaw finds the right lawyer for your situation.

You’ll need to search for your industry in your country to find the right matchmaking service. The best way to do it is Google “find the best {service name}” and they’ll most likely pop up.

There are a number of marketplaces/directories where experts can bid on quotes from clients for a reasonable price. A couple examples are Thumbtack in the States and Oneflare in Australia.

The general idea of these marketplaces is that leads come to the website looking for a particular service. They enter what they’re looking for and applicable businesses are notified that there’s a lead. Those businesses then send a quote and hope to win their business. Just like with the freelancer marketplaces, it’s important to build up your reviews to be successful.

Some of them are driving crazy amounts of traffic so they can be very viable places to find new clients for almost any niche you can think of, including: doctors, dentists, accountants, bookkeepers, DJs, locksmiths, interior designers and more.

Just because you’re not a Bay area startup, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an elevator pitch. You never know when you’ll have an opportunity to promote your business or run into someone who may need your services.

If you can’t clearly communicate what you do and how you’re different—you’re going to have a tough time selling your services.

You may think that offering services to everybody will land you more clients, but in many cases that’s the wrong mentality. Specializing in one industry can actually be far more lucrative in the long run.

Here are a few reasons why it might make sense to pick a niche:

• It helps clarify your target market which makes sales and marketing easier and more specific
• It gives you expert status in that industry which makes your business more appealing to that target market
• It helps you learn to speak your target market’s “language”
• It can be helpful for SEO (ex. someone looking for a ‘startup accountant’ will find your business if you specialize it that field)
• It allows you to build your processes around a single area of expertise which means you can scale faster

Want some examples?

• Reed Tinsley is a CPA who only services doctors
• Walker Corporate Law Group only services entrepreneurs and startups
• Wonderist is a digital agency that only services dentists

Read this awesome post on why ‘niching down’ can be very lucrative. It’s written for marketing agencies but applies to any professional service.

All too often do I see websites that don’t work the way they should: links are dead, doesn’t work on mobile, it’s tough to navigate, the list goes on…

Each person that comes to your site is a potential client. If that person can’t get where they want to go, they’ll just leave your website. That means you’re losing clients before you even speak to them.

Make sure you website works on all devices, loads fast and works properly. It’s not that complicated. Check your website’s cross platform compatibility, run a Google speed test and an SEO audit.

If something’s broken or you’re getting bad scores, speak to an expert because your website is leaking clients!

CTA = call to action. This is the main action that you want a user to take. Every single business website should have a clear next action for the user to take. Otherwise why are you even bringing users to your website?

City Tax Accountants do it right. They have one main CTA on their website which is the next logical action for the user:

It doesn’t need to be a form either: if you want users to call you, display your phone number clearly as the next action.

There are no hard rules either, you can have a secondary call to action (ex. a phone number and a contact form). Just make sure you have one clear next action for your user to take when they land on your website.

Some people who visit your website have questions before they sign up as a client. Live chat is an easy, low friction way to start a conversation and answer their questions.

With a tool like Drift you can add your profile picture to make live chat more personal. You can also collect emails from people so you can follow up later if you’re not available when the user starts the chat. If you’re feeling very adventurous you can even build a chat bot to answer questions for you.

Live chat isn’t right for every business but it can be an opportunity to win more clients if done right.

Did you know that there’s a way to track everyone who visits your website? Even if they don’t contact you?

Tools like Leadfeeder match up Google Analytics data to find you a list of companies that have visited your site. You can use that list to reach out to follow up and turn those visitors into clients.

Just a heads up: this tactic is only useful if you get a good amount of traffic. Don’t bother if you only get a few people browsing your website per day.

If your business has a physical location getting listed on Google My Business is one of the easiest ways to get more clients. Once you’re listed your business may pop up for any local searches for your services. According to Moz’ Local Search Ranking Study, Google My Business listing is the #1 factor for local SEO success.

Make sure you do the following:

• Create or claim your listing (there’s a chance you’re already listed)
• Verified your address via mail
• Have a consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) with your website
• Choose appropriate categories (you can choose more than one)
• Have accurate hours of operation
• Write an introduction (around 250 words)
• Add a link back to your website
• Add at least 3 photos of your business

Updating your Google My Business page should take less than an hour but it can make a big difference for local SEO.

Also, Google has released a new feature called Posts where you can write quick updates for your business including offers or deals. You can read more about them here.

There’s a two fold reason to get your business listed in all possible citations and directories:

1. They are a ranking factor for local SEO, which means you get a ranking boost by listing your business properly across the web.
2. They can drive clients directly to your business. Every so often people will search in Yelp, etc. for your services and maybe your business will pop up.

I would recommend paying the $99/year for Moz Local to take care of your citations for you. It’s easy, cheap and consistent.

This won’t get you listed in industry specific directories though (for example, Avvo for attorneys or the Xero advisor directory for Xero accountants and bookkeepers). Make sure you get listed in those as well.

A lot of these directories will ask you to pay to ‘upgrade’ your listing. I’ve almost never seen a directory that has been worth promoting your business for. The Yellow Pages are particularly bad for this

Not only are reviews a ranking factor for local SEO, but according to BrightLocal’s study: “consumers are likely to spend 31% more on products/services from businesses that have excellent reviews”.

The easiest way to start collecting and monitoring reviews for your business is through software like GetFiveStars. It helps you automate your review collection and monitor reviews across all sites that matter.

At the very least, make sure you start asking clients for reviews on Google when they have a good experience with your business!

For anyone new to SEO, links are a very important ranking factor for your website. Generally speaking: more links, higher ranking. Take that with a grain of salt though because quality of links matter too.

There is an easy way for most businesses to get links to their site—ask!

Think of any services, software, or vendors that you business uses. Do any of them list their clients on their site? If so, that’s the perfect opportunity for you to grab a link.

This could be your bookkeeper’s website, your marketing agency website or your scheduling software’s website. Building links can be easier than you think if you just ask.

Help A Reporter Out is a service where reporters and writers can find sources for their articles from experts. Through this service you can get links to your site and get quoted in some huge media outlets like Mashable, Time Magazine or The New York Times.

Once you sign up you’ll get three emails every week day with queries from reporters. Answer to the best of your ability and ask them to reference your website if they use your answer.

Buzzstream has written a fantastic guide on successfully pitching on HARO if you’d like to learn more about it.

You don’t need to be a technical wizard to do simple on-site SEO for your website. My #1 recommendation is to make sure your website is keyword optimized. Google can’t read your mind, so you need to tell them what you do.

I’ll walk through an example for an accountant in San Francisco:

On your homepage be sure to include ‘accountant San Francisco’ in the title, H1 tag and somewhere in the body text.

Also are there specific services you offer? Create pages for them: tax preparation San Francisco, bookkeeping San Francisco, etc.

You can work with an SEO consultant for a few hours to do a bit of keyword research for you and make sure everything is setup correctly. In many cases, you don’t need to spend a fortune on a big digital agency to get results.

Join Facebook groups and be genuinely helpful to the other members. You can join groups in your direct industry and get leads through other members. For example, there are members of the Digital Agency Owners who are too busy and post that they have a client or two to give away. The same applies for bookkeeping groups, etc. sometimes people get busy and can’t handle their current client load.

While groups for your industry are great for advice and feedback, they won’t drive a ton of clients. The best groups to join to get new clients are for adjacent industries where your clients hang out. As a lawyer or accountant you could ask to join the Digital Agency Owners group and make a post asking if anybody needs some free advice and pitch in when you can. If you can become “the lawyer” or “the accountant” for those groups you’ll be sure to get some new clients.

Here’s what Bryan Clayton, the CEO of GreenPal has to say:

“No matter your niche or vertical there is a FB group that you can participate in to contribute to the discussion, answer questions, and develop a presence to refer people to your business, often times when they are looking for exactly what you offer.

FB just also launched a dedicated mobile app to support their groups' communities so now it's easier than ever to manage the groups that you participate in, monitor the conversations, and participate while on the go throughout your day.

We have found this tactic to be very effective for our marketplace. We monitor local groups and neighborhoods' groups , and when anyone is asking for a recommendation on a lawn care service, we kindly let them know about the GreenPal community. We track the success and 60% of the time we make a recommendation, they signup for our service

This tactic can work for almost any business in any niche.”

The same general rule applies to LinkedIn, you want to be where your clients are hanging out. The difference for LinkedIn is that many of the groups are heavily spammed and less moderated than Facebook. I’ve found that a good portion of LinkedIn groups are people just promoting their own links instead of providing useful advice.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good LinkedIn groups out there—you just need to look harder! What you’re looking for is a group with a good post to comment ratio, meaning that posts get a healthy amount of comments. If people aren’t commenting that usually means that the conversation is dead and the group won’t be worth your time.

Maybe you use Slack for internal communication in your company, but did you know that it can be a good place to find new clients? There is a whole network of Slack channels created for specific industries and interests. Here’s a list of over 400 Slack channels waiting for you to join.

You’ve most likely heard of the hugely popular Q&A website Quora by now, but did you know that it can be a fantastic way to get new clients?

Quora gets a ton of views around almost every topic imaginable. That means there are people asking questions about your industry that you can jump in and answer.

Deck out your profile and deliver amazing answers to questions that are relevant to your business. You can even link back to your website with an answer if you’re sincere and add value by doing so.

They even give you an analytics dashboard so you can see how many views and upvotes your answers get.

If you’d like to learn more about Quora, Josh Fechter has written the bible on getting leads from Quora.

Forums aren’t quite what they used to be since there are so many alternatives, but you can still find some thriving forums with super dedicated members.

If you are a software development company, you can start answering questions at Stack Overflow and be seen as an authority by helping people.

If you are a digital agency, you can start answering questions at the Local Search Forum and be seen as an authority by helping people.

In both cases there will be other people searching for the same questions and will run into yourself as someone who can solve them. There are also many other similar types of forum communities that you can find for your specific industry.

If you have a client base already, a lot of the time all you need to do is ask! Don’t be scared to send out an email to your client base saying you have some free bandwidth and are looking for new clients. You never know who your clients may be in contact with.

A referral program can be a great way to entice clients to refer people to your business. They’re cheap to set up and work for almost every industry imaginable: accounting firms, digital agencies, personal trainers, yoga instructors, cleaning services, business consulting, etc.

You also don’t need to give a monetary reward for your referral program. Many times things like branded clothing, gift cards, or credit for your services actually perform better than cash.

Take a peek at ReferralCandy’s epic list of referral programs to get some ideas for your business.

While Google Adwords has gotten more competitive and expensive over the past few years, it’s still one of the best ways to get new clients. The beauty of Adwords is that people are actively searching for what you’re offering so you can be pretty sure that they’re hot leads.

You may think of Bing as a joke compared to Google, but did you know that it actually has 33% market share in the USA?

Bing has a decent amount of search volume and cheaper clicks than Adwords making it a very good option for PPC advertising. Your mileage may vary by country, but give it a chance if you’re in a location where people search using Bing. Users also tend to be older and wealthier, which may be the perfect combination for your business.

Facebook and Instagram ads are bunched together because they’re run through the same platform. A word of warning with cold Facebook ads, they may not be right for you. It can be awesome for specific industries but doesn’t work for everybody. For example, just posting an advertisement for your interior design business with your face as the image probably won’t drive that many clients. Don’t go spending tons of money on Facebook ads without knowing what you’re doing.

That being said, it can be very powerful due to their incredible targeting methods. If you’re a personal trainer in New York, you can target people on Instagram who like Jenny Craig in Manhattan with a video series: “5 Steps To Being Fit, Fast”. Then reach out to anybody who downloaded your video series and offer a free personal training session. For Facebook ads to work well you need to find the right audience with the right offer. Unlike Adwords, they aren’t specifically searching for what you offer.

LinkedIn ads tend to be even trickier than Adwords and Facebook. They’re also only applicable if you are a B2B business… Don’t try to advertise your lawn mowing business on Linkedin, it won’t work.

That being said, it can be a great way to target professionals like lawyers and accountants. Just be prepared to shell out at least $5 per click (as of writing this that’s the minimum).

It’s also notoriously difficult to make direct sales on LinkedIn. Usually you need to give away something of value like an ebook or whitepaper and then follow up personally or set up a marketing funnel for your leads.

People often overlook Twitter ads but it can be effective and cheap if used correctly. Promoted tweets are very easy to set up and can drive social engagement, clicks to your site and conversions.

The best way I’ve found to use Twitter ads is to wait until a relevant event or conference is happening with a hashtag (Xero’s #xerocon hashtag for the big Xerocon conference is one example). Then you set up a promoted tweet targeting that location and anybody who uses the event hashtag.

That’s just one idea though! Twitter’s pretty easy to get started with since their cost per click is quite low, so you can mess up and not spend a fortune.

In most cases, retargeting is the easiest and most cost effective PPC method since you’re marketing to people who have already shown interest in your services. Retargeting is a way of sending ads back to people who have visited your site. Only a small percentage of people who visit your site will become leads or clients on their first visit—a lot of people need a reminder later on—so you’re essentially telling people “hey, don’t forget about me!”.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that in most industries, Twitter isn’t that worth while to get clients. Sure, you can follow industry leaders for educational purposes but you most likely won’t get a lot of business from posting Twitter. Those “social media packages” that most agencies sell won’t do anything but put more words on the internet.

Don’t get me wrong, there are people crushing just tweeting on Twitter, but it’s most likely not you.

There is a powerful way to use Twitter to get clients though! It’s by playing a quick responsive game whenever somebody mentions a key term or competitor.

With a tool like Mention you can keep track of those keywords and respond when they’re mentioned. One example of this could be when somebody has a negative experience with a competitor, you swoop in. Or you can set up a “keyword” + geolocation combo to monitor whenever somebody mentions your industry in your city. The key with Twitter is acting fast!

There is a new formula that seems to be working for quite a few people to get clients from LinkedIn. It basically goes as follows:

1. Optimize your profile.
2. Connect with X amount of people a day who are in your target market (potentially using automated tools).
3. Create posts that solve their problems with a link leading back to your website.
4. Use “engagement posts” to encourage virality.

I haven’t really used LinkedIn to find clients myself but it can be useful for certain B2B industries like accounting, marketing and law. You can read more about how Josh Fechter reached over 25 million LinkedIn views in 4 months. I believe he’s gotten most of his clients from LinkedIn so it’s entirely possible if you play your cards right!

Instagram is the opposite of LinkedIn, where it’s the perfect platform for B2C businesses looking for clients—as long as you have images worth sharing.

Think of it as a living portfolio of your work. It’s a great place for personal trainers, interior designers, architects and builders to find clients. Less so for accountants, bookkeepers and dentists. Sure, you can go on Instagram, just don’t expect to close a ton of business from Instagram if you don’t have a photo friendly business.

If you’re in an industry with photos to share there are a few key things to keep in mind:

1. Make sure you link back to your website in your profile.
2. Post often with good pictures that will get engagement.
3. Spend time following and commenting on people who could be a good fit for your business. See who’s following similar profiles or competitor’s pages. You can also try a tool like Social Bloom (just don’t abuse it).
4. Don’t be scared to direct message people who have been engaging with your content.
5. Test out Instagram Live. It notifies your followers that you’re going live so it’s a great way to get free engagement.

Kristin Marquet, the founder & creative director of Creative Development Agency, uses Pintrest to get new clients:

“Here's how it works: I write a 1,000 word + blog post for my company blog, create 5-10 attractive pins for each blog post, pin them to all of the relevant boards on my profile along with the group boards in which I am a member.

This sends back traffic back to my website and allows people to subscribe to my newsletter. Then they are added to my email list, added to an email sequence, and then I sell them from there. From this approach, I get booked out for my consulting services 3-4 months in advance."

Podcasts have exploded in popularity over the past few years. 21% of Americans ages 12 and up have listened to a podcast in the past month. That’s a lot of people.

Guesting on podcasts makes you appear as an authority in your field and gives you a platform to speak to your target market.

You can start by signing up to Podcast Guests to get notified on podcasts looking for guest. Be sure you apply to shows where your audience hangs out, not just shows on your industry. Solve a problem that the audience has and position yourself as the expert that can help them with it.

Also have a call to action ready so the audience has a next step to take to work with you and get more information on your business.

Creating a podcast can also be a great way to get new clients if you’re ready to put in the work. Just be prepared: it can almost be a full time job. You need to build a website, get recording equipment, find guests, edit episodes, etc. It’s not for the faint of heart. There’s even a term called podfade which describes when a podcast puts out episodes more and more sporadically until it dies.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and third most popular website after Google and Facebook. That means people are turning to YouTube to solve their problems. Those people could be your clients if you start leveraging it properly and present yourself as an expert.

Getting started on YouTube is easier than you think. Your smartphone is most likely good enough to get started, you don’t need a bunch of fancy equipment.

Use a tool like VeeScore to search for keywords around your services. Film the video and optimize it to show up for that keyword when people search for it (see Brian Dean’s guide on YouTube SEO for more info). Then, rinse and repeat and start building up your YouTube audience.

You can start collecting questions that your current clients ask you and make videos out of them too. If your clients are asking you, potential clients are most likely searching for the same information online too.

If you’ve got a following on social media, or a big email list, webinars can be a great way to convert that audience into clients.

I haven’t done many webinars myself but I have attended a lot of them. The best ones add a ton of value and teach me something useful—they aren’t super salesy. Just make sure you’re teaching something useful to your subscribers and not just doing a webinar for the heck of it.

If you don’t have a list of people ready to sign up for your webinar, you’re going to need to do it in conjunction with another type of marketing like PPC to get people to sign up. That makes it potentially expensive and a risky investment so tread carefully when marketing with webinars.

A cross promotion webinar (aka joint venture webinar) is a collaborative webinar between two businesses with similar interests. For example, a nutritionist and a personal trainer would make a perfect cross promotion webinar since their audiences are interested in the same thing: being healthy, losing weight and getting fit.

The beauty of cross promotion webinars is that you get to swap and leverage each other’s audiences. It’s a fantastic promotion method that can get you a lot of clients if used right.

If you want to do a cross promotion webinar start brainstorming business allies that would work, it could be a: complementary businesses, software company or business group.

A virtual summit takes cross promotional webinars to the next level. They are online conferences where experts and influencers speak on a number of topics. See LawLauncher as an example of a virtual summit for lawyers.

There are a few reasons they work so well:

• You can leverage audiences other than your own
• It helps you build relationships with other influencers in your space
• They cost very little to run as you don’t need any physical space or need anyone to travel anywhere

You also don’t need to be in that exact industry to speak at virtual summits either. See how Debra Schaefer spoke about management accounting during LawLauncher 2016:

Just find a way to add value and the organizer will surely add you to the schedule.

Great, you’ve printed business cards. But do you stand out from the crowd? Will the person you’re giving your business card to remember your bland rectangular paper?

88% of business cards handed out get thrown away in less than a week (source). Chances are your business cards are ending up right in the bin.

If you can get your potential client impressed with your business card, they’ll feel guilty throwing it away.

See James Mahon’s business card as an example:

He’s a divorce lawyer who’s card rips in half. Clever eh?

Now that you have business cards that stand out, it’s time to get them seen by potential clients. You don’t need to meet face to face with someone to get your business cards seen.

Think about strategic locations where you can leave your business cards:

• Hotel card racks
• On the counter of other non-competing businesses
• Co-working spaces
• Coffee shops (if you’re a regular they’re more likely to let you leave them)

You never know when someone is thinking about using services that your business offers. They could be thinking about it during a haircut (salon/barber counter) or on a walk (public bulletin boards)—you never know!

Marketing agencies can be a great way to get clients, even if you run another marketing agency. Perhaps you specialize in content marketing and there’s another agency in your area that does only web design. That’s a perfect match to refer each other business.

Agencies can be a strong partner for almost any professional service. If a business needs marketing services they most likely need other professional services as well.

Clients turn to accounting practices for all of the regular accounting services: tax return preparation, tax planning, bookkeeping, etc. but a study by The Sleeter Group shows that SMBs are also looking for more. Over 20% of SMBs are looking for business planning and business strategy from their accountant.

That means accounting practices are playing an advisory role to clients, ie. giving their clients advise on what services and products to use. If you build a partnership with the right accounting firm you can be the business they refer when a client needs a: lawyer, marketing agency, business consultant, IT company or software implementation partner.

Law firms play an important role throughout the life of a business. They may play an advisory role when a business is starting out or growing and looking for services.

Just like accounting practices, if you play your cards right your professional services can be the business law firms point to when one of their clients needs them.

Software companies (including us) are looking for partnerships with businesses to promote and implement their product. These are a great way to make some extra money but there’s an even more important reason to become a partner—new clients!

If you’re a law firm look to software like Clio and become a Clio Certified Consultant.

If you’re a web development agency look to software with partner programs like Shopify or Squarespace.

If you’re a marketing agency look to software like HubSpot or Active Campaign.

Search for software in your industry and see if there any partnership opportunities to score new clients!

I know, direct mail is not exactly the ‘latest and greatest’ way to get business, but it can still be a great way to raise awareness and get clients.

Tangible mail does stand out in our digital world. And you can be sure that it gets delivered, instead of ending up in somebody’s spam folder.

It’s pretty cheap to get started with direct mail so it might be worth testing the waters!

Don’t think that you’re limited to postcards and letters when it comes to direct mail campaigns. Mike Schultz, president at RAIN Group, is a little more creative:

“There were a few executives who we were looking to get through to. To do this, we created an elaborate campaign and sent those executives a high-quality puzzle box. If they wanted to open it and find out what was inside, they had to contact us.

Of the puzzles distributed, 63% of the executives reached out and wanted to know how to open the box. This campaign really opened doors and allowed us to start having conversations with senior executives who then turned into clients.”

No, I’m not talking about spamming thousands of people with the same message in hopes that one becomes a client (that’s actually illegal now in most parts of the world). I’m talking about doing good, personalized outreach to your ideal client.

There are plenty of tools like Clearbit that help you find leads for your target market. Do research on everyone you’re reaching out to and present your business as a solution to their problem. If you do it well, cold email can have over a 10% response rate.

Everybody has an email so this can be effective for getting clients in almost any industry: web design agencies can reach out to ugly websites via email, accountants can reach out to startups via email, IT companies can reach out to large enterprises via email…. The list goes on.

Just because someone is interested in your services, doesn’t mean that they’ll become a client. Once you have a lead it’s vital that you follow up and get them to convert if they’re a right fit.

According to a study by Marketing Donut, 80% of potential sales opportunities are lost simply due to lack of follow-up. That’s a lot of potential clients down the drain if you don’t follow up.

All of us have been guilty of this at one point: “I’ll email them tomorrow”. Then tomorrow turns in to forever and the lead is lost.

If you’re already crushing it and can’t handle your current number of clients, start a waiting list to collect information from clients

Having a waiting list is awesome for a few reasons:

1. It makes your business look good. People will wonder why you’re so damn busy and turning away clients.
2. It adds an element of scarcity to your services, which makes them even more attractive to potential clients.
3. If a big fish signs up to the waiting list you can surely free up some time for them.
4. You’ll have a list of clients waiting when you’re ready.

Until you have a contract signed and collected payment from a client, they aren’t really a client. If you can speed up and optimize getting clients on board, you’ll close more clients.

Case studies are a great way to prove the value of your business through customer success stories. A lot of clients in B2B need to convince multiple stakeholders in their business and case studies are a great resource to help them do it.

They are generally in the form of a web page, pdf or video content. They can be used as sales material in emails, posted on your website or even printed and given out at conferences.

Writing an ebook can position yourself as a leader in your industry and help you get a ton of clients along the way. Focus on your clients’ pain points and write chapters covering questions that people have about your services.

This means giving away your knowledge for free, which a lot of people are uncomfortable doing, but it doesn’t mean people won’t turn to you for guidance. A lot of people will start the ebook and realize it’s best to trust an expert instead of doing it themselves.

It’s now entirely possible to write an ebook yourself, get a cover designed on Upwork and post it on Amazon for next to nothing. If you can write the content, you can get an ebook published.

Just a word of warning here: your time is valuable. Don’t give away time after you establish yourself in your field. At that point you should be billing for every minute of your time through a tool like Clarity.

That being said, when you’re starting out giving away your time for free can be a good way to get potential clients to ‘test drive’ your services.

It can be a free half hour consultation with a potential client to determine their situation and give some advice. I’m not endorsing you to give away everything at this meeting. Instead, use this as an opportunity to see if they’re a right fit for your business.

Be creative with it too! Maybe the back of your business card can be a gift card that includes a “30 minute free consultation valued at $99” or something along those lines.

Now is your time to put these ideas in to action. Work through the list and make a plan of action to get more clients for your business!

PS. Do you have any creative ways that you've gotten new clients for your business? Let me know and I'll add any good tips to the post.

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