Lead Nurture: Building Your Inner Circle

Take good care of your business.

If you’re a solo consultant or small consulting firm that’s dialing in best practices, you know your lifeblood is cultivating a stream of new prospects who will choose your services.

Finding and bringing in new clients usually hits the bottom of your to-do list because it’s more satisfying to do your best work with clients you know well, but when you run out of clients… you run out of satisfaction in your work and income.

Fortunately, there is a way to attract clients to your business without hijacking all your time or creative resources. And you don’t have to learn a bunch of slick sales pitches, either.

Creating a marketing framework that appeals to high-value customers, whether they’re prospects who just discovered your business or your favorite clients, creates momentum to bring the best kind of clients to your door.

While it sounds great to describe this process as a funnel that drives business to you through some invisible force like gravity, a more useful analogy is a dartboard.

Bringing Clients Closer to You

In our dartboard model, the rings represent degrees of contact that you have with prospects and clients. The outer rings are for people who have just realized you exist or are lurking on your website. The inner circle contains… well, your inner circle of clients who have the most access to you and your skills because they’ve paid for that access.

As these prospects travel from the outer circle to the inner circle, you’ll want to create products, services, and marketing content that offers increasingly more value to them as they move towards the “bullseye” of maximum access to you, your smarts, and the value you offer. Make sure that every single contact you have with prospects, leads, or clients offers them value, not just hype and exciting ad copy.

Here’s how the dartboard works:

Ring 1: New contacts might get to see free blog articles with great advice that simplifies their workload or eliminates an aggravating problem that you’ve nailed.

Ring 2: If they give you their email address, then you’ll add them to your (regular!) newsletter and invite them to special events, bonus reports, or discounts on your entry-level products.

Ring 3: Paying a for a short online or video course (something evergreen and automated) will also give them access to an ebook you’ve created–or vice versa.

Ring 4: Your ideal clients get personal attention on their business and their specific issues via a consulting engagement. And they also pay for that one-on-one investment.

But before you use the dartboard model, make your life easier by having this marketing framework in place:

1. A clear, specific positioning statement.(high-value-positioning) A generalist marketing approach where you try to appeal to every possible client is a certain path to wasted time and effort.
2. A high-value marketing plan(high-value-marketing) that speaks to your ideal clients who are willing to pay premium consulting fees for your services because you’ve built trust by delivering quality information to them over time.
3. Close every interaction with a call to action(high-value-lead-acquisition) so they know how to move toward the center ring where they can get more value from you. ## Making the Dartboard Work for You

While landing a high-profile speaking or writing gig is great exposure, attracting potential clients means creating ongoing interactions so those leads remember that your services are at the ready and they have repeated opportunities to move closer to your “bullseye”.

While this may feel like a huge job given the workload you’re already juggling, there are some ways to stay in touch while keeping your sanity.

• Keep a consistent schedule for your email or mailing list. Regular contact will bring in regular business, and you’ll look like you’re in charge. (In other words, if you’re going to start a newsletter, keep it going!)
• Deliver value with every email, every blog post, every time. Cover topics that are essential for your clients, not your peers.
• Find ways to painlessly repackage existing material and send it to new prospects. Pull a list of tips out of a recent article. Write a short email about the top three questions that crop up with new clients. Grab a two-minute clip from a recent interview and post it on social media.
• Keep nudging leads toward engagement with every interaction. A huge subscriber count doesn’t matter if most of them aren’t interacting with you.
• Break up your contact list into different categories so new leads aren’t getting the same material as long-time subscribers. This is known as segmenting your list, and there are many ways to do it using filters in your mailing list software.
• Keep a lookout for “inner circle” material that you can send to the past and present clients in the bullseye. Since these people have already been willing to pay for your services, it’s worth it to give them VIP treatment and let them know you’re keeping them front of mind.

When you move out of “hunt and sell” mindset and commit to providing great value at every point of contact, you just paved the way for clients to move closer to you. Clients will buy without really feeling pressured while you get to spend your time looking like an expert.