Using Existing Business to Help Drive New Customers and Clients

With any start-up company, there’s usually a pretty common pattern. Your first step as a business owner is trying to find prospects and customers. The problem is that to get customers, you need customers or a portfolio to feature your past work. It’s like the old saying goes. “To get business, you need business.” Although a tricky start-up phase many of us find ourselves in, the reality is that a little hard work and motivation pays off. Along with these two ingredients, comes swallowing your ego and be willing to do work for free at first.

Doing work for free isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. In fact, the people who you’re doing the work for are giving you something much more valuable than money, they are giving you experience. With experience and work beneath your belt, you now have the ability to use this as selling points when trying to win over the trust of your potential customer or client. They will see the work you’ve done and think, “Hey, these guys know what they are doing.”

Building the trust factor is one of the most important elements in getting new business. In the second year traditionally, most start-up businesses find that getting business becomes one step closer to reality. By this time, you’ve probably had a good decent run your first year, picking a good number of customers and clients. Most of these, you’ve had to reach out to, but that’s perfectly normal.

As times goes on and your business naturally grows, it will be growing from many angles.

Angle 1: Assuming that you’ve kept your website up to date with all of the new work you’ve received, your website will gradually increase rankings based on the age of your domain, how much SEO efforts you’re putting forth, among the following of existing customers that were pleased by your product, services and customer service.

Angle 2: Offline promotions, or anything you do away from the Internet. If you decide to buy some ad space in local magazine, or get a quick radio spot. These things were probably weren’t possible in your first year because of budget. But since you had a decent year of growth, you can afford to invest back into the business in efforts to drive new business from different angles.

Angle 3: Word of Mouth: Probably one of the most important elements of business that you cannot afford to neglect. The referrals you get from your existing clients, family, friends and co-workers will be huge in converting leads to clients. Often times, this is the fastest way to get new business, as people are looking for the trust factor, and if they trust their friend who worked with you, it’s a good chance you have them.

Remember to keep the momentum going as new business comes in. Your job is to make sure that flow of new customers doesn’t slow down, but grow even faster.