Stop Ignoring Your Business Friends! Your E-List Is The Key To Your "Client Community"

It runs totally against all common sense and yet we do it anyway. When it comes to business development, all too frequently we ignore our business “friends” in favor of seemingly more desirable (yet unknown) strangers.

Our assumption is that somewhere “out there” lies a rainbow of the best prospects, the highest profits, the healthiest possibilities. Despite the fact that most of us have been told that it takes 10 times the effort and expense to capture new customers than it takes to generate new sales from already-established ones, we nonetheless blissfully leap into the chasm of new business development, waving good-bye to our old business friends and treating them as if they never existed.

How else can we explain why publishing an article, as only one example, strikes most folks as a vehicle for getting their message out to a faceless pool of prospects in the larger business universe and then leaning back to see what (if anything) happens? The article comes out, and the author waits and wonders: Will I get any business out of it? Will any readers contact me about my services? Has anyone even seen it?

Meanwhile, the author has forgotten something critical: she has not so much as announced her published article to her current client base and current prospects, much less offered it for review! The very people who know you best or are getting to know you, who already place great stock in who you are and what you offer, who have already plunked money down for your services in the past—these chums get dissed without so much as a fair warning.

If you really want to make your business development efforts pay off, you must supplement them with reaching out to your “client community.” This means clients and customers, past and present, but also prospects, network contacts, colleagues, coworkers, and even vendors. Your most seemingly insignificant business connections should be on this list and should be continually alerted to your business victories because of the oldest business adage in the book: you just never know.

Think about it. Your current customers, contacts, and “business friends” are the ones who will truly be interested in your newly published article or book, or your upcoming talk, or your new business service or product.

They actually care about the things you do; they actually feel that they have a stake in your business success. Your job is to help them remember this, to keep reminding them and educating them about how you can help them yet again. Or how you can help someone they know. Some people refer to this as “top-of-mind” marketing. I call it smart business thinking.

How does one implement such a client community strategy? Leveraging the power of the Internet by regularly emailing “eblasts,” monthly if possible, will do the job. This may or may not mean publishing an e-newsletter or ezine which is the path chosen by most folks. I call them “eblasts” instead because the format of the traditional e-newsletter/ezine approach often bogs down its “publisher” in a heavy time commitment that sooner or later catches up with them.

When things get busy with clients, for example, the raison d’etre of all of this in the first place, choices have to be made: Do I work on my client’s behalf today or do I take the day off from that to compose my newsletter, with its two original articles, tidbit sections and personnel updates? Most of the time the answer favors the client of course, so that after a few months of missed newsletters, it gets shelved… permanently.

“Well, I haven’t sent one out for a few months now,” the thinking goes. “I guess it’s been too long for me to send one out again. I’ll just forget it.”

The eblast approach is different, since an eblast can be structured in any number of ways, especially as a very short e-message. For example, if you’ve just published an article in a business journal, why not send out this simple one-line message: “I am pleased to announce that my article entitled ‘How to be More Successful in Business’ has just been published by Decision-Maker Magazine. Please click here to read the fill text: WEBSITE LINK.”

How hard is that? And how much time would that take? Other eblasts I’ve seen consisted of only a monthly (or weekly) quotation by a famous person from history, or a one-paragraph comment on a recent business development in the news, or a few quick paragraphs announcing a new client or explaining a recently successful client engagement or announcing some upcoming speaking engagements. The idea of the eblast is to prevent the time-suck of the more ambitious newsletter from throwing you off course.

You've simply got to get e-messages out on a regular basis if you’re to keep in touch with your many contacts. Failing to do so means failing to leverage the power of the Internet. And failing to leverage the power of the Internet means failing to keep your client community alive and working on our behalf.

(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, Ken Lizotte).