Depending on the state of the economy, business tastes and fashions, your firm's current positioning on the competitive landscape, and what's going on in your clients' businesses, you may be attracting lots of leads and opportunities. But, if you're really serious about selling your services, take stock: which activities and initiatives really generate the interest, connect you with prospective clients, and produce results ?
It's easy to fool yourself that an activity is effective in the absence of clear-headed assessment and measurement. In a variant of the old management mantra, if you can't evaluate, assess, or measure results from each business acquisition initiative, then you can't effectively manage it and possibly shouldn't be doing it.
Just because you've always produced newsletters, sponsored events, bought tables at dinners, advertised in a trade journal (and the list goes on ...) it doesn't mean that any of these is necessarily the best way to acquire business now. Mostly, professionals and their firms cling to old favourites, even when they don't produce results. It's a tough call to stop and dismantle a program, but there's little point in continuing what doesn't work. By cutting ineffective programs, resource is released for initiatives which produce business.
Start by establishing measures for each activity. This isn't always easy, and requires resource, but until you work through how to measure or assess outcomes, then invest the effort in doing so, you don't have a fact base to decide what works best and what may not work at all.
If you want to make gains and are really serious about selling your services, take a cool, dispassionate, and fresh look at each profile raising and lead generation technique in turn. Assess its contribution to leads, right-fit business opportunities, and conversion to clients and fees. When you find ways to measure and assess outcomes from each, you'll be equipped to make sound decisions about where best to allocate resources to make competitive gains, do some serious selling, and build a better future for your practice.
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