New clients. The name of the game to grow our businesses (or book of business).  Every year we set metrics and goals for how many new clients we need to bring on. Whether your number is 10 or 100 new clients needed every year, I’ll bet you have some kind of plan or strategy to hit that number.  Your plan will have the activities you need to do on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis to help you hit the number.  Activities like networking, cold calling, direct mail, LinkedIn prospecting, Facebook ads, SEO, publicity via earned media, social media updates, attending trade shows, etc.  For some it is a well detailed plan that took hours to create and for others [...]

Have you ever asked for a referral before? What happened? Did the person you asked answer with a stock response like, "let me think about it?" (And did they ever get back to you with names of people for you to call or email?) Or did they almost automatically sit back in their chair or start to shift in their seat?  When they moved back from you they are subconsciously trying to distance themselves from the request you just made.  And the shift in their chair means they are uncomfortable. Why does that happen? Because you attempted to manufacture a referral...meaning you tried to create one that doesn't exist. Now you could argue that asking allows the other person to [...]