Your prospective clients are the most valuable assets for your business. Without prospects, you wouldn’t have any clients. Therefore, your prospects are the most important things to building your business. Most business owners focus so much on either their clients or getting new prospects that they don’t pay nearly enough attention to converting their prospects to clients. In other words, getting a new prospect is half of the battle and converting the prospect to a client is the most important aspect of successful business development. Here are 10 tips for converting prospects to clients:

1. Track Leads- Most people don’t have any idea how many prospects are actually coming in at any given time. This lack of awareness can be detrimental. It would be like driving your car without a gas gauge knowing how important gas is to keeping your car going. Do an experiment for just a month and track how many prospects are coming in through your efforts- both on-line and off-line. You may find that one of the main reasons that your business isn’t growing is that you don’t have enough prospects coming in.
2. Track Conversion Ratios- Once you have an idea of how many prospects or coming in over a month; compare that to how many new clients you convert over the same period of time. This will give you your conversion ratio. This ratio is typically very low and is another major reason that your business may be struggling.
3. Learn to Close- Closing is simply a name for converting prospects to clients and many people avoid closing since they are either afraid of rejection or concerned about pushing their service/product on to a prospect. Unfortunately, this is a huge problem since, if you don’t ask for the business your chances of converting your prospects shrinks significantly. Simply asking for the business will solve half the problem and learning effective closing techniques can go a long way as well. If you feel that you have a good product or service asking should not be a problem. Come up with a simple 1 sentence close that you feel comfortable with and practice using after speaking with each prospect. It could be as simple as ‘I really look forward to doing business with you and when would you like to get started.’
4. Use a CRM- Having a poor system for tracking prospects is one of the main reasons that most people do such a poor job of it. There is a statistic in sales that says it takes on average 7 contacts to convert a prospect to a client. If you have 25 prospects coming in each month and if you plan to contact each one 7 times, that is 175 contacts combined with the contacts that you need to make from previous months. That is a huge tracking project and an organized system is crucial if you plan to be successful. There are programs that exist to make this job easy and they are called Client Retention Management (CRM) programs. I would highly suggest considering a CRM for your business. Some of the main programs are www.act.com and www.salesforce.com but there are dozens of good options that exist.
5. Prioritize Follow-up- Most people don’t actually enjoy following up with their prospects. Set aside at least 30 minutes each day to follow up and stick with that commitment.
6. Additional Marketing Channels- One of the main reasons that most businesses don’t get enough prospects is that they have only one or two active marketing channels. Some people rely on advertising and others on referrals, but a successful business typically has at least three active channels at any given time. Web based marketing channels such as SEO, Adword Marketing and Email Marketing are especially important in today’s market.
7. Email Newsletters- Staying in touch with prospects is critical in order to keep your business on their radar. One of the best, easiest and most cost effective ways of doing so is through sending out regular email newsletters. This is a great way to educate and inform your prospects as well as branding your business.
8. Add Value- Adding value to your clients is important, but in today’s market adding value to your prospects is equally important. Most people want to get some type of value from their service providers before they make a commitment. Some great ways to do so are to send out newsletters, as was mentioned earlier with valuable educational resources and information. Here are some other ideas: Add educational resources/information to your website, offer free e-books, offer free presentations/webinars, have a nice referral program.
9. Use a Lost Leader- In today’s market, people are shopping around more than ever and are really looking for the best price and value. One way to get a prospect to consider your service is to give them some incentive in the way of a discounted product or service. This is called a ‘Lost Leader’ since in some cases you will either give it away or sell it a reduced rate. The goal is to get them in the door…
10. Referral Program- Getting new prospects via referral is always nice since you typically need to invest as much less time and money to get the prospect. Most people don’t take full advantage of getting referrals because they either don’t ask for referrals or don’t offer strong enough incentives to their existing clients to incentivize them to give referrals. Consider this ridiculous scenario for a moment: If you were to truly offer each of your clients $1,000,000 for each referral and they knew you were serious, how many referrals do you think they would give you? The answer would undoubtedly be a lot. This example illustrates that given enough incentive, everyone will give referrals. Come up with some type of give-away that is equitable for you and create a formal referral program based on that incentive. One to consider is a refer-a-friend program. This is pretty simple, each time a client refers someone they get something for free as well as the person they refer.

Now is not the time to let prospects slip through the cracks. Prospects are more valuable than every before to your business and there are less prospects to go around. Develop a conscious process for converting prospects to clients.