I have described a scenario for the early stages of your computer consultancy career. While starting up is the most risky stage of any business, you still need to develop an ongoing marketing plan that will continue to move your business in a positive direction.

Clients change suppliers, go out of business, move and this all results in shrinkage of your client base. A constant topping up of new clients is essential throughout the lifetime of your business.

The classic salesman’s mistake

Consider a very common situation that salesmen face. They have no business, so they launch into a huge prospecting campaign. They get on the phone, do mail shots, advertise, go to exhibitions and suck in a big mouthful of enquiries. They convert a percentage of these into paying customers and their diary gets fully booked. The problem is, they have no time to do any marketing. Three weeks later when their appointments come to an end, they are back to square one. No appointments! While working so hard, they had no time to continue their marketing and somehow, when your diary is so fully booked and you are bathed in the feel good factor that results, your outlook becomes so positive that you think the full business pipeline will never end. Yet it does. Before we know it we start complaining that you can’t do everything at once. You say, “I can’t work and do my marketing at the same time! Marketing is so time intensive and I just have to grab the client appointments while I can.”

This is typical salesman behaviour. How do I know? Because I was in sales for a number of years. We all did it, except for the very successful. Somehow they just continued to market and get a steady flow of leads. It was a planned approach. While the rest of us did our prospecting in batches.
Essential marketing tasks performed weekly
To be successful, you must continually market, every week. Be consistent in your approach and steady in your resolve. Even when the outlook is rosy and you think you don’t need to, it is your mind that is deceiving you.

You need to make a firm commitment to performing certain marketing tasks every week. This can take the form of spending X amount on advertising every week, or a specified number of adverts or even a defined number of mailshot letters sent out. To do this you will need to block out time in your diary. Do this early on before your appointments take up all the time. Work around your marketing time, not through it, for it is one of the most important activities you can work on.
How to market when you have no time or energy left
Marketing takes energy and it also takes time to do it well. And sometimes we hit a crunch, where we are lacking in both these areas. Clients are pressurising you to complete overdue projects, you are behind on your invoicing and new clients want you to start on their project now or you risk losing out to a competitor.

In these circumstances, you have to weigh up the costs of forgoing your marketing (at least in the short term) to keep happy customers. Yet you know it will hit you 1 month later when your diary dries up. Therefore, it pays to have a marketing approach that takes neither time nor energy to run.

Want to know how to market without effort on an going basis? Or shall I skip that part? Only joking! What you need is…

A website.

But not just any type of website. You need a lead generation website that sells in your absence and brings you a constant stream of enquiries that pile into your email inbox. I will cover this approach in more detail later on but keep in your mind the power of this approach. It can keep your diary full, even when you run out of marketing time.

As I type this page, I can see yet another enquiry generated from my website. I make that 3 in the last 11 hours and quite often I get 10 enquiries a day and more. All for no additional effort after the initial setting up period!