Our Ultimate Guide to Finding and Pitching Potential Clients
One of the most overwhelming parts of starting a service-based business is how to actually find clients. You’ve done all of the beginning steps— you’ve decided what to offer, packaged and priced it, created your social channels, set up your financial shiz, and all of that fun jazz. But now, where the heck do you find clients and how do you pitch them?
Before we offered digital products, we were service providers, so we’ve had our fair share of finding and pitching clients. Today, we want to unveil our best tips to you in this ultimate guide!
Know Your Ideal Client
Before you know where to hunt for clients, you first need to know who your ideal client is. Knowing their demographics and psychographics will be the first clue to where you can find them. If you’re going for the more professional, corporate type of client, LinkedIn would be a great place to start. If you want to serve photographers, you’ll find most of them over on Instagram. If you want to serve a younger audience, places like TikTok or Instagram would be your best bet.
WHAT IF YOU STILL AREN’T SURE?
It’s totally okay to have no clue who you want to work with and to cast a wide net in the beginning. Many people take months to really narrow down their ideal client. It’s like choosing what you want to eat if you’re an indecisive person— you usually don’t know what you want until it’s presented as an option in front of you. In that same way, once you start working with different people, you’ll pick up on the type of clients you do and don’t enjoy working with.
Ask for Leads in Your Network
Once you know (or still don’t know) who your ideal client is, the first place you should look for potential clients is within your own network. You’d be amazed at who you find in your circle. Some of the best people we’ve ever worked with have come within our own networks, and an added bonus is that word will travel faster about your business. If you post about it on Facebook, encourage your friends to share your posts and like your business page.
Your network could be your friends, family, ex-coworkers, your Facebook friends, your cousin whose husband’s step brother might be interested, etc.! Ask around and spread the word that you’re offering your service(s) because you never know who you might find. And because you’ll have mutual connections with the potential client, that might heighten your chances of working with them!
Cold Pitch Locally
If you’re providing services for other businesses, the second place you can start is right within your local business network. You can either visit in person and introduce yourself, or just look up their business info and shoot them an email introducing yourself, what you do, and how you think you can help them. (We’ll talk more about how to pitch later.) A lot of the time, people are more inclined to work with someone who’s local.
Another idea once you start bringing in revenue and are able to invest is to join your city’s Chamber of Commerce. This could be an awesome way to get your business and offering on the map. Usually you get loads of benefits, plus the opportunity to attend chamber events and network with other businesses in your city.
Network in Facebook Groups
There are thousands of niche Facebook groups available for you to join (if you’re a creative business owner, ours would be a great place to start). We’d recommend not promoting yourself, but rather posting helpful information and commenting on other posts to give value and answer questions. Even if the group allows self-promotion (unlike ours) or has a dedicated thread for self-promo, there’s an added benefit to going all out with providing value. If you’re active enough, people will start to remember who you are and what you do, meaning they’ll come to you first if they need help and others may even start tagging you in posts.
We’d advise sticking to smaller groups (10k-30k members) for this to work best, though, because your posts or comments may get lost easily in huge groups, and it’ll overall be more difficult to build recognition. Also be sure to only pick 2-3 groups to network in and be consistent. This will keep you from getting overwhelmed from trying to juggle networking in tons of groups, and it’ll allow you to put your full focus on the few you want to really be active in.
Another great idea would be to put your elevator pitch in your bio and publicly link your social channel(s), website, and business page if you have one so that if someone visits your profile, they can easily see who you are and what you do.
Facebook even rolled out a feature that allows you to have a unique profile specific to the group you’re in. You know how when you click someone’s name from inside a group and you’re able to see their group activity, badges, and posts? You can edit that profile and add a bio to describe yourself to the group and choose what info you want to publicly share.
How to Cold Pitch Potential Clients
If you serve other businesses, you’ll likely send tons of cold pitches, at least when you’re first starting out. This can be really intimidating to new business owners who are really feeling the imposter syndrome and are nervous to put themselves out there like that! We totally feel you, which is why we want to help you craft your cold pitch.
FIRST DO YOUR RESEARCH
Before reaching out to someone, do some research and get familiar with their brand and mission. Hopefully, you’re choosing to reach out to this person because you like what they’re about, so be sure to find details that genuinely stand out to you. Read up on their about page and learn a bit about who they are as a person. Check out the latest thing they launched, article they published, award they received, whatever it may be.
HOW TO WRITE YOUR INTRODUCTION
If you can remember this one tip, you’ll already be 100 steps ahead in your cold pitch: make it about them. The worst intro you can have is beginning by talking about yourself. Before you reached out to them, they didn’t have a clue nor did they care about who you are or what you do. People like to hear about themselves and their own business. It’s just how humans work. And since you’ve done your research on them, you’ll be able to begin with genuine flattery (Keyword: genuine. They’ll likely be able to tell ass-kissing from a real compliment.)
Try to limit this to 2-3 sentences if you can, 3-5 at most. Here are a couple of examples:
“Hi Name,
Congratulations on your recent feature in {Pretend Magazine}! I think it’s so awesome that more people are learning about {pretend topic}. It’s something that I personally am really interested in, and your article was incredibly insightful. I loved your point about {pretend thing you loved about it}.”
Or...
“Hi Name,
I’ve been an avid follower of your {pretend content} for a while now, and I’m a huge fan of your mission. {Pretend mission} is something I hold very near and dear to my heart as well, so I really appreciate your values.”
PRESENT THE PROBLEM
We’re still going to keep the email about them here by leading into their problem(s). If you’ve noticed that they’re not doing something or doing it incorrectly, you can kindly point it out. Or you can just simply ask if they’ve been experiencing said problem. Making them aware of the potential issue is the first step to presenting yourself as the solution, just as you would in your other marketing messaging. Examples:
“I was just checking out your latest blog post on {pretend topic} and noticed a few ways you could be exponentially improving your SEO to increase your web traffic. I know how important your content is to me, and more people should absolutely be seeing it. Do you need help with this?”
Or...
“By chance, have you been having difficulty expanding your reach on Instagram?
With all the recent algorithm changes, so many {pretend niche business owners} have been struggling with getting their posts in front of more {pretend business’ target audience}.”
If you’re reaching out after seeing that they’re looking for a service provider like yourself, they’re obviously aware of the problem and are actively looking for someone to fix it. So, you can switch this part up to simply let them know that’s the reason you’re emailing them.
If they specified any guidelines for reaching out, be sure to meet those in your email, too. Sometimes people will ask for a specific subject line to help them easily filter through their inbox, or they want to make sure you touch on specific points. This is a good thing because it makes it easier on you!
PRESENT THE SOLUTION (AKA YOU!)
Now that they’re aware of the problem, it’s time to present your service as the solution! While this is about you, it’s also still mostly about them because you do want to call out what kind of results their business could see and how you would fix this problem for them. This is also the time to link to your website or portfolio, so they have the opportunity to read up on you and hopefully get the answers to common questions they may have before booking a call or replying back to your email.
Here’s an example:
“As a {service provider}, I help {target audience fix pretend problem} by {way that you help}. My clients have seen upwards of 19% conversion rate increases, and I strongly believe I would be able to generate similar results for {Pretend Business Name} by {more tailored way your services could help}.
You can learn more about me and how I helped {Other Pretend Business} do {great results} in my portfolio/website here.”
CLOSING THE EMAIL WITH A CALL TO ACTION
Your call to action could be to book a call or simply ask for a reply, but you want to make sure you’re encouraging them to do something. A few examples:
“Do you have 30 minutes in the next couple of weeks to go over my ideas on {how to help with pretend problem}?
Looking forward to your response,
Your Name”
Or...
“If you’d like to hop on a call to chat more about what I can do for {Pretend Business Name}, feel free to book a call at your earliest convenience here.
Can’t wait to hear back from you,
Your Name”
Or (double whammy)...
“I’d love to hop on a quick call to go over my solutions to {pretend problem}. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in?
Can’t wait to chat,
Your Name
P.S. Just in case the answer is yes, you can find my scheduler here. Feel free to book a call at whatever time works best for you!”
Don’t Get Discouraged
The more potential clients you pitch, the more you’ll start to find your groove and discover what approaches work best for your ideal client. Everything in business is a matter of trial and error. Although it can be hard, try not to be discouraged by “no”s. Trust us, you’ll receive plenty, but that one “yes” will make it all worth it!
