Are you on the way to becoming a client magnet?

Are more employers working with you this year than last? Are you earning more of your organisation’s income from employers this year than last? Are more employers working with you for a second or third time?

You want to be in a position to answer all of these questions positively.

If you’re achieving this sort of success and, if you’re hoping to achieve even more success in the future, there’s a good chance that you’ve accepted that client attraction marketing really works.

That means you’re applying the lessons set out in this series of posts.

• You’ve defined a market that you are going to serve.
• You know who you want to attract to work with your organisation.
• You’ve made sure that prospective customers from your chosen marketplace can find you.
• You’ve made sure you are memorable in a positive sense when customers interact with you.
• You’ve created a great website that really is the hub of all your marketing and business communications.
• You’re building your list of prospects and customers.
• You’ve created a customer pipeline.

Congratulations. You’re making progress.

Getting business to come to you is vital in the modern world of FE because, for the future, you’re likely to have limited amounts of money to spend on more conventional approaches to promoting your organisation.

If you adopt client attraction you can do more with less, in one sense so the cuts in budgets may be less serious for you than they would be otherwise.

However, you will have costs. It’s just that your costs will be calculated in different ways.

• Client attraction costs in terms of staff time.
• Client attraction costs in terms of skills. You definitely need people who have skills that can be in short supply, for example, webmaster skills.
• Client attraction doesn’t need to cost a great deal in terms of financial outlay.

Client attraction helps you to build your business for the longer term, so it’s a valuable approach to marketing, to promotion, to selling, to business building and to building long-term relationships with employers.

That’s why, now you’re on the road to becoming a client magnet, you’ll want to continue travelling in the right direction.

This is the tenth and final post in a series about client attraction basics.

Have you created your customer pipeline?

If you’re going to succeed in bringing in more employer business and more new employer business, too, you'll need to differentiate your list of customers and potential customers.

A good way of doing this is to think about employers as making a journey through your customer pipeline.

• Customers enter the pipeline via a wide funnel.
• They then travel along the pipeline.
• When they reach the end of the pipeline they have become your advocates and promoters.

Many employers will never get that far down your pipeline.

However, you need to know where employers are in the pipeline to help you to decide how to manage your relationship with them. You need to do this for several reasons.

• You deal with employers in different ways depending on where they are in your pipeline.
• You allocate differing amounts to resource to managing your relationship with them when they are at different points in the pipeline.

In marketing terms the employer enters your pipeline as a suspect.

When you know more about the employer and you think there is a possibility of doing business with him or her, then the suspect becomes a prospect.

When you do your first piece of business with the employer, he or she becomes a customer.

As you build the relationship the customer becomes a client. You start to tailor what you do to meet each client’s expectations and offer a differentiated set of products and services.

Clients with whom you work well become your fans and will, if asked, promote you, or give you a reference.

A few of your fans will become your advocates. These are the employers who take the initiative in promoting you. They are always looking for opportunities to let people know what a great job you do. These are the people who reach the end of your pipeline.

Your customer pipeline is an essential element in building your business.

Have you worked out where each employer sits in your pipeline? If you haven’t, you need to.

This is the ninth in a series of ten posts about client attraction basics.