Marketing Strategies: Seven Simple Steps to More
Clients in 90 Days

by Maya Bailey

Published on this site: May 19th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

In my work as a business coach I meet with people every day who have dreams of creating success in their business. Sadly, most of them are saying the same thing, "I hate marketing, I just want to do what I'm good at without having to market myself. " The truth about getting more clients is that it's not that difficult, it just requires following some simple steps.

1. Focus: How do you get to where you want to be unless you know where you are going? I always teach my clients a visualization in which they imagine where they want to be professionally in 1 year from today. How much money do you want to be earning? How many hours a week do you want to work? What kind of clients do you want to work with?
   
   
2. Strategies: Once you're clear about where you want to be, you need to create strategies to get there. I tell people, "if you already knew what strategies to use, you'd probably already be there." Strategies help you to chunk big visions into tangible, bite size action steps.
   
   
3. Accountability: How accountable are you to yourself? Most people I meet in business for themselves, find it far too easy to slide in keeping their agreements with themselves. The magical thing about coaching is that when you have a witness to your accountability, you are much more likely to do what you said you'd do. Just knowing that someone cares and will ask you every week, "How did that action step go?", is huge incentive to staying on track.
   
   
4. Discovery: As a former psychologist, one of my passions is helping people discover how they block them themselves and get in their own way of success. What I find is that everyone needs to reprogram some self-limiting beliefs, like "I don't have what it takes to succeed" or "I don't deserve to have a lot of money". Another block is that most people suffer from subconscious sabotaging strategies, like procrastination . These need to be reversed. Finally , everyone I've ever met has a monstrous , overly developed inner critic, which I call the Gremlin. In discovery you learn to identify the voice of you Gremlin and learn to tame it way down.
   
   
5. Perspective: We all spin our wheels and get caught up in our narrow perspective. The best investment we can make in getting more clients is to have people around us that give us the option of another perspective.
   
   
6. Support: If you are in business for yourself , you need all the support you can get. As you put yourself out there to get more clients, you are assuming the responsibility of helping these clients. Who helps you? Who do you lean on? It is invaluable to have a support team or a committed ally in your corner.
   
   
7. Celebration: How often do you celebrate yourself? As a coach who teaches people how to get more clients I find that learning to celebrate not only your successes but also your efforts is the way to a long a healthy career. By learning to stop, pause and validate yourself for what you've done keeps this process light , fun and exciting. Also, think of how impossible it is for your gremlin to beat you up, if you are busy celebrating yourself! It is one of of the joys of my work that I get to help people truly celebrate themselves.

Maya Bailey, Ph.D., is a Master Business Coach and creator of the High Impact Accelerated Accountability Program for getting more clients in 90 days. She can be viewed and listened to on her website:
http://www.90daystomoreclients.com Article services.