~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Too many people think that if they ask one or two people, or post a few times on social media, clients will appear. When that doesn’t work they get discouraged, and a lot of them quit — not because the business was wrong, but because it wasn’t as easy as they expected.
Sales is a numbers game that runs on relationships, and it takes considerably more persistence than anyone tells you.
My process is simple to describe and slow to execute: get seen, build credibility, reel clients in. In that order, because skipping a stage is why most attempts fail.
Get seen
You have to get in front of as many of the right people as possible. Social media, networking, alumni groups, referral partners, speaking, writing — there are dozens of routes and they all work for somebody.
What nobody warns you about is the volume required. Marketing people have long worked on the rule of thumb that someone needs to encounter you a good number of times before they remember you at all — the specific number varies by whoever’s telling you, and the underlying point holds regardless.
In my own experience building this business, and from working with others on visibility, it takes somewhere between 500 and 1,000 posts before people genuinely start to recognise your name and want to know more.
That number is uncomfortable and it’s the most useful thing in this post. Most people give up somewhere around post forty, having concluded it doesn’t work. It does work. They simply stopped inside the part where nothing visible happens.
Build credibility
Being seen isn’t enough on its own. People need a reason to believe you’re competent before they’ll risk money on you.
Credibility is built by being useful in public, repeatedly. Answering real questions properly. Explaining how something actually works. Sharing what you learned from something that went wrong.
Consistency matters more than brilliance here. Showing up irregularly builds nothing — people can’t develop confidence in someone who appears at random. Weekly and adequate beats occasional and excellent.
Two things accelerate it considerably:
Other people vouching for you. Reviews, recommendations, referrals. This is the one part of your credibility you didn’t write, which is precisely why it carries weight.
Specificity. “I help businesses grow” builds nothing. “I do the bookkeeping for independent restaurants” is immediately assessable, and the person either has that problem or knows someone who does.
Reel them in
Once people know you exist and believe you’re credible, you make offers that solve a problem they actually have.
This is where people who’ve done the first two stages well still fall down, usually by never actually asking. There’s a kind of hoping — posting useful things and waiting for someone to enquire. Some will. Many more won’t, because they didn’t realise you were available or weren’t sure you’d want their sort of work.
The fix isn’t aggression. It’s clarity: say what you do, say you have capacity, and make it easy to start a conversation.
And position around their problem rather than your service. Nobody buys bookkeeping. They buy not thinking about the accounts on a Sunday. The service is what you deliver; the problem is what they’re paying to remove.
What stops this working
Five failures account for most of it.
Quitting inside the invisible period. Covered above and it’s the biggest by a distance. The work compounds and the compounding is back-loaded.
Talking to everyone. If your description fits any business, nobody recognises themselves in it. Narrow enough to be recognisable, and you’ll be surprised how much more work arrives.
Broadcasting instead of conversing. Posting is not the same as talking to people. One genuine conversation with someone who has the problem is worth a fortnight of content, particularly early on.
Competing on price. If the only differentiator you offer is being cheaper, you’ll win the clients who leave for someone cheaper still. Establish value before price, always.
And never following up. Most people ask once and stop. A polite second and third contact converts a meaningful share of people who were interested and simply got busy — which is most of them.
The most overlooked source
Worth separating out, because it’s consistently ignored in favour of finding strangers.
The people who already bought from you. They know you, they’ve already taken the risk once, and they’re immeasurably easier to sell to than someone new. Most small businesses deliver excellent work and then never contact the client again.
The people who already know you. Former colleagues, people from your industry, other parents at your children’s activities. Most people never mention what they do, and then wonder why nobody refers them.
And people serving the same clients without competing. An accountant and a bookkeeper. A photographer and a venue. These relationships produce work for years and almost nobody builds them deliberately.
Referral work also converts better and haggles less, because it arrives with trust already attached.
The honest summary
There’s no secret. The businesses that fill their pipeline do unremarkable things consistently for longer than feels reasonable: they show up where their buyers are, they’re useful in public, they ask for the work, and they stay in touch with people who’ve already bought.
None of that is clever. All of it is boring. And the boring version, done for eighteen months, beats every shortcut anyone will try to sell you.
Remember that every “no” gets you closer to a “yes.” Go and collect your no’s.
More on where to be seen and what changes once people know you.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
