Part 23: Prospecting for clients
Did you know that less than 10% of all of the world’s diamonds mined are actually made into jewelry? The rest are mostly made into tools, such as diamond cut blades and cutters. That’s because most diamonds mined are just brown rocks that are nothing you would consider valuable. You wouldn’t want to wear an ugly brown rock on your finger. Even less than that 10% are rarely big enough to be worth anything. Hundreds of thousands of those jewel-quality diamonds are very small and insignificant, but they look nice as accent diamonds in earrings, necklaces, tennis bracelets and other jewelry pieces. Only a small fraction are ever larger than 1 carat total weight (ctw).
Finding the BEST customers is just like digging for diamonds. You’ll pull out plenty of the “rough” stuff, but to have a handful of gems will take patience, time and lots of digging.
Unlike marketing, prospecting is a whole different tactic. Prospecting can be an extremely worthwhile strategy for you to attain new clients and grow your business. Often, it costs very little but yields extremely high rates of return on investment (ROI). It’s a way to start with very little money in your pocket. You can get your Freelance business going with less than $50 bucks! Best of all, it’s a great way to find out what works and what doesn’t work in attracting new business. You will see if this idea you have is even viable, and you will learn how to face tremendous competition (AND HOW TO WIN AT IT) with some very easy tactics.