50 calls

If you make these 50 calls, you will not only get new projects, you will also learn a great deal and renew old friendships.

You want to revitalize your business? Want to regain your own enthusiasm and interest in your business?

I have an idea for you. If you will do it you will not only get new projects, you will learn a great deal and renew old friendships. Won’t that be fun?

Here’s all you have to do: Pick up the phone and call 50 of your old clients.

Catch up with them. Find out how they and their families are doing. Ask them about their business. Ask them about the challenges they are facing and what they are doing about them. Ask them if there’s anything you can do to help them right now. Ask them who else in their organization (or outside of it) you should be speaking with.

These 50 calls will get you out of your hole.

These 50 calls will get you used to making business development calls.

These 50 calls will get you tuned into the markets you serve.

These 50 calls will give you something to talk about with the other clients you speak with.

These 50 calls will help you learn new things that you may be able to apply to your own business or other clients.

These 50 calls will help tune up your marketing database.

These 50 calls will get you new business, both now and in the future.

Making these 50 calls to past/former clients is a variation on the “50 cups of coffee” tactic that I am hearing many people do these days. That is where they try to arrange 50 cups of coffee with people they may never have a chance to meet or talk with otherwise. I have had people ask me to do that several times in the past year and always said “yes.” Today we have virtual “cups of coffee” from the pleasure of our own kitchens or back porches or offices.

Which brings me to Phase 2 of the “50 calls” program. That’s where you make 50 additional calls to people you have never spoken with before. Once you realize how great this is you will be more willing to call people who weren’t clients in the past. And of course that could be pivotal.

And once you make the second 50 calls, you will have new opportunities with new clients you wouldn’t have had otherwise. All of the same benefits to the 50 calls made to former clients apply.

Finally, once you make these two rounds of 50 calls each you will be so sold on the benefits of doing them that you will encourage other people in your company to do the same.

One “match” may very well start a fire that burns down a forest.

Try it out and let me know what happens!

Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.