How to Get Clients: The 24 Hour Challenge
by David Steele

In this comprehensive article in which you will learn:

• Getting clients and marketing are not necessarily the same thing!
• How to avoid the most common mistakes that practitioners make in building their practice
• How to guarantee your success in private practice

This might be the most important practice-building information of the year for you.

Please read this article carefully and consider accepting the 24 hour challenge.

What Is Marketing?

Very simply, marketing is communicating what you do. There are two primary forms of marketing:

1. External Marketing: The process of reaching people that don’t know you to develop prospects.

External marketing activities include advertising, speaking engagements, submitting articles for publication, publishing a book, radio and television appearances, special events such as trade shows, conferences and festivals, networking events, internet marketing venues such as search engines, pay-per-click advertising, banner exchanges, etc. You provide a very personal service, and it is unlikely for someone to hire you if they don’t know you. Getting clients starts with getting prospects for your internal marketing activities.

2. Internal Marketing: The process of building your relationship with your prospects so they refer to you and/or hire you.

Internal marketing activities include asking for referrals, offering complimentary sessions, newsletters and e-zines, e-programs, e-mail broadcasts, mailings, telephone calls, sponsoring a niche community (in-person or on-line), free or low cost seminars or events for your subscribers, membership system with member benefits, etc.

Research shows that 80% of sales require five or more contacts. Internal marketing is how you engage your prospects over time and bring them closer to hiring you.

Getting Clients: Bluebirds vs. Boulders

As you will learn below, getting clients and marketing are not necessarily the same thing. Your ability to succeed in practice will depend upon learning and practicing the skills needed to get clients, as much or more than your marketing or your helping skills. Mastering the skills necessary to get clients will guarantee your success in your private practice.

In getting clients, I make a distinction between “Bluebirds” and “Boulders.”

“Bluebirds” are the clients that are so strongly attracted to you that they respond to your marketing efforts immediately, fly into your window and hire you. In my experience, most private practice professionals unconsciously expect this to be how they fill their practice.

“Boulders” are prospects that are interested and attracted to you, but require a lot of time and effort to push and pull them into working with you.

It is often hard to understand why it’s so hard when they appear so interested. Often they have objections such as “Gee, I’d like to, but I just can’t afford it right now,” or “I don’t have the time,” or “I have to think about it.”

In my opinion, it is rarely about time or money or needing to think about it, they are simply experiencing fear and need your support to overcome it. While we might wish for a practice full of bluebirds, my philosophy is to design your marketing for the boulders, and the bluebirds will follow.

If the 80/20 rule applies here (and I think it does) you can expect 80% of your clients to be boulders, so if you focus on the bluebirds you will most likely not have a full practice.

Does Marketing Create Clients?

If you review the various external and internal marketing activities listed above, you might notice that it is quite possible to do them all and not get any clients.

Advertisements, presentations, newsletters, and websites are all effective in communicating what you do, but do not create clients on their own. Private practice professionals often make one of the following two mistakes:

1. Over-focusing on marketing

These professionals expect their marketing activities to convert their prospects to clients and spend their efforts on their websites, seminars, writing, etc, and are discouraged when they get few clients from them.

2. Over-focusing on services

These professionals want to help their clients, not market. They hope that they will attract new clients by doing a good job with their existing clients. They take more trainings, read more books, and work harder for their clients, hoping those activities will attract more clients. They feel helpless and discouraged when their hard work doesn’t result in clients flocking to hire them.

Marketing vs. Enrollment

I make a distinction between “marketing” and “enrollment.”

As we discussed, marketing is communicating what you do to people that don’t know you, and building your relationship with them. As we saw, you can market till the cows come home and not get any clients.

“Enrollment” is the process of individually connecting with a prospect with the intention of converting them to a client, if appropriate.

This is why the "free initial consultation" or complimentary session is so highly recommended and utilized by professionals as an enrollment activity; it gives the prospect an experience of you and increases the likelihood they will hire you.

However, you can give away your services to hundreds of people and not get any clients if you don’t “close the sale” and enroll them as a client.

The Four Closing Questions

When engaging a prospective client in a free initial consultation or complimentary session, I recommend “closing the sale” by using the following questions:

Closing Question #1: “Has this been helpful to you?”

Five to ten minutes before ending, asking this question transitions the focus of the session from coaching them to evaluating their experience of your coaching. Almost always the answer will be “YES!” and they will most likely have a positive feeling and mindset towards working with you.

Closing Question #2: “Would you like to continue this conversation sometime?”

A natural, casual follow up question; you are not putting them on the spot asking them for their money or a commitment of any kind. You are simply asking if they like the idea of getting together and doing this again.

Closing Question #3: “When would be good for you?”

You’re moving gently, casually closer to the idea of working together. Usually the prospect will respond by then asking specifics about working with you, such as cost, length of commitment, etc. It is far better to address these when the prospect brings it up, as it indicates they are ready to think about them. Bringing up the cost too early creates immediate resistance because they are not convinced of the value or ready to consider the investment.

Closing Question #4: “Do you know anyone else that can benefit from my services?”

Always remember to ask for the referral, especially when a client has had a positive experience with you.

TIP: It is very important to be prepared with how your client and prospect can refer to you. Asking for their contact information raises privacy issues, expecting your client or prospect to remember to mention you is chancy, so I recommend giving them a stamped envelope pre-stuffed with a brochure and/or flyer, cover letter, and business card, and asking them to address it to their friend and mail it.

While you’re at it, give them one or two for their own use or to pass on. When handing out your card, brochure, newsletter, or flyer, be sure to always include extras with a request to pass them on to anyone they know that might be interested.

Overcoming Objections

Most private practice professionals freeze when a prospect states an objection such as “Gee, I’d like to, but I just can’t afford it right now,” or “I don’t have the time,” or “I have to think about it.”

As mentioned before, in my opinion, it is rarely about time or money or needing to think about it, they are simply experiencing fear and need your support to overcome it.

The challenge here, and why so many professionals have difficulty with this situation, is that the prospect is interested and attracted and not saying “no.”

If a prospect does say “no” and indicates they’re not interested, chances are you would immediately respect that and proceed no further. Helping people overcome their self-imposed limits to reaching their goals is what you do as a helping professional!

If they were your client and experiencing fear and resistance to something they wanted to do, how would you handle it?

Think about it. You help your clients overcome their fears and take action all the time. Why not do this with prospective clients as well?

Remember, most of your prospects (perhaps 80%) will be “boulders,” and you need to be effective in helping them past their fears to hire you. This is a pivotal choice point in their life. Behavior is not random, it follows patterns, and unless you can help them past their fear, it is likely they will continue to follow this pattern and stay stuck where they are in their life.

Just to be clear, this applies to prospects that ARE INTERESTED, but are hesitant. This DOES NOT APPLY to prospects that are not interested or say “No.”

How do you help your clients move past their fears? Can you do the same with your prospective clients?

Sample coaching questions for helping clients and prospects past fear:

1. What do you risk if you do/don’t do this?
2. What would happen if we did/did not work together?
3. How would your life be different if you did/did not do this?
4. How else does this stop you from going after what you want? Are you ready to change that?
5. Are you willing to brainstorm ways to make this work?
6. Where do you want to be in 5 Years? How will you get there? When do you want to start?

The 24 Hour Challenge

As we discussed, marketing and getting clients (or “enrollment”) are not necessarily the same thing.

You do need to market and build your business, but without the skill of enrollment you most likely will not get many clients. Enrollment is a huge obstacle for many private practice professionals, and I have had a lot of success helping them overcome their fear and resistance by issuing the following “24 Hour Challenge:”

“Pretend this is a reality TV show and you will win a million dollars if you get one new paying client in the next 24 hours.”

What would you do? If one million dollars could be yours tomorrow if you get just one new client, you would overcome your fear and resistance and get creative!

While there are many possible ways to do this, the easiest and most successful way is to simply get on the telephone, start at the top of your prospect list (or people you know), and work your way down until you get a client.

Here are some suggested steps:

Step 1: Gather the contact information of everyone you know.

Dig into drawers for forgotten business cards, find old address books, look through the yellow pages for colleagues you forgot you knew; look through your e-mail addresses and website favorites.

At some point you will want to compile all these people into a database that you can use for your internal marketing, but for now, you just want to collect enough prospects to keep you busy on the telephone until you succeed in getting one paying client from them.

Step 2: Write a script for leaving an enticing voicemail.

Assume that you will mostly get their voicemail, what can you say that will compel them to call you back? Get creative!

Step 3: When you get them on the telephone, share that you are now in private practice, give them your laser speech (or simply describe what you do and for who), and ask them about their situation.

Your goal is to get them to talk and naturally enter a coaching conversation with them as if it were a complimentary session.

Step 4: Use the “Four Closing Questions” explained above.

That’s all there is to it!

If you push through your resistance and fear and do this long enough, you WILL get a client!

If you can get one client, you can get two, and three, and so on. You will have proven to yourself that you can get clients whenever you want to, which will hopefully raise your confidence and ability to enroll other clients, and guarantee your success in your private practice!


©2004 by David Steele / All rights reserved

David Steele, MA, LMFT, CLC is founder and CEO of BuildingYourIdealPractice.com and Relationship Coaching Institute, and author of “How to Build Your Ideal Practice In 90 Days.”

David conducts a 90-Day Practice Building Intensive for private practice professionals who desire to build their ideal practice, and invites readers to join his free Monthly Practice Building Seminar Series; visit www.BuildingYourIdealPractice.com for more information.

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