How to quickly go from 100 customers to 1000

Growing your business can be really challenging. Here’s how to quickly go from 100 customers to 1000 by following a few simple steps and adjusting your strategy. Reaching this milestone for your business is huge and to achieve it you’ll need a little help from your current customers and consider the resources you have in your team.

Your next 1000 customer might be different

As your ambition changes, so will your business. It’s very likely that your next customers will be different from the customers you started to win at the beginning of your journey, so who are your customers now?

Your first 100 customers are likely to come from early-adopters, friend of a friend, accidental heroes, the results of weeks of cold calling and good old-fashioned dumb luck!

What will your next 1000 customers look like?

You’ll need a new strategy to target them and if you’re going to do that you’ll need to know where to find them, what their motivations are and how often they will need your service?

Start by writing a summary of the following:

• Their Location
• Industry
• Size of business
• Frequency of use

If you can agree what this list looks like then you can start targeting your next 1000 customers. Otherwise you’ll just be throwing a line in the water and hoping you’ve got the right bait.

Use your current customers to get more

Your first 100 customers will most likely get your next 1000.

Yes, it’s unlikely they will ring up their friends and colleagues and insist they use your services. But you can leverage the good service you offer them to win your next customer. If you are a small business then you’ll be surprised how many people want to see you succeed. It’s likely they have started their own business before and can empathise with how challenging it can be.

It’s possible they think you are too busy, too successful or too proud to ask for help. Don’t allow them to think that, reach out and ask them if they know anyone else who could benefit from what you have to offer. If you get an inquiry from a prospect then find a similar customer you have on your books.

Let’s say you offer Fire Safety Compliance services. A prospect customer could have found you online and asked if you do smoke alarm tests. Instead of simply replying back with confirmation, ask one of your current customers to give you a testimonial or better still ask your customer if they wouldn’t mind ringing that prospect so they can hear directly from a happy client.

They will know that 5 minutes out of their day could make a huge difference to your business.

Share what you know

You’re an expert. Whether you believe it or not, you have a successful business, lot’s of happy customers and the answers to lot’s of questions – it’s time to share what you know!

• If you’re a Gas Engineer then share what you know about CP12 certificates.
• You probably know everything there is to know about F-Gases if you install HVAC equipment.
• What you don’t know about Fire Regulations probably isn’t worth knowing if you run a compliance business.

You can go from 100 customers to 1000 by being seen as the knowledgeable expert in a particular subject and answering someone’s question they post online. By creating content specific to your services you’re able to prove you know the subject matter well and can provide a reliable solution.

How do you answer a question if you haven’t been asked it directly?

Lucky for you there’s plenty of ways and they are all free and accessible. People regularly ask questions online that you can view and answer. The only thing it will cost you is a time, but it’s time well spent. Social media, online communities, Youtube tutorials, Linkedin, even Tick-tok videos are great ways to answer questions and get noticed.

Use Quroa and look every bit the expert

A fabulous customer engagement tool you can use is Quroa. Quroa is a website where people post questions on a variety of topics. For members of the public it’s a great way to find an expert in a sea of misinformation. For you, it’s your opportunity to stand out as an expert in your particular subject.

Quroa attracts such a broad demographic of users you’re bound to be noticed by would-be customers. You’ll be interacting with people motivated enough to hop online and ask a very specific question, or search for a question hoping to find the answer.

• Quroa gets over 300 million monthly visitors
• There’s over 300,000 topics
• You can share your company details, website and contact information

The trick to getting noticed on Quroa is ensuring you write a detailed yet digestible answer which receives ‘upvotes’. These are similar to ‘likes’ on Linkedin and Instagram. It shows social approval of your answer and means you’ll appear further up in the results.

Create a well structured profile page. Don’t hold back on the details in your profile. If you’ve taken the time to write a well constructed and helpful response to a question on Quroa, then your profile is how you’ll benefit from it. Ensure you include your name, credentials, qualifications, a profile picture and a description of yourself and your expertise.

People will click on your profile if they are impressed with your answer so this is where you’ll need your company details and contact information – turn that question into a quote!

For a more detailed guide to using Quroa for your marketing check out this article. Learn more.

Choose a channel

Make the decision of which channel to use based on where you think your customers spend time and where you are comfortable posting content.

If the idea of creating engaging, amusing, short bite sized videos on Tick-tok makes you uncomfortable, regardless of how many potential customers you can find, then be authentic and build up confidence on a channel more suitable.

How to make a start

Do a few Google searches on the questions you typically get asked by your customers. Look at the results that come up and visit the some of the websites where those questions are asked. Click on a few of those answers and see if you could provide a more robust and detailed answer to the question.

For example you could search “How often do I need to get my Air Con unit checked?”

Google lists over 550,000 website listings related to this search and with a well structured answer your business could be noticed as an expert in the particular field.

Questions like that could be the title of your next blog article or Youtube video. Answer the question with as much detail as you can manage and make it easy for people to find you – don’t be shy, promote your answer, post, blog or video over social media and on forums.

The most important thing is to ensure you’ve provided a helpful and correct answer.

Use your local networks

Local news websites, community networks and social media channels want your content. They are eager to capture the interest of their communities as much as you are keen to find your next customer.

Consider when your key times of the year and offer content to these groups. You’ll be surprised how keen they are for column inches.

If you offer fire safety services then why not put together a paragraph or two on how to protect your home, office or buildings with smoke alarms – particularly at high risk times of the year.

Email. Email. Email.

Keep emailing your prospects. You’re not going to win them over on the first email no matter how snappy your subject line!

Digital Marketing is a great way to keep your prospects warm before they make a decision to use your services. There’s an art to getting email marketing right but you can boil it down to these three things:

• By consistent in your send frequency
• Be helpful
• Have a point!

If you’re going to do this you need to agree on a frequency. At Klipboard we send a monthly email out to our customers and prospects with a summary of articles we’ve posted during a month like this one.

Unless they are expecting to be sold to most people would prefer to read something helpful that will benefit them. If they receive an email from Amazon over Black Friday then there’s an expectation to be sold to. However, when they get an email from you what are they expecting?

Use your knowledge and expertise and give away free advice or your tops tips. If you create good content that’s helpful people will remember you.

Call to action

It’s really important to ensure there’s a purpose to the email. You can share tips on servicing your HVAC unit or how to ensure it operates at peak condition for longer, but ultimately you want the reader to do something, be that book a service or contact you for a quote. Don’t be shy about this and make sure your email has call to action buttons.

Here’s some examples you could use:

• Book now for an estimate
• 50% off your first order
• Visit our website to see more

Make sure your email has a destination for them to go to. You can direct them to your website or better still, create a page on your website that answers a specific question or challenge.

Free email services

There’s several Free Email Marketing services you can find online that are perfect for growing businesses. The main benefits of using these services are that they send emails from a trusted domain, that means your email has a better chance of ending up in an inbox and not a spam folder. They also help you manage your data, allowing your customers to easily unsubscribe from your emails should they wish to.

Since the introduction of GDPR and EU Data protection rules, businesses are expected to respect a person’s right to remove their contact information. These email marketing services make that easy to manage.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the more popular options for digital marketing. They have an approachable website and their email building tools have made it a global success.

Mailchimp’s ‘Free Plan’ is a basic setup which allows you to send to around 2,000 subscribers. You can even create landing pages to capture more contact email addresses and share these over social media to grow your audience – even before you’ve paid a single penny for the service.

https://mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing/

Moosend

If you’re considering doing something a little more than just emailing and you fancy doing some blogging then Moosend is a great option.

Blogging on sites other than your own website isn’t always recommended as you want to earn the traffic and domain authority. However, if your business has limited resources and you don’t have an in-house expert for your website then Moosend is a great one-size-fits-all option.

Spending a little time with Moosend can really pay off for your business. It will help you automate your marketing, creating a sales funnel and track where your customers are coming from.

Moosend is free for up to 1,000 email subscribers.

Hubspot

We use Hubspot. It’s one of the most well-known customer CRM systems and email marketing platforms.

While it can be a little daunting at first to navigate, once you understand how your data, marketing and website is all connected together it gives you a great top down view of your business.

Our marketing people use it to send emails, our customer teams create better experiences for our customers and it can even integrate with our support programmes.

The free version will have you set up with a maximum send capacity of 2,000 emails. You’ll have access to a neat landing page, email template and form builder to help you create great customer experience.

https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/crm

Respect the hustle!

Nothing comes for free and securing your next 1000 customers is going to take a lot of effort from across your whole team.

It’s at this point in your business that the pieces of your businesses are starting to fit into place and work with each other. It’s an exciting time when you start to realise the fruits of your work but it will only continue with more effort.

Keeping your team engaged with your growth plans is vital. You can’t do this by yourself now, it’s too big and your ambition too large. You’ll get there by surrounding yourself with like-minded, driven and engaged team members.

Hire talent to fill gaps

Most likely you and a few others rolled up their selves and did a bit of everything.

Now it’s time to bring in the talent. Find competitive, empathic and thick skinned people who want an adventure. The type of people who get excited about growing a business are very different to those who long to work for a global brand.

You’ll need to find people who have the experience you don’t, you have the skills your team is lacking and fully understand goals.

Acknowledge effort

Above everything else, appreciate those who have taken a risk and joined your business. Many of whom could have joined bigger businesses, but they have seen something in your leadership or ambition that clicked with them.

To go from 100 customers to 1000 takes a lot of effort. Mistakes will happen, lessons will be learned and your team will learn a lot about themselves and it’s always worth remembering two things…

1. You’ve made it this far
2. People will want to see you succeed.

Going from 100 customers to 1000 with Job Management Software

Everything mentioned in this guide is free. From the email service providers to content creation. There shouldn’t be any upfront cost other than your time and commitment to making it work.

Another way to grow a Field Service business with something else that’s free (at least during the trial!) is Klipboard.

Klipboard will help streamline your Field Service business and reduce the time you spend on things that will hold you back from carry out your plan to go from 100 customers to 1000.

• Reduce your admin
• Simplify your job scheduling
• Getting total visibility of your business

Start a FREE TRIAL today.