8 Ways to Prime Old Clients for New Business

In the active online market, there are many people competing for new projects. If you have a solid client base, it’s often easier to get new work from existing clients than to establish new relationships.

It can be valuable to establish a habit of occasional light contact with them to remind them that you exist. Often, this reminds them that they had work they needed done, and it may expose other problems or projects that they were considering hiring out.

If you are run your own business and act as the face of it, you can establish a competitive advantage against startup culture. In talking to developer evangelists, for instance, I’ve discovered that they are focused on short term sales relationships (<6 months). To generalize this, when a company grows quickly over a short period very fast, customers will not have as much continuity in who they talk to. This is especially true in geographical areas where people keep jobs for only 2-3 years. If you play a long game and maintain good relationships, you can have relationships that pay off a decade after they form.

Here are a few ways you can wake up existing clients:

1. Send out Christmas cards
2. Update your linkedin page - this sends out emails to people you’re connected with.
3. Do conference calls/webexes to handle tickets. Often people collect a series of questions - when you resolve a particular problem, ask if they have any more questions. This often uncovers new issues. Occasionally this will uncover problems large enough to justify follow-on projects.
4. Send them billing notices. This reminds people to send you tickets and initiate contact.
5. Set up alerts on security issues. For instance set up alerts for queries like “viagra site:getosmosis.com”, or use a monitoring tool. This allows you to proactively discover issues for your clients. When these occur they are reminded that you are available.
6. If you use third party libraries in a project, subscribe to the mailing lists for them, and notify your clients of major upgrades that might help them.
7. If you sell a product, set up an email list of customers for release notes - you can put upsells at the end of these.
8. Set up alerts on news about your clients or follow them on linkedin, and send them congratulatory notes when you see news or promotions.