“Get clients now! – second edition” by C.J. Hayden

This is a very interesting book on marketing.  It’s aimed at “professionals, consultants and coaches” so it’s very much a business development book with little on advertising and branding.  Get Clients Now is also a franchise training course and that does impact the structure of the book a little.

Essentially the book wants to you write a 28 day marketing plan to get more clients.  It’s a very checklist oriented book, which I normally like, although I did find it a little hard to use in reality.  I notice on the author’s website that all participants of the Get Clients Now training course have to purchase the book and you can see it would probably make more sense with a coach sitting beside you helping you to work through the book.

There is some great stuff here though.  An excellent method to help you discover where, in your marketing or sales processes, you are encountering problems and then specific ideas to solve those problems.  There are also very good discussions of the pitfalls of business development and best practices for advisers.

Indeed, the strength of the book is in building a business development plan – the 28 day marketing program.  The strategy discussions are excellent.  However, the discussions of individual tactics (seminars, cold calling, newsletters) are pretty cursory once you get to the meat of the matter.  The book is only 230 pages and a lot of time is spent on strategy.  You will likely need other books or other help to implement the ideas in your marketing plan.

Still, there is enough to get you started and help you identify what you need to do next.  A complete coverage of every possible marketing option would be 1,000 pages, so the coverage in this book is not unreasonable.  If you need to devise a strategy, want to learn more about business development or get a process to think about marketing tactics, then this book is recommended.