When you’re first starting out as an entrepreneur you’re starting with no contacts, no customers, no testimonials, and no case studies. So how do you get potential clients to take you seriously?

Here are some of the strategies that I used to scale my business from 0 to $3M per year in our first year in business.

The first strategy is to become an authority or thought leader in your niche.

And the way I did this was by writing articles that educated my market on the problems they had and then build a bridge with a call to action to set up a call with my team to help them solve that problem.

Then what I would do is post that on every social media channel where my customers were. So for me since it was a call center for restaurants that was my personal LinkedIn feed. My business LinkedIn page. That was our facebook, twitter pages. Anything and everything.

What we also did was get PR. Here is a hack for you. Sign up for PR newswire its not very expensive and it allows you get into Yahoo Finance and a bunch of other news publications. And the really cool part is if you write a really attention grabbing press release other news outlets would pick up the article and link to our website or they would rewrite the article in their own words and link to our website.

Now another hack that you can use is to sign up for the Forbes communication council. You have to quality for it but you can pay to sign up and you can write articles that share advice which help position you as a thought leader in your space. Your articles will link to your website and help drive free traffic as well.

All of these strategies are huge hacks for SEO because in a nutshell SEO love when high authority websites like Forbes, Yahoo Finance, and other sites link to your website. And every like on social media that you get from posting your content creates backlinks as well.

So this is one of the ways we got to rank in the number one spot in google for the term restaurant call center which we figured out was our money keyword to drive inbound traffic.

By the way, here if you’re wondering how we figured out that restaurant call center was the money keyword here is how we figured that out. We went on Google Ads keyword finder and typed in all of the relevant keywords or search terms related to a call center for restaurants and saw it was the one keyword that had the most search volume on a monthly basis.

And when we saw our customers were searching for this we changed a lot of our marketing and sales material to say restaurant call center because that is how our market was thinking about our solution in their own minds.

It wasn’t that we really liked that term. We actually viewed ourselves as more as a technology company but at the end of the day its what it takes to get customers.

Ok so so far we’ve talked about inbound strategies to help build credibility. Let’s talk about outbound strategies to build credibility.

Outbound actually worked better for us I would say to build a pipeline fast but inbound was great for our positioning. So what we would do is send cold emails in a very personalized way.

We would target executives that were C-level or VP’s of large restaurant chains and we learned how to speak their language in our messaging to them. So for example we’d say things like we can help increase your average check size and improve your guest experience. Or speed up your throughput.

And in the beginning I had zero experience in restaurants and I actually learned how to do this from reaching out to restaurant owners to get feedback on our service and they told me that language. Then I just tested sales and marketing messages.

Now when we reached out to executives what we did and we learned this from Aaron Ross who wrote the book Predictable Revenue is target C-level abut ask for a referral. So we wouldn’t actually ask to set up a meeting with them but we’d ask who would be the best person to speak with about this?

Now the power with this is that because we were speaking their language that helped build credibility and trust. So a lot of the executives would then copy or cc the actual decision maker who might be a level or two below them.

Then that person would be pre-framed to already kind of be interested in what we had to offer. There was a lot more that we did below but hopefully this gives you some ideas that you can use right away in your own business. Also if you want a cheat sheet click on the link in my bio or below this page and I’ll shoot over a cheat sheet that breaks this whole process down step by step. And If you found this helpful please like it and share it so I’ll share other tips on how to get traction and scale your business.