Why Top Producers Win at Client Acquisition—And How You Can Too

Jeffrey Czajka • August 1, 2025

No matter how competitive your market or how unique your industry, one goal unites all business owners and sales professionals: acquiring more new clients. Onboarding new clients means more revenue, fresh referral opportunities, and a stronger foundation for long-term success. Especially in today’s volatile economic climate, each new client acts as a buffer against uncertainty and helps stabilize your business.


But while everyone agrees on the importance of gaining new clients, the real question is how to do it. The truth? There’s no single path to success. Top producers across industries use wildly different methods—from digital campaigns to old-school flyer drops—to reach elite levels of performance. So what’s their secret?


What sets top performers apart is they understand that client acquisition boils down to two key dimensions: Awareness vs. Engagement and Reactive vs. Proactive. Let’s break those down.


Awareness is about visibility—getting your name out there. Traditional advertising, branding, and social media posts are all awareness tools. They let people know you exist, often without direct involvement. And while awareness is essential (no one buys from a business they’ve never heard of), it’s not enough on its own.


Engagement, on the other hand, is where the magic happens. It’s about interaction—creating opportunities for meaningful conversations between you and your prospects. Engagement builds trust, clarifies needs, and helps both parties align on solutions and timelines. It’s awareness with impact.


Top producers prioritize engagement because it leads to better-qualified prospects, stronger relationships, and higher conversion rates. Prospects feel empowered to “buy” rather than being “sold to,” and sales professionals get to act as trusted advisors—not pushy vendors.


Reactive strategies wait for prospects to make the first move. Think billboards, online ads, or SEO—tools that rely on inbound interest. These can be useful for brand visibility, but they rarely generate consistent sales flow. After all, how many times have you seen a billboard and immediately called the company?


Proactive strategies flip the script. They involve reaching out, starting conversations, and adding value before a prospect even asks. Examples include: meeting with Centers of Influence (COIs), hosting lunch-and-learn sessions, or attending networking events. These proactive tactics break through inertia, help you stand out from competitors, and allow for better qualification—saving time and boosting ROI. And here’s the kicker: they’re often far more cost-effective than traditional advertising.


Today’s consumers are bombarded with ads—on every screen, in every space. The human brain has learned to tune them out. Commercial breaks are for checking phones, grabbing snacks, or chatting—not watching ads. Online, we skip or scroll past promotions without a second thought.


For small businesses and individual sales professionals, this means one thing: advertising alone won’t cut it. The ROI just isn’t there. Looking ahead to 2026 everyone wants more clients. But the ones who get them will be those who engage their market proactively and meaningfully.


To help you evaluate your current marketing efforts and discover ways to improve, we’ve created a short video. Click here to get started—and take the first step toward becoming a top-tier producer in your space.

Radio poll

By Jeffrey Czajka • December 1, 2025
On the radio this morning, the daily call-in question was “would you rather have a raise or more feedback from you boss?”. They said their online poll had something like 65% of respondents say “feedback”, but a higher percentage of those calling in said “more pay”. Interesting…  While this question may spark good interaction with the radio show audience, it oversimplifies a very complex topic for all parties involved. There is base pay, variable compensation, bonuses, benefits, time flexibility, time off, and so many other things to consider when designing (or accepting) a compensation package which makes looking at the two radio options very situational. Personally, I’ve always found this topic very interesting and revealing when talking with owners/managers. Compensation policies explain a lot about employee retention, productivity, and customer service levels. It also requires the right person to be the in the right job. In the end, there are a ton of creative and impactful ways to attract, retain, and reward employees to achieve growth for everyone. As the radio poll suggest, it is not all about the money, but the money is important.

The Fallacy of Quality Over Quantity

By Jeffrey Czajka • November 1, 2025
During a recent conversation with one of my consulting clients today, they made a comment justifying their lack of activity this past week because they want to focus on quality over quantity. Immediately, my internal fallacy detector went off! It doesn’t matter what industry or profession you are in – you could be a financial advisor, business banker, loan officer, wholesaler, dentist, optometrist, family practice, psychologist, a lawyer, CPA, engineer, or any other service orientated profession that needs to build a client base while delivering their services to paying clients – this fallacy of quality over quantity applies to you. It’s a great point to dive into if we truly want to experience exponential growth.  There are so many impacts that we could discuss on this topic. To one extreme, focusing on too high of “quality” could turn you into a “whale hunter”. You might land the big one, but are you able to stay in business until it happens? Another extreme is, are you educated or experienced enough in your specific profession to be able to handle the “quality” you aspire to work with? Only seeking high “quality” clients typically goes with less but bigger clients. At this point in your career, are you okay with concentration risk? Each client is a larger percentage of your business and if your “quality” client leaves you, a larger percentage of your revenue leaves you too. One way to better understand this dilemma of quality and quantity is to look at building a client base from a game of numbers perspective. Each industry / profession (and person) will have different numbers, but no one is perfect. Not every prospect you meet with becomes a client. Whatever your ratio is, it applies to prospects of any quality level. If you need to get 10 prospects to gain 1 client, you can’t obtain 5 prospects and then justify it by saying “I’m focusing on quality over quantity”. Say what you want, but if you need 10 and get 5, at best you get half a client. Now since we are dealing with real people, you can’t get half, so reality says (more than likely) you round down and get zero. Another reason why people say such fallacy is they are mentally searching for justification of poor performance. On one hand, it might just be laziness. (We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and rule that one out.) More likely, it is poor execution skills. People may not know what to do. If they know what, they many do not know how. If they know both, they may not be very good at it. For many people this is a combination problem they need help solving. You may say, one “quality” client is better than 3 “inferior” clients. That may be true. No one would rightfully argue against quality control measures being in place. That said, if your object is exponential growth over a short period of time, you can never sacrifice one for the other in this equation. You must uphold your quality control AND do the quantity needed. If you deliver both quality and quantity at the targeted levels, the best thing that could happen is you arrive at your goal early. The worst thing that happens is you reach your goal on the intended deadline. If you miss the goal, you probably had the wrong metrics. Building a clientele is a professional exercise comprised of art, science, and execution. It is good to define your quality control measures, but you still need to do the appropriate amount of work to get the job done.
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