No matter what industry you’re in (marketing, construction, cleaning services, or any other B2B field), landing commercial clients takes effort. But let’s be real…the ticket sizes might be larger, but business client don’t always bring in money immediately.
Commercial clients don’t make snap decisions. They take their time, compare options, and focus on long-term value. That means you don’t need the flashiest pitch—you need the right approach to get in front of decision-makers and prove how you can add value and why you’re the best choice.
That’s precisely what we’re diving into in this blog post.
Let’s break down how to attract, win, and retain high-value commercial clients (without wasting time on dead-end leads).
How to Get Commercial Clients: Business Growth Tips
Summarize this article for me please⏰ 60-Second Summary
- Commercial clients hire other businesses for long-term services, bulk orders, or specialized solutions. Unlike individual customers, they typically have multiple decision-makers and focus on medium to long-term ROI rather than impulse purchases
- A strong online presence helps attract clients. Optimizing your website with clear messaging and SEO strategies, staying active on social media, and contributing guest posts to industry sites increases visibility and attracts potential customers
- Networking with local businesses is essential for connecting with key decision-makers. Attending trade shows, industry events, and business networking groups increases visibility and builds relationships that can lead to long-term contracts
- Cold outreach works if personalized. Research-backed emails addressing specific pain points can increase responses and booked meetings
- Regular check-ins and structured feedback loops strengthen client relationships, helping secure long-term contracts and ongoing referrals
- ClickUp streamlines the entire process from tracking leads, managing sales pipelines, and overseeing prospective customers to automating follow-ups and optimizing business relationships
Summarize this article for me pleaseUnderstanding Commercial Clients
Commercial clients are businesses or organizations that hire other companies for products or services. Unlike individual customers who make quick, one-time purchases, commercial clients look for long-term partnerships, bulk services, or custom solutions that add value to their operations.
Difference between commercial and residential clients
To land the right clients, you’ve got to know who you’re dealing with. Commercial and residential clients have different needs, budgets, and decision-making styles.
Here’s a glance:
| Factor | Commercial clients | Non commercial clients |
| Definition | Businesses, corporations, property management firms, organizations | Individuals |
| Decision-making process | Takes longer, involves multiple stakeholders, focuses on long-term ROI | Faster decisions, often based on emotions, convenience, and price |
| Contract size and scope | Larger contracts, ongoing services, bulk purchases, higher transaction values | One-time or occasional purchases, smaller-scale projects, limited budgets |
| Sales and marketing | Larger contracts, ongoing services, bulk purchases, and higher transaction values | Direct advertising, referrals, emotional appeal |
Key characteristics of commercial clients
If you want to land more clients in the commercial space, understanding their characteristics is key.
In a nutshell ⬇️
- Multiple decision-makers: Purchases go through managers, finance teams, or procurement departments, making the process more structured
- Large-scale requirements: Orders, contracts, and projects tend to be bigger and more complex than residential work
- Streamlined buying process: Everything runs through proper sales agreements, purchase orders, and formal proposals
- ROI-driven decisions: Cost, value, and efficiency matter more than emotions since commercial clients focus on long-term returns
The importance of commercial clients for business growth
If you’re serious about business growth, focusing on commercial clients can bring bigger opportunities, like:
- Commercial contracts are larger, recurring, and often more profitable than individual sales
- Working with established companies boosts your reputation and attracts more clients
- Serving a handful of large clients is often more manageable than handling dozens of small ones
- With structured payment terms and bulk orders, commercial clients provide financial stability
➡️ Read More: How to Find Clients for Your Consulting Business
Summarize this article for me pleaseStrategies to Gain Commercial Clients
Landing commercial clients requires smart strategies that put you in front of the right businesses at the right time.
Let’s break down how you can make that happen:
1. Digital marketing and online presence
If you’re running your own business, you need an online presence. But being ‘online’ doesn’t mean being ‘everywhere.’ It involves showing up where decision-makers search for businesses like yours and build client trust before reaching out.
Here’s how you can do that:
✅ Improve your website and optimize for SERPs
- Have a clear messaging so the first thing visitors see is who you help and what problem you solve
- Insert top-ranking keywords so the right people can find you
- Integrate the best SEO agency software in your workflows to optimize blog posts, newsletters, and service pages
💡 Pro Tip: Turn your top-performing pages into lead magnets through page-specific resources instead of generic signups. Think templates, checklists, or mini-guides that boost conversions 3-5X more than standard opt-ins.
✅ Get active on social media
6sense reports that 70% of B2B decision-makers research vendors online before engaging with them. Be sure to:
- Optimize your profile: Your company pages should read like a solution to the problems your prospects are facing
- Engage strategically: Comment on posts from industry leaders, business owners, clients, and prospects through the page (get senior-level employees to do the same from their accounts)
- Share valuable content: Post insights, success stories, and industry trends because commercial clients trust experts
But managing social media while running a business isn’t easy. Without second guessing, plan your social media strategy with the Social Media Content Plan Template by ClickUp.
With this template, you can:
- Define what success looks like—more engagement, brand awareness, or clicks
- Track your progress so you know what’s working (and what’s not)
- Map out posts with a content calendar to stay consistent
- Assign tasks, set deadlines, and track approvals so nothing goes unnoticed
- Use statuses like In Progress, For Approval, and Published to track content effortlessly
- Add details like platforms, copywriters, designers, and deadlines to keep everything in sync
✅ Publish guest posts and thought leadership content
Get in front of prospective clients because you never know if they are reading an industry blog now. Contribute articles to well-known sites where they go for information.
Below are a few popular sites you can pitch and contribute impactful content to:
| Category | Guest posting sites |
| Business and marketing | Entrepreneur, Business 2 Community, HubSpot Blog, Social Media Examiner, MarketingProfs |
| Tech and startups | TechCrunch (Contributor Network), ReadWrite, VentureBeat, The Next Web (TNW), SitePoint |
| Finance and investment | Investopedia, Forbes (Contributor Network), Money Crashers, The Motley Fool, NerdWallet |
| General blogging | Medium (Various Publications), LinkedIn Articles, Quora Blogs, YourStory, Business.com |
2. Build trust and leverage existing clients
Do you know what’s the best source of trust for a new business? Your existing or past clients.
They already know your value and capabilities, and their network is probably filled with potential leads. This is how you can tap into their network:
✅ Create a referral program
Ask your clients, ‘Who in your industry could use our services or products?’ Offer to draft a quick intro email for them to forward to potential leads or get them to connect you with the relevant person on social media.
More importantly, give them a reason to do business with you—through discounts, free trials, or exclusive access to services.
✅ Fetch and promote new reviews
If a business is potentially looking to hire you or use your offerings, they’ll check your online reviews before reaching out.
If your Google and LinkedIn business pages are empty, that’s a red flag ⛳ . Make sure to request existing clients to leave a quick, honest review. Include those reviews on your website, proposals, and social media to attract decision-makers.
💡 Pro Tip: Block off a quarterly ‘Review Day’ and have your team spend 30 minutes contacting their best clients personally. Instead of just asking for a review, have them share a specific moment or success they remember working together. This kind of genuine, nostalgia-triggering message feels meaningful.
3. Expand your network and industry presence
To convert more high-paying clients, you don’t need to meet more people; you just need to meet the right ones. This is how 👇
✅ Attend conferences and events
Go where the decision-makers and industry peers are. These could be major tech events, trade shows, local chambers of commerce, or BNI groups.
But showing up isn’t enough. You must be clear about who you want to meet and why. Do your homework and reach out to them before the event to set up quick introductions.
⏱️ Friendly Reminder: Design a proper company deck you can show on your laptop or tablet. Ask thoughtful questions about the challenges industry peers face. Since you’re meeting at an event, chances are that potential clients will be receptive to hearing you.
✅ Partner with complementary businesses
Let’s say you run an office cleaning business. Instead of knocking on doors, partner up with a local office supply company. They’re already selling to businesses that need clean workspaces, so why not work together?
Set up a referral partnership. When they bring in a new customer, they recommend your services, and you do the same for them. It’s a win-win!
4. Focus on high-value clients
Don’t go chasing every business in your industry. Focus on potential commercial clients that need what you offer.
Here’s how to do that:
✅ Turn to LinkedIn and news insights for sales
Search for decision-makers by industry, company size, and role on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can create a targeted list of businesses and key personnel to approach with this tool. In addition, navigate to Crunchbase and CB Insights to spot companies that recently secured funding or are expanding.
✅ Use job boards and lead-sourcing platforms
Scan through an industry-specific job board like Wellfound, Y Combinator, and Indeed. If a business is hiring for a role related to your service, they might be open to outsourcing.
Many industries also have RFP (Request for Proposal) boards where businesses post commercial projects. These boards include RFP Database, FindRFP, FedHealthNet, Agency Spotter, and more.
✅ Use market reports and directories
Look at industry reports and directories, such as IBISWorld, Forrester Research, Clutch, Kompass, and Yellow Pages, to spot growing businesses that could need your services.
📮ClickUp Insight: Low-performing teams are 4 times more likely to juggle 15+ tools, while high-performing teams maintain efficiency by limiting their toolkit to 9 or fewer platforms.
But how about using one platform? As the everything app for work, ClickUp brings your tasks, projects, docs, wikis, chat, and calls under a single platform, complete with AI-powered workflows. Ready to work smarter? ClickUp works for every team, makes work visible, and allows you to focus on what matters while AI handles the rest.
5. Tap into email and paid ads outreach
Sometimes, the best way to get ideal clients is to go straight to them. In a nutshell,
✅ Email and cold outreach
Generic emails that say, ‘Hey, we offer XYZ services, let’s chat?’ get deleted. You should be clear and personalized if you want real results—more replies, booked meetings, and closed deals. But before that, fix a high-quality email list:
- Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find decision-makers in your target industry (For example: CEOs, marketing directors, or procurement managers at mid-size manufacturing firms)
- Use tools like Hunter.io, Snov.io, or Apollo.io to pull verified emails. They keep your contacts accurate, up-to-date, and less likely to land in spam
Next, spend some time writing the email.
Start with a personalized subject line (e.g., ‘[First name], quick idea to help [Company Name] boost revenue’).
Open with a research-backed first sentence that shows you understand their business (e.g., ‘I saw [Company Name] just expanded into the UK—many companies struggle with [challenge] at this stage.’).
Rather than pitching, offer immediate value—share a case study, a helpful tip, or a free resource. Finally, keep your CTA simple: ‘Would love to share this in a quick 15-minute chat. Does next Tuesday work?’
🔎 Pro Tip: Set up an email funnel for 2–4 weeks, depending on your industry and target audience. A 4-email sequence is a good starting point:
1️⃣ Day 1: Initial outreach (Personalized, value-driven email)
2️⃣ Day 4-6: Follow-up 1 (Reminder + extra value)
3️⃣ Day 9-12: Follow-up 2 (Address objections, reinforce value)
4️⃣ Day 15-20: Final follow-up (Breakup email, leaving the door open)
✅ Run paid ads
Paid advertising is a powerful tool, but it requires a dedicated budget and a strategic approach (after all, real money is at stake).
These are the following channels you can leverage:
- LinkedIn ads: Reach decision-makers based on job title, seniority, industry, and company size
- Google PPC: Bid on high-intent, industry-specific keywords where buyers are actively searching (e.g., ‘best B2B lead generation agency’ instead of just ‘lead generation’)
- Retargeting ads: Create custom audiences of visitors who engaged with key pages like your pricing or case studies
Summarize this article for me pleaseTools and Resources to Find and Manage Clients
The truth is that locating and managing clients can feel overwhelming if you don’t have a proper system. Juggling emails, follow-ups, and tracking leads across multiple platforms is a recipe for frustration.
Enter, ClickUp, the everything app for work. 💁
Organize and optimize your sales, marketing, and CRM efforts
One tool for client project management, another for tracking, and yet another for collaboration. Doesn’t this sound like a never-ending cycle of clicking between tabs and losing track of what actually needs attention? This is when you need an everything app that centralizes all of it!
First things first, to build that pipeline full and drive real growth, you need a marketing engine that attracts, engages, and converts the right audience.
ClickUp for Marketing gives your team a central hub to create, execute, and optimize strategies. This marketing tool streamlines every step, from campaign planning and content management to performance tracking and team collaboration.
With it, you can:
- Create marketing roadmaps, set specific growth goals, and keep campaign timelines crystal clear
- Bring teams together with ClickUp Whiteboards, Proofing tools, and more, ensuring everyone’s aligned from brainstorming to execution
- Track KPIs, measure campaign success, and adjust strategies using interactive dashboards
What’s more? ClickUp has a library of 1000+ templates to save you time. Among them, use ClickUp’s Marketing Action Plan Template with customizable campaign trackers, content calendars, and lead generation workflows right out of the box.
This template allows you to:
- Set task statuses like ‘Blocked,’ ‘Cancelled,’ ‘Complete, ’ ‘In Progress,’ and ‘Planned’
- Add custom attributes (e.g., ‘Output,’ ‘Team Assigned,’ ‘Files,’ ‘Goals’) to track key details and monitor progress
- Track marketing action plans with tags, goals, dependency warnings, and email integration
Once your marketing efforts start bringing in leads, the next step is turning them into loyal clients. And what better way to get started than with ClickUp for Sales? Never again lose high-value deals with this robust project management solution.
📌 For example, you can automatically assign tasks based on each stage of your sales process. You can trigger status updates when a lead takes action (e.g., responds to an email or downloads a proposal). You can also prioritize high-value leads so your team knows where to focus next!
Even better, build no-code dashboards using ClickUp Dashboards to add more visibility to your workflow. These give you a top-level view of conversion trends with advanced visual charts, including deal closing rates, the average time it takes to close a deal, and more
You can also track individual and team performance—understand who’s closing and where improvements are needed.
Turn leads into lifelong clients
With ClickUp’s CRM Project Management solution, you don’t need a dozen tools to keep track of your sales pipeline. Everything (contact details, deals, client notes, and emails) is neatly organized in one place.
Long story short, get 👇
👀 Visual sales pipeline: Track leads, deals, and customer interactions in a way that makes sense to you. Choose from multiple views (Kanban, List, Table, etc.) to see where everything stands at a glance
📊 Live dashboards: Get a bird’s-eye view of key metrics like customer lifetime value, deal sizes, and sales trends (all in real-time)
📧 Email integration: Sync your emails directly into ClickUp so your team can see past conversations, collaborate on follow-ups, and keep everything right where you work
📂 Account and deal management: Organize customer info, track orders, and manage sales funnels with ClickUp Custom Fields and workflows
With that, you’ve got your CRM set up—leads are organized, deals are tracked, and customer relationships are running smoothly.
Simplify client acquisition with proper systems
Marketing, operations, and customer support all contribute to turning potential clients into long-term partners. However, when teams use disconnected tools, information is lost, deadlines slip, and the entire process slows down.
Use ClickUp Tasks to organize every step of the client acquisition process. Manage leads, assign follow-ups, and set deadlines on the go. For example, assign Team A to create lead lists while Team B nurtures the sourced leads in the funnel’s second stage.
Want to build more efficiency? Use ClickUp Time Tracking to understand whether teams are using their time effectively. From sales calls to proposal prep, see where efforts are spent and optimize processes.
Create, edit, and share client pitches effortlessly
Teams undeniably need a way to create, refine, and share pitches without the back-and-forth. And ClickUp Docs does just that!
It’s built for teams that need a fast, organized way to create client proposals, sales decks, and pitch materials. It can help you:
- Create structured proposals with pre-designed templates
- Work with your team in real time without version conflicts
- Keep all client-related docs, meeting notes, and references in one hub
- Share instantly via a link (no more sending outdated attachments)
But if starting from scratch feels overwhelming, ClickUp Brain gets you moving instantly. Whether you need a project proposal, sales pitch, or contract renewal, Brain generates it for you.
For instance, you can feed Brain a prompt like, ‘Write a compelling sales pitch for a branding agency targeting e-commerce startups. Emphasize expertise in visual identity, product packaging, and social media branding. Keep it professional yet engaging.’
In response, this is what it comes up with:
With ClickUp Automations, the process is even easier. When you are done creating a pitch deck or contract, set up a “when-then” automation on ClickUp to send it for approval to the client or to a fellow team member for review.
Summarize this article for me pleaseOvercoming Challenges in Gaining Commercial Clients
Even if you have all the client acquisition strategies in your sales playbook, landing these deals isn’t a straight line. SuperOffice reports that prospecting is the most challenging stage of the sale process for 80% of salespeople, followed by qualifying leads (44%) and closing deals (24%).
So, what are the biggest challenges you’ll likely face when trying to gain commercial clients?
1. Your sales cycles feel never-ending
Unlike smaller deals, commercial clients go through multiple approval layers, budget reviews, and sometimes entire fiscal cycles.
🎯 Solution: Identify the approval process early—ask, ‘Who else needs to sign off on this?’ In addition, create urgency by offering limited-time pricing, priority onboarding, or exclusive add-ons for fast action.
2. Established vendors have a lock on the market
Many commercial clients have long-term relationships with their current product or service providers. Even if they’re unhappy, switching feels like a hassle.
🎯 Solution: Position yourself as the alternative they can’t ignore. Can you offer faster turnaround times or a specialized approach that their big-box vendor can’t match? Highlight these differences. Offer a pilot project or a trial to reduce their perceived risk.
3. You keep getting stuck at the proposal stage
You’ve had great discussions, and they ask for a proposal, but things stall once you send it. Maybe they push back on pricing, delay deciding, or stop responding altogether.
🎯 Solution: Before sending the proposal, confirm they’re ready to move forward and address any remaining concerns upfront. Make proposals action-driven. Instead of just listing services, include case studies, social proof, and a clear deadline.
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Build Long-term Client Relationships
You’ve found a system that helps you land commercial clients with positive results. But what comes next? Client management! The better you do it, the more referrals and sustainable growth you’ll see. Here’s what to do:
1. Check in regularly to keep clients engaged
Even one bad experience can shake a client’s trust, so go beyond the contract. A strong onboarding system helps introduce your product or service intimately while proactively addressing queries.
To get started, use the Client Success Template by ClickUp. Centralizing all client-related details allows you to track progress, document key wins and concerns, and facilitate regular updates.
💡 Pro Tip: Establish a communication rhythm based on your industry and contract cycle, whether weekly check-ins, monthly reports, or quarterly reviews. If needed, use pre-built client management templates.
2. Create a feedback loop that works
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Therefore, gathering feedback is essential to client communication. It helps you understand what’s working and where your client needs more support.
To begin with, use ClickUp Forms to instantly capture client needs, route requests for resolution, and ensure feedback turns into action.
ClickUp Forms adjust questions based on client responses with condition logic, making them easier to complete and better at collating relevant info.
Once the forms are submitted, they can be easily converted into tasks and assigned to the right team members for further execution.
3. Use templates to simplify client interactions
You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel or develop something overly creative when maintaining relationships. Sometimes, simply following tried-and-tested client retention strategies and templates can help.
Take feedback collection, for example. If you don’t want to set up a feedback process from scratch, check out ClickUp’s Feedback Form Template. Tailor surveys to specific customer needs with customizable fields, rating scales, and open-ended questions.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWin New Commercial Clients With ClickUp
It’s natural for you to be concerned about winning new commercial clients, given the length of sales cycles, the stiff competition, and the rapid shrinkage of budgets.
ClickUp, the all-in-one app for work, helps you refine your sales outreach efficiently, monitor leads, and close deals faster. It centralizes all sales activities, making it easier for you and your team to stay organized (and consistent).
Sign up for ClickUp today—completely free—and experience the benefits yourself.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
