Finding Business Prospects and Landing New Customers and Paying Clients
By Stu Leventhal – Guru Marketing Tips Editor
Let’s face it, the big question for all companies, sales agents, small business owners, entrepreneurs and CEOs is; how can we do more business? Any ideas are worth considering. We all want to sell more and more and then MORE!
But how, how, HOW?
What attracts new clients and customers to take a chance with a different company? How can we get our current customers to buy even more and to try all of our other products too? Can we convince a client to sign a long term contract to continuously buy from us for a stretch of a few years? Can we entice happy customers to purchase in bulk?
Everyone is talking about the potential for doing business online, the far reach of cyberspace and the power of social media, e-mail marketing, SEO, PPC ads and even blogging… Offline advertising with newspapers and on radio stations and TV commercials are all still here and going strong too; not going the way of the dinosaur as many in marketing and promoting predicted over a decade ago. So what should a company leader put their money into?
Where will a startup company, with a limited budget, get the biggest return for their dollars spent and time dedicated?
Is online marketing really as great as everyone selling various web marketing solutions say it is? If so then what are the best places to invest ad dollars in, for a company that wants more business and good biz leads? How should a global commerce company and a local neighborhood company be marketing differently from worldwide corporations? Why?
What really works for a local business; corner store, bar, deli, accountant, realtor, comic book store, landscaper, barber shop… and what works best for a global seller, big brand name or supplier to the whole world?
Is blogging and social media posting really free? Do I need to hire a SEO expert to get Google and other search engines to start recommending my website to web surfers and people looking for the goods and services I supply? Can I tackle SEO and SEM myself, competitively?
How can I dominate my industry and leave my competitors behind in the dust, once and for all? I know I need techie stuff but I do not know which stuff? Plus how much should one expect to pay when hiring these various digital marketing wizards?
Boy oh boy, there sure are a lot of things for modern day marketers, business owners, managers and biz leaders to consider when making up their marketing budget plan for the year. There are just so many, many people claiming to be ready and waiting to make your business soar! How do I choose?
We all want the best results per every dollar spent so first we have to determine what our goals are. Just saying more clients or more orders or more profits are my goals is too vague. Understand that there are steps to growing your business; so you need specific goals to shoot for concerning each step of the process.
- Find where new potential customers and clients are hanging out online and offline. You cannot pick an effective marketing style or method or design a winning strategy unless you first know where your marketing will be encountered by your targeted new client pool of potential prospects.
- Once you have a target prospect pool in mind to pitch to, you still have to convince these new potential clients to trust you enough to give you some contact info so you can send them more special info and design a unique custom marketing strategy prepared to sales pitch to each individual.
- Ask new potential clients for information about themselves. Who are they buying from currently? What brands are they using now, for the services you wish to supply to them? Are they happy with their supplier? Why? What will it take to convince them to give your brand a try?
- Sales pitch and sales pitch again using a different methods then sales pitch some more… Test and try out new pitching ideas until you start to learn what works best.
- Find out what it will take to convert a new prospect into a paying customer. How are your biggest competitors vulnerable? Is there a niche in the market place that is not happy because they are not being serviced properly?
- Next you want to be sure that your new client starts to gradually order some of your other products and eventually is using all of your products and services.
- Service the new account. This is where you keep the new client happy and re-ordering. You have done a lot of work and spent plenty of time and money to win these new clients away from your competition; you do not want to lose them now! You also want to over deliver so that they are so pleased that they start upping their orders.
- Ask your happy clients to recommend you and send you some referral business.
- Brand Building… Eventually you want to have an authoritative brand in your field of specialty that gets you orders based only on the stellar reputation of your company and its long standing record of years and years of pleasing customers. But you will not get there, to be the industry champion, unless you start right now and continue to work hard day after day, month after month and year after year.
- Networking: You have to find other businesses that are already in with the prospects you are targeting. They have the customer base that you wish to do business with. Can you propose a collaboration so your company and a new networking partner will both benefit by teaming up?
Brand building as well as networking require brand reputation management, meaning you have to be vigilant about countering any negative publicity such as bad customer reviews on all those popular company product and service review and rating sites. No decent company will want to associate their brand with your brand unless you have a stellar reputation and an impressive business history.
Yes dedicate yourself or someone else to following up with any customers that leave you a bad review and make it your top mission, to do whatever it takes, to win them back!
These are just some of the usual steps used to turn a stranger into a loyal customer of yours. Every product type, industry and company also has its own unique stages to its sales process.
When you determine how to allocate your marketing money, you must allot some funds as well as the necessary staff and time to each important step of the new client wowing process. Each step will usually require a different type of marketing to move the potential new client closer and closer to actually placing an order or hiring your company and then becoming part of your brand fan club. There will be a strategy that works better than all of the other strategies most of the time for each step but you will have to experiment and learn by experience what works best for every stage of the process.
Once you know what works, do not just stop there; keep improving your methods so they work even better the next time.
I wish I could tell you that there was one best way to market but the truth is there are many best ways and each of your competitors are probably doing it differently from you and from one another. Some will put their efforts mostly into e-commerce while others dedicate more time and funds to traditional offline business. You have to market based on what you have to work with.
An established top company obviously has more funds for promoting than most others in the same field. A new company may need to really out market the established companies to get customers to switch brands they have grown to trust over a lot of years of doing business with the same company. Remember people do grow fond of their salesman and most of us are resistant to change.
Folks will not change brands willy-nilly; you have to work hard to steal away customers.
You should make it a priority to stay informed with what your competition is up to and then plan to counter and beat their strategies. If there are industry trends, and there usually are some then you have to join in with those trends. Always take advantage of a growing fad in your industry. You have to show that you are current, in the know, up to speed and never yesterday’s news.
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