HOW TO FIND PROSPECTS? 5 Quality Place To Look

One of the problem most business owners face is credible places to find prospective customers. Prospects are everywhere but which prospects are we talking about here?

There are prospect suitable for web designers, for the wine dealer, for the makeup artist etc. Getting the right prospect for a particular business is a major concern that has plague many and would be business owners. If you think just opening a business that is all it takes, you are in for a big surprise.

Let’s take Gold for example, before gold becomes what it is, do you know how many processes it went through before it became what it is in the market? If you just open up a shop hoping to hit it big, you will be mistaken. There is every need to know where to look to get the right prospects and when you get there, how to go about finding these prospect, all will be covered in this article.

       

To support me in my assertion that it is a problem for most business owners to actually know where to start their search for the right customers. Willian levins in his article: How to find local business to business prospects/customers
stated that if you’re trying to sell your product or service business to business, one of your biggest challenges is continually finding new customers. Even before starting to sell, you face the dilemma of identifying local prospects. So it’s no surprise, one of our most frequent questions we receive is, how do I find local businesses and customers?

Janet Attard gives a direct hit on what startup do in her article: Finding Customersfor Your New Business, she states that many people who start their own business quickly discover that finding customers is a lot more difficult than they had thought. They call a few friends to let them know they’ve started a business, print out fliers and stuff them in neighborhood mailboxes, set up a website, run an ad in the local newspaper, or buy pay-per-click ads online, and sit back and wait for customers to come. When the leads and sales don’t happen, guilt (over the money they’ve spent to set the business up), frustration and stress set in.

Meghan Keaney Anderson in an article 8 Useful Tools for Identifying and ConnectingWith Prospects, writes about the elusive prospect. You know they're out there in need of your service or product, but it can be tough to uncover them at the right time in their search. So how do you find them? And once you find them, what the heck do you do with them?

These are wonderful authors, who have agreed with me that finding the right prospect for business is a major concerns of many business owners. There is the problem of identifying local prospects, most new comers in the business world thinks it’s all about telling friends, running ads or pay per click will guarantee them of flood of customers, while all these methods are very reliable ways of gaining customers, there are ways you to use these traffic method that will guarantee success but the newbie don’t know that and so when they don’t see any return on their effort they are discouraged. Even when you have identified these prospects, how are you going to approach them? This also tie with the newbie placing ads, because they are not experienced yet, they usually sabotage their sale process in effort to convert the prospect. 

You will be learning about 5 effective places you can go to meeting the right prospects for your business and what to do when you get there. You will be learning to use very powerful method in the social media to get targeted traffic your way. Business cards will always be an effective method. Giving and receiving business will not cut it for you, you must go beyond that, that follow up, that is where the money is. You will also learn about Article writing for driving targeted traffic your way. Press Release is very powerful method you should get into in getting qualified traffic, tons of them and lastly sending of Thank you cards. These methods will bring you tons of qualified traffic.

Please when you see words like traffic, it also means leads or prospects. So let’s start with how to use the social media to get targeted prospects……

SOCIAL MEDIA: As a business owner, you have probably come to realize that using social media is one of the best ways to generate interest and land new clients. At the same time, you likely fit into one of two groups:

-Those who actively use social media for prospecting

-Those who passively use social media, hoping that people come to them (as opposed to actively searching)

If you are truly interested in finding prospects via social media, you better find yourself fitting into the first group. You want to be as active as possible, reaching out to prospects in hopes of striking up a conversation. Before you do anything you need to do research as per the people and companies that fit your target market. This will help you to sieve through the time wasters, maximize the use of your time and effort into turning prospects into loyal customers. Let’s use Twitter as one of social media method. You can still apply this strategy in other media as well.

Write down 3 to five keywords that pertain to your business. A web designer for instance will the keyword: web design, hire web design, web design project, etc. Once you have listed the keywords, it’s time to visit the Twitter. At this point, type in your listed keywords one at a time, into the Twitter search bar, and you will be amazed at how many people that looking for web designers. It’s one very easy but powerful of finding prospects. This is the time to start reaching out to them. Use your intuition here. If you can ascertain that they can be true prospects, then strike a conversation with them. Not all of them will respond, it’s part of the social media world but with persistent on your part, you will soon land handful of clients interested in doing business with you.

BUSINESS CARDS: Make and use your business cards. Remember that your cards are your advertisement for yourself and whatever it is you are creating online or otherwise. One of the easiest ways to promote you and your business is the use of this type of cards. It also give a quick and easy way to exchange information with people who will be a part of of your social life. There are many other ways to find prospects to build and promote your business. At community functions such as fund raising events, trade fair, craft shows, or job fair are just few places out many where you can find prospects for your business. Talking to people is much more effective ways of promoting your business. In events like these is an amazing way of finding prospects. When you engage at small talk, will be able to gauge their level of interest at which point, you will have your business card ready to give out to them and make sure you have their business card for follow ups. Remember that is absolute very important to follow up within a week of meeting for maximum effect.

ARTICLE MARKETING: Article marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic to a website or blog. This is because the strategy is free to implement and the results from such activities can last for years to come. This marketing practice has become the technique of choice for a lot of network marketers looking for targeted MLM leads. Letting people know about your business is much more acceptable when you give people their freedom as oppose to using force. When you combine the techniques of teaching and giving, people feel very much comfortable with your approach and as such will likely become your customers. You will be portraying that you are an asset and that you have their best interest at heart.

You must start by writing and engaging and informative article to make your prospective clients easily reach you. Your goal in writing this article is drive free leads to your business whether offline or online and you can do that even more effectively by offering something for free at the conclusion of your article. You will receive targeted traffic to your website and because they will be impressed with your high valued content, they will opt-in in to further be updated of your articles. Once you have their contact information, can begin to send them high quality content, reinforcing what you told them which allow them to implement the techniques you have suggested.

PRESS RELEASE: You're looking to grow your business, build your client base, and find new customers. What's the best way to find clients? Should you cold call? Use direct mail? Network? Advertise? Use social media? AdWords? All of those can work, depending on your business. The best way to find clients is to actually have them find you. It's a very different conversation when prospective clients contact you than when you make cold calls or initiate conversations with prospects who don't know who you are. Think of how different it would be for a client to call and ask if he or she could hire you. That would be a truly motivated client.

But how do you change the dynamics? How do you shift the playing field so that your prospects are the ones that are initiating the conversation? One tried and true answer is to establish yourself as an expert in your field and the most effective way to accomplish that is through an effective PR campaign. When it come down doing Press Releases, the bottom line is about offering something educational and informative. Presenting yourself as an expert and an educator, both the media and the public will reach out to you for advice and when it comes to seeking the right product to use, you will be the one to be called upon.

With press release, you gain two very important assets most business owners are struggling to get. With these asset you are more trusted by the public because you are now talked about, people believe in you and what you sell. What are these assets? Validation and Credibility. We are judged by the company we keep and the moment you being featured in the media, people begin to regard you as news worthy. You suddenly leap beyond your competition via news coverage, you and your message is now talked about in homes and businesses, no longer as an ad or commercial but as a news story. When people come to you, they come to a specialist, and expert, someone the media has deemed important enough to be featured in the press.

SENDOUTCARDS: SendOutCards in itself is a great tool for finding prospects. Start sending your friends and family cards right from the comfort of your computer. The company has a dedicated section just for sending your family and friends prospecting cards. That's just using the cards they have inside of the system, you also have the option of creating and customizing your own prospecting cards. When customizing, you can really put your own personality in the cards and have the ability to put your website inside the card by using QR codes.

This is like a follow up to the business card method of gaining new prospect. One effective way of gaining reliable customers is after you have their business card, use their information to send them a thank you card, i will tell you that they will be amazed by what you did because they don’t really think you will care about them and when people sense that you care about them, you have gained a lifelong customers. Try it and you will be amazed at its effectiveness.

You can also use SendOutCards to people you have done business with before. An ingenious way is take a photo of their company logo and design a thanks you card for them, they will appreciate it. There are so many ways you can use SendOutCards to find prospects, let's just take a look at a few ways:

       

Networking meetings

Chamber of Commerce/BNI meetings

Email Marketing/Online Marketing

Home Parties

Word of Mouth (ask your family or friends for referrals)

And so much more!

There you have it. Now you where to find prospective customers for your business and you also know what to do to approach these prospects in order to convert them to loyal customers. If you really want to grow your business, you are aware of how important customers are for business survival and as a freebie in giving you a taste of how prospecting work to find potential customer and how to make them buy from you, download my free eBook, by the sidebar THE ART OF PROSPECTING. In it you will learn a very simple but powerful technique of gaining flood of prospective customers to your business.

Get my free eBook: The Art of Prospecting. In it i revealed a very simple but effective way for you to flood your business with the right customers. Really, its very simple to do and your business will be filled with customers and more money for you. Click this link to get it now.