HOW TO APPROACH PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS?

Turning a Prospective Customer into an Active Customer takes a lot of planning, follow-up and follow-through. From the first sales call it takes anywhere from 1-3 months to get a business to buy from you. Sometimes you get lucky and find someone who is burnt out on their current supplier and just wants to give you orders for showing up. Others make you work for the business and won't spend a dime until they see your dedication and work ethic.

You shouldn't even think of leaving the house unless you've planned who you're going to call, how the conversation is going go and the product to sell. Use the prospective customer's website, company bulletin or follow them on social media just to know how they're like, what he likely to buy or what he has bought in the past. Hopefully you know their industry well and have basic idea of what to sell to this person or persons. 

You can never over prepare before any sales call. I have friends who wants to approach prospective customers that neglect the preparation step and as a result don't get the result they've envisioned.Once you know what you are going to sell, the next step is to come up with some Value Added Services that relates with your product. Fact finding should be the one thing in your mind when approaching a prospective customer. Chances are you will be only be able to schedule a meeting in your first call with those who are responsible for such thing, the chances of meeting the decision maker is very slim.

Make sure to have an impressive PowerPoint presentation, it will help during the scheduled meeting, it will add more dept to your presentation. PowerPoint presentation is a must when making sales call, if you don’t know how to use it, find someone to help you out or go to YouTube where you will be taught how to use it. You can always have a template to use but if you can tailor it to the customer, the better. You can even email it to them before the day of the meeting. Having something to handout to individual at the meeting is also a requirement, if you don’t know how many people are going to be there, make extra copies. Things to have handy to share includes: catalogs, line cards, business cards, company info, a hard copy of your PowerPoint etc. They should be light but informative. This preparations will make you approach prospective customers better.

Make sure to be on time, preferable 30minutes before the schedule time. This is the time you use to gather your thoughts and review your presentations. Make sure to engage everyone during the meeting. Good listening skills and asking of good fact finding question will help you get along during the presentation. You will scale very well when you allow others ask you question or concerns they may have.

In some meetings, it may not look appropriate to bring out the laptop to make your PowerPoint presentation. This was why i ask you to make hard copies of some materials of which your PowerPoint presentation is among. The PowerPoint presentation should be printed in colors and put in three ring binder using clear page inserts. The key is to be prepared for any situation.

Approaching prospective customers is usually about doing proper planning and having a well thought out presentation at hand, also if you know your product very well, its an added advantage.

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CLICK ON THIS PHOTO AND WHY I THINK ITS A METAPHOR FOR SUCCESS.

10 Fascinating Photos That Look Unbelievably Like Paintings

While we've all seen our fair share of hyperrealistic and photorealistic art, or paintings and sculptures that look amazingly like photographs, it's not too often that we come across photos that look like paintings. Throughout the five-plus years we've been around, we've seen these unbelievable photos pop up here and there and today, we decided to give them all one home. Here, then, are ten fascinating photos that look unbelievably like an oil, acrylic or watercolor painting. Enjoy!
Photographer Oscar Ruiz is behind the shot, above, of a housing development in Mexico. Back in May, it was picked as the photo of the day by National Geographic. "A few years ago when I was working as a helicopter pilot for a local radio station, we were required to fly around all of Mexico City chasing news and traffic. I remember flying up to the highway that connects Mexico City with the neighboring state of Puebla, and on my way back this housing complex that seemed to go on forever caught my attention. I decided to circle around to observe from up close what I later found out was the recently built San Buenaventura complex, which is located in Ixtapaluca, on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City.
"The exceptional afternoon sun reflecting those thousands of recently painted small homes just looked so beautiful, and the lower I flew the better the angle, so I just got out my camera, opened the sliding window on my Bell helicopter, and snapped a couple of shots."

Photographer Michael Brandt captured these painterly rolling hills at the Palouse Valley, Washington, USA. This particular photo is looking towards Tekoa Mountain from Steptoe Butte. "The rainbow picture was taken at a place called Steptoe Butte - it's an amazing geographical landmark right in the heart of the Palouse. It is a large butte that offers outstanding panoramic views of the very unique rolling hill landscape known as the Palouse, that gives photo fans endless compositions and ever changing landscape throughout the seasons. From late April through to early September photographers from around the world make a trek individually or through photo tours to visit this unique region."

Photographer Andre Ermolaev is behind this gorgeous aerial shot of Iceland's volcanic rivers. "Iceland is a wonderful country; I would even say that it is a true paradise for all the photo shooting-lovers. But what has become a real discovery for me is the bird’s eye view of the rivers flowing along the black volcanic sand. It is an inexpressible combination of colors, lines, and patterns. The photo represents the mouth of the river falling into the ocean. A little bit upstream there is a yellow-colored brook flowing into the river, but yellow currents fail to mix with the main water flow. One can estimate the scale judging by the car tracks that are clearly seen on the black sand. This is just a river, just a volcano, just our planet."

James and Kelly Stone took this gorgeous shot of dunes dotted with trees at Lassen Volcanic National Park. "Painted Dunes can be seen atop Cinder Cone at Lassen Volcanic National Park in California. The colors are a result of volcanic activity. The beauty is breathtaking. The vision, as you can see, is like an oil painting. God's tapestry on Earth."

Doesn't this man look like he's rowing in a lake full of paint? This is actually a real photograph of a heavily polluted lake in Anhui province, Taiwan. The green substance on the top of the water is algae. The photograph, by Jianan Yu, is of Chaohu Lake, one of eight rivers and lakes in China that the country plans to treat under ta $7.4 billion construction plan.

Photographer Chaluntorn Preeyasombat calls this photo Clearing Storm. "Huangshan Mountain, Anhui, China. Taken from the Beginning-to-Believe Peak after morning snowfall. The lingering fog made the scene look like Chinese painting."

California-based photographer David Orias is behind a series of wave photographs that look remarkably like oil paintings. Orias uses long exposures and a telephoto lens to capture these stunning shots. He states, "Southern California has its fire season and sometimes this creates conditions of eerie orange light in the morning as the sunlight is filtered and scattered by smoke particles. This creates unusual and to some viewers unrealistic colors. I take the baseline colors and work with them to create a fine art appeal."
Graphic designer Denis Collette has a series called "My Waterbox," a collection of images that show reflections in a river and lake near his countryside cottage. He said, "I like the creativity of the water and like to be surprised. I have taken thousands of photos of reflections and they are all unique. The reflections are generally of trees, wild flowers, weeds, wild vegetation, the sky and the clouds. But the photo changes depending on the wind, the light, the stream, the level of the river and sometimes the depth of the river. It always fascinates me. The water ripples make them look like oil paintings by Van Gogh, Turner, Riopelle or Monet."

Painted Ladies is a beautiful shot of three women in rainbow-colored tulle by photographer Barbara Cole. The self-taught photographer not only challenges our reality, she does it all using Polaroid film! "I fell in love with Polaroid film sometime late in 1987," Cole says. "I had been experimenting with the Polaroid Spectra camera and Tungsten light and I loved the mood that its warm colours and creamy palette evoked. In the end, however, it proved too difficult to work within the limitations of this simple point and shoot camera and I abandoned it..After some exploration, I found someone who was able to adapt the SX-70 camera to work with my studio lighting and techniques. Then, I carefully manipulated the surface image to add dimension and introduce a painterly quality I loved."

This last photo, taken in Namibia, shows a dune tinted orange by the morning sun admist camel thorn trees. Photographer Frans Lanting explains his shot, "It was made at dawn when the warm light of the morning sun was illuminating a huge red sand dune dotted with white grasses while the white floor of the clay pan was still in shade. It looks blue because it reflects the color of the sky above. ... The perfect moment came when the sun reached all the way down to the bottom of the sand dune just before it reached the desert floor. I used a long telephoto lens and stopped it all the way down to compress the perspective."

This post was written by Alice Yoo from http://www.mymodernmet.com

Latasha Ngwube Redefines Konga Style!

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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.