6 ways to find new business in 2022

How many of you put prospecting for new clients at the top of your business New Year’s resolutions?

Given the instability in most sectors right now, I hope that it’s most of you.

New business is your insurance. I like to call it business prepping because you’re insulating your business against the false starts, delays and ghosts that can eat away at company morale and that all important financial cushion.

We all need to put our own company’s survival at the top of the list, and keeping a solid list of new prospects on the books is a vital feature of good business practice.

All growing businesses need to know these three navigation tips:

• Where they came from
• How they got here
• Where they’re going to

New business provides you with one of the critical components of the last part. New prospects help define the future direction of your agency.

So here’s a quick checklist of free advice on how and where you can prospect for new business in 2022 and they all have one thing in common; disruption.

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New business thrives wherever there is disruption. Not catastrophic, but bumps and turbulence that your agency can address to make the prospect’s journey smoother.

Area 1: Current Affairs

Check the vertical trade press that cover your agency’s areas of expertise (or where you want your agency to be). Aside from the obvious sources, there are plenty of blogs, Vlogs and news channels run by enthusiasts and specialists. Look for NPD-related stories and breaking news about company activity that doesn’t always make the mainstream media. Armed with some current news and a few talking points related to your agency, you can not only pick up the phone and begin a conversation but you can also seed social media with thought leadership and opinion pieces to encourage conversations with new prospects.

Area 2: General news

Like the first point but a more long-range overview of current affairs. Looking back 2-3 months in any vertical sector, you can identify trends, concerns, issues etc that are talking points among your target prospects and not those that you assume are significant. There’s nothing more deflating than a cleverly constructed opener being met with “But that’s not relevant to us”.

Area 3: Database sales

You bought that subscription to a CRM system, so use it. Freshen up your cold prospecting database, identify ten of the top targets and create a narrative that works as a one-to-many sales piece. I never recommend mass-mailing – especially in a climate where ‘empathy’ is the key watchword but picking the best 10 prospects and working them through to a conclusion allows you to cleanse your list and adapt your horizon.

Area 4: People Moves

There is no excuse for not knowing the career updates of prospects and companies in your target sectors. We have so much information about new appointments available at our fingertips, and reaching out with offers of help is a guaranteed way to win hearts and minds. Everyone wants to shine in their first three months, so what can you do to help?

Area 5: Tenders

Many SME agencies think that tenders are too time-consuming and pointless to pursue, so they become low-hanging fruit for agencies that are set up to deal with them. Agency frameworks, opportunities to tender, and requests for information are circulating all the time and these can be big wins that can provide meat and potato revenue to underpin your agency.

Tenders are also a wonderful sign of disruption and can give new business prospectors a clue as to the future direction of big companies. So even if the tender isn’t relevant, it’s a great talking point with your prospect.

Area 6: Mergers and Acquisitions

The critical cause of disruption occurs when a fresh injection of capital or an MBO, MBI, seed round, acquisition, disposal or spin-out happens. Back in my early days of sales, new company launches were a minefield of time-wasting conversations. But with money looking for 3, 4, 5 and up to 10x?returns, companies and innovations that were once to be avoided are attractive multi-million pound or dollar opportunities for growth. Their leaders are forward-thinking, imaginative disruptors who thrive on new ideas and ground-breaking, daring proposals.

Use your time efficiently; do the simple things.

Prospecting for new business in this climate means that you cannot rely on historical spending trends. Neither can you rely on the biggest time-waster of sales – intent marketing. Using search engine algorithms analyzing search terms from a company does not provide proof of what a company is looking for. It’s pointless chum in the water, so don’t be distracted.

Instead, rely on your personality, sector knowledge and play to your agency’s strengths.

Here’s a piece of free advice that I love - Clients want to work with agencies that do work they love. In a neck-and-neck race for new business, a client will always pick the agency that has already won their admiration.

So be that agency. Get on the front foot and put your agency out there using any of the six simple rules for new business prospecting I’ve listed above and get 2022 off to a positive start.

?Profile Marketing

You may have noticed but I am a massive fan of LinkedIn. It is a wonderful networking sandpit and – in the absence of in-person connections, it’s important to make the best first impression. I’m going to do a newsletter dedicated to this subject next month but I wanted to offer a quick word of advice. LinkedIn is the absolute first place that any new prospect will look you up to check that what you say is so.

With this in mind, it is vital that your personal and your company LinkedIn pages are optimized to the fullest extent. This doesn’t mean you have to splash out for Navigator, it’s perfectly acceptable to use LinkedIn’s free service and there are literally hundreds of ways you can tweak your profile using great photography, clever summaries and poignant posts that will help you demonstrate yours and your agency’s capabilities.

For a full overview of what you can do – for free – to boost your LinkedIn presence, I was fortunate to interview my personal LinkedIn hero John Espirian a few months ago on the Fuel podcast and not only is he a charming man, he’s also spent thousands of hours mining, testing, adapting and refining his LinkedIn activity using nothing more than the basic service. Ignore this advice at your peril because LinkedIn is destined to become the preferred field of play for all your competitors this year.

Check out the podcast here: https://thefuelpodcast.com/john-espirian-author-content-dna-the-stairway-to-linkedin-heaven/

I hope that you find these tips useful as a refresher for your new business drive and 2022 is your year for growth.

Happy prospecting!