What can you do to get new business today?

My old sales manager used to start each Monday with these question to try to get our minds in creative mode, to see if we can think outside the box.

The life blood of any organisation that is required to sell something to survive; is new clients. It always boiled down to the same question:

How to find more potential customers?

How quick you can find them is also pivotal to your success.

Look at any sales job description and in the small print they will somewhere mention the thing all sales people don't like to talk about which is 'lead generation' The dirty part of the job.

For me as a salesman in the nineties, lead generation meant calling for appointments one day in the office each week and canvassing.

Our quota was; that we were required to make 16 appointments a week; 4 per day over 4 days. Our office day was mainly for using the phone and our arduous weekly meeting with the boss.

The calls we made from the office were to existing users, competitor users and non users, and when we were not in the office or on appointments, we were supposed to be canvassing. We needed 5 compliment slips a day to prove we spoke to someone at the business we cold called upon, and got a name.

I never met a Sales Representative who enjoyed doing 'lead generation' activities, all bar none agreed that the job would be 'Heaven' if we could just go and do appointments. It would certainly be more profitable and we would all have been paid more.

The cold calling aspect has long since changed, back in the 90's and 2000's it was common place for reps to call companies with unsolicited pitches, the businesses kind of expected it, that's how company owners and buyers got to see new products and kept an ear to the ground.

It was a slog on our office day to get the 16 appointments booked, but it was often made easier with 2-3 sales leads we got during the week which were generated by mass mail outs by head office. We called these sales leads as quickly as we could from phone boxes out on the road and mobiles when we got one, and made appointments.

Generally we made around 10 new bookings on office day from around 50 calls 1/5 as a ratio. However now, due to the internet, it has no been proven to be actually ineffective to make cold calls.

A 2014 Baylor University research paper into cold calling effectiveness found over the course of a two week period in November 2014, 50 participating agents at the University made 6,264 phone based cold calls collectively Of the 6,264 cold calls placed,

28% were answered,

55% were not answered, and 17 % were non working numbers 

While 6,264 calls were placed over the seven day period, 72% were very quick calls due to non answers and non working phone numbers. Accounting for non answers and non working numbers becomes the tedious part of working true cold calling lists. However, the 28% of calls that were completed (1,774) were productive calls.

Out of the 1,774 calls that were answered, agents were able to set a total of 19 appointments with prospective clients, and 11 referrals were received. Agents were asked to call back at a later time by 132 prospective clients, and 1,612 of the callees were not interested in the offering or refused additional information.

Contrast to my 50 calls for 10 new appointments and 3 -4 sales, you now need around 330 calls to make one appointment, now if you go on the industry averages of 1 sale in 3 appontments, thats an astonishing 990 calls, so at 50 calls a day thats nearly 8 days calling to get the appointments and 1 sale.

Many cold calling gurus will argue its about having a clear targeted market and a mix of cold to expected calls not many have to call complete strangers all the time, either way I would say its not that effective any more unless you are calling your own warm database all day.

Networking Events

More recently Networking has become the staple of Business people, going to meetings with a name tag and wonder around with your sandwich and coffee and get to meet other business people and say hi, find out a little about them and then see if they have a requirement for your services. It is most definitely not as clear cut as it sounds. You have to go to develop relationships first. There are even now networking gurus who help you know who to approach and what to say.

It is not beyond the realms of the imagination to go to your very first event and the first hand you shake says:

'Fantastic I have been looking for this for months lets get down to business right now shall we?"

But thats like a full house on your first Poker hand! in my experience its more like 3-4 events meeting 8-12 people at one event before you get to make an appointment or two. It does take time and money travelling to the meets and paying the organiser.

My best tip is make your what you do (your speil) one very short sentence and make it a benefit. For example If you sell double glazing say:

"We help people to see their gardens, and to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer."

If you sell Accountancy services : "We help people save money on taxes and audits"

I say "We help people with Sales Leads"

If the person has no interest they will say nothing just "Oh' but if they are interested they will be intrigued as ask you to tell them more.

The internet seems to be the modern way many are touting to find leads online. between the three ways cold calling, networking and using the internet I will tell you as a Digital Marketer that business networking will be the quickest for you.

Online marketing is very much a long term strategy. It's more about your brand.. Unless of course you have budget then you can get get your message in front of many eyeballs quickly.

However the strategy that seems to work is a content marketing one. 2-3 blog posts a week and sharing to your organic reach , along wth online press releases wll over three months usually show the seeds of success especially if you are writing altruistic and endearing tips and tricks the reader finds useful to brand yourself as a leader in your industry.

You also need to grow your social media accounts with the right people and engage them every single day to have an organic reach that is useful to you when you share a post.

Landing pages are very effective if you have some budget.

For around 500 USD we can create a landing page on a great domain name for a quick turnaround for sales leads . It consists of just one page on a basic website with hardly any other pages to distract the potential reader with basic notes about what you offer why they should subscribe/buy today or ask for an appointment. Not forgetting a very simple and easy to see contact form to fill in. We can even add a company Video.

We can then send your page to hundreds of thousands of targeted emails with open stats and reads.

Biz-find also have a unique way to find leads; we offer all our members a free page on our sites to brand their business to our 40,000 monthly visitors and 500,000 social media reach. For this exposure our members either pay a fee or tell us every day the things they are looking to buy for their business (B2B) and for themselves (B2C). Just subscribe as a pro member and for just $20 a month when one of our members tells us they need what you sell, you get an email with the decision maker and their number.