Fastest way to new business

My sales team and I were recently reviewing sales reports, analyzing sales patterns and comparing new business vs. old. During the discussion, we realized that most prospects we cold-called or sought during the past year didn’t generate much business, even though a sizable amount of time and money was spent working on them.

The best prospects were companies who found themselves in a jam and needed a shop to bail them out and make them look good. It’s a matter of becoming the shop that bails them out, if they can find you. Finding and identifying a good shop occurs through many means, but positioning your shop as having a specialty is important. This has happened to us a few times this year and, thankfully, even turned into some new business.

In our case, referrals and being found online worked the best. Several times we were discovered online when customers searched for regional suppliers because they had job sites in the area. This validates a technique we had previously discovered: marketing our company in a more regional manner brought more targeted leads than the national approach. We also refocused on our target market and more aggressively pursued it. It’s not that we don’t like doing business with customers from everywhere, but we found many of the inquiries from other regions or countries were less likely to become paying customers and were less profitable when they did.

Regardless, personal referrals are always your best bet, and they don’t always come from obvious sources. Maybe it’s an employee’s neighbor telling someone at his company. Perhaps it’s a result of a community event you attended where you met someone and told them about your company. Maybe a prospect has driven by your shop and finally calls. Or maybe it’s because you attended a business event you initially wanted to skip, and, guess what, someone there remembered your shop months later. You never know when a good referral will fall in your lap. However they find you, when they call and need your product or service, it’s probably yours to lose.