You reached Flavio's blog
on Business Exploration.
I am always happy to talk
with interesting people.
if I look on-line to get some hint about prospecting for new clients
I generally find quite basic approaches, suitable for consumer businesses
and confounded with elementary on-line marketing tricks.
When you sell industrial equipment and B2B services with a high technological content,
where customers have to make life-changing purchasing decisions
over high-ticket investments that can make or break a company,
these approaches inspire compassion and benevolence.
The reality is that the salesman has to reach a buyer that is deeply entrenched (dug ) into his company,
that has erected high barriers to the change of the status quo,
and narrowed the path to gain his trust to almost invisible bridges.
Reaching that customer, is not a matter of polished weblines,
but of touchable human interactions.
Till now I found 7 of them, and I am happy to learn more, if you are willing to share!
To get in front to a new client, you may use an ally. Here some example:
Better: get a peer of your customer. Someone that the customer trusts and that can lend his trust to you.
Poking into competition is an all time favorite. There are at least 3 ways to use competition to reach new customers:
By definition a referral is a customer contact that is passed to you by an existing client. We can extend this idea:
We cannot always rely on others to achieve our goals. Sometimes we have to pick up the phone and reach the customer directly. This can be done if you have somehow put your hand on customer's phone/email/address.
Sometime you can rely on someone outside your organization, to do the sales job. A middlemen brings a lot of value in presiding a territory.
You can get some new customer doing marketing. It really depends by your industry and business model. It is a realm and here I list just some example.
If you have any other way to get in contact with new customers and want to share it, I will be happy to add to this list and quote you, because it will help more people!
Flavio