Business Tips

10 Ways To Get More Customers

When hunting for new customer for products and services, it’s often easy to focus too much on one sales approach. It may be cold calling, it may be ‘networking’, it may even be regularly revising all of your marketing materials to see if you can hit the right buttons with your potential client base.

If you’re stuck in a rut, here are 10 ideas you can use in order to think about whether or not you’re spending too much time in one area.

They’re all taken from actual examples of strategies we’ve implemented when we’ve been looking to give our own sales a boost.

1. Hit the Phones - call up the 10 companies in your target market closest to where you are who you’ve never spoken to before.
2. Grab a Map - send an introductory email to 10 foreign companies which could use your services, and tell them what you do.
3. Get Brainstorming - ask everyone in your team if they know anyone from back home who might be worth asking for some leads.
4. Start a Blog - choose a topic related to your business, start a blog, and invite your current prospect list to check it out.
5. Create a Group - create a group on Facebook relating to a humorous aspect of your industry, and then contact whoever signs up.
6. Ask for Referrals - call up your current clients and ask if they know of anyone who could use your products and services.
7. Go to the Top - look up some Private Equity companies in your area and see if they own any companies which you could potentially partner with.
8. Think About Customers Laterally - take a good look at your products and services…is there a type of customer out there who you’ve never served before but could feasibly use what you are offering?
9. Think About Products Laterally - could the product or service you’re offering be metaphorically ‘repackaged’ or described in a different way that would open up either new markets for you or enable you to sell at higher margins?
10. Expand Your Market - could you be offering your products and services in an additional markets without incurring any incremental costs?
11. Always overdeliver. (That’s why there are 11 tips here, not just 10).

Put these tips into action this week, and hopefully one of these will create a spark which gets you back on track.

© 2008 Microconsulting Online.