The Big Question: How To Find More Business?

The top ways to find more business, Some easy, some Hard!

If we all got more clients we’d all be happy right? Well for the majority of us that’s true. Yet we’ve all met the chap at networking who’s playing the over composure game:

“I am not looking for any more clients actually, I have more than I can handle”

Oh really buddy, that’s why you are at a networking event in Bangkok in 38 degrees in a full woollen suit! Hmm!

For the majority, we are in business to get more business, it’s the very nature of capitalism, the boom and bust, always be closing, <sigh> back to the Buddhist temple for me!

Let’s chat about the ways most traditional business go about finding leads.

Cold calling

Telemarketers around the world will be shifting uncomfortably on the desk chairs at this term, ‘It’s all about how you have targeted before the call that makes the difference, they will tell you, and if they are really good they are probably right, they will laugh about how many start-ups can burn themselves out in a couple of weeks, after paying a fortune for a list and banging the phone up to eighty times in a day to make 2 half-arsed appointments!

Recent research from top universities tell us; that 80% of decision makers will not buy anything from a cold call or will ever give you an appointment. Films like ‘Wolf of Wall street’ and ‘Boiler Room’ have made people uber-aware of the tricks salespeople have to use to get ‘in the door’ from a cold call.

finding new business on Biz-find

Personally the only way I would contemplate using this tactic to get new business is to pay the professionals who already have the lists and have qualified experienced telephone sales people, average price across the board according to my research for a good telemarketer is $15-20 per/hour, so you would have to work out whether the end  would justify the means.

Business Networking

Everyone’s doing it; years ago Networking was called the Church! Rotary, Lions club, BNI are all at it, early mornings to late at night eating breakfast to evening wine, swapping business cards and getting to know each other and creating relationships, farming not fighting they say, to get a grip of each other’s personal network. There are right ways and wrong ways to network, there are now consultants who run seminars on how to network, how to approach people, and the right elevator pitch.

It’s all about your personality, if you are reasonably gregarious and don’t mind walking up to a group of strangers then you will do well, some can’t abide the idea. But like anything you have to let it run the course, if it is new business you are after, then you must move around the room and the clubs, 5 years with the same faces at the same BNI club will not really grow your circle!

To be successful at networking, you need to know the basics and then go to around 8-10 events a month, most events cost around $20 and personally I would get to speak to around 12 people in one night, 8 of which I would follow up and on average I would make 4 appointments off that one event in one week, from there I would sell to three, making my percentage profit from networking around 230%. I sell consultative services, your product and service could have a much higher average order value and it could take you 6 months to meet someone to sell a house for example, but the 12 people /8cards/4 appointments from one event is my average, and I’ve been doing networking for over 5 years, work from there to get your end sales figure.

Online marketing

Everyone is talking about social media marketing right now, no less than me as it’s my main business here in Thailand; I own google as far as first page for the keywords: social media marketing company Thailand, but is it cost effective? It is the most difficult area of marketing to put a return on investment on, people have tried to offer metrics, but most are just lost on it.

Online marketing has to be under the heading of Branding, and branding is like a stealth tax on business, where it is more like karma than a good business practice. Brand is trust and logo recognition, and how do you establish that? Social media edges onto psychology and really getting people to know you and opening your doors so people get to know exactly who the boss is and what he stands for, It’s about sharing the company vision to the people through Facebook, which is totally alien to many an old school business man. Personally I love digital marketing because no longer can business hide behind huge buildings and gate keepers and are exposed for what they are by the people.

SEO and Online marketing

But how can you profit from it? Well for me personally; I have a number of websites and I blog daily, my blogs are shared to social media which took 7 years (10,000 hours funnily enough) to get to a number of followers, contacts, and likes, so that when I share this blog today, around 50 will read in the first 30 minutes. I now am in a position where my business name is top of search engines and I get around 5-8 leads a week directly through blogging and sharing. Time taken- around 5 hours a week dedicated purely to blogging, and if you think you can get 5-8 leads a week through social media marketing without blogging and you think you can outsourcing content, you really need to go back and read my blogs!

Buying leads

Just google ‘contact leads’ and you can clearly see your real estate people and large order value businesses have been buying in leads for some time. But how can the rest of us buy in leads than does not cost more than our business does? The Internet has come so far yet is still so young and those of us will remember just a few years ago; dial-up connections and downloading a few images and how long they took compared to now. The Internet today is a global market place yet it is still run by people who by their very nature are quite disorganised, and some of us wish for a simpler system to just go online and find leads for your business easily.

One way you can do that is to go to a BIZ-FIND site, in your country, when a business registers on our directories they either pay or tell us the B2B or B2C products and services they are buying right now and we add them to a categorised list for pro members to see, simple!

Just log in and become a pro member or just 25 Pounds you have so many more marketing benefits than a free member and you get access to the leads, find your business category, and see if we have any leads for you, you can have an email sent directly to you when new leads come in. We are currently driving around 30,000 visitors a month to our directory websites and around ten new businesses each day create a free listing and become part of a Biz-find directory somewhere.

upgrade to biz-find pro

We drive the traffic by writing and publishing great content each day and sharing to our 500,000 real people on our social media accounts, by the way did we mention we were a social media marketing training company Oh I did? Then contact Netmedia to get on a web course in Bangkok , and of course in UK in the summer months