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Nine Easy Ways To Build Business Prospects
Identifying new business prospects and filling your sales pipeline are the building blocks of your sales activity. Without prospects, there wouldn’t be any leads, and if you remove the leads from your sales process, all your sales activity will topple over.
With that in mind, here are some simple ways to find new and exciting prospects for your business:
SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media platforms are an excellent source of prospecting. They’re a fantastic way to connect with customers, and a great place for you to grow your prospect list. It’s also a good way to create and nurture customer relations by having meaningful business conversations, sharing content that is relevant to your target audience, and acquainting yourself with followers of your brand.
Always try to connect and communicate with influencers on social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. If you share some of their relevant posts, the odds are high that they will share some of yours in return, showing online support for your business and therefore recommending you and your product to their followers.
Once your message has been ‘liked’ by a top influencer in your industry, potential prospects will gain confidence in following you, sharing your content, subscribing to your newsletter and potentially buying from your product range.
CASE STUDIES
Case studies are a great way to build trust and confidence in your business. Always post case studies and success stories of who have used and benefited from your services.By making use of positive feedback, you can demonstrate what businesses can achieve by using your product.
This virtual “thumbs-up” will give people the impetus to check out your website, like you on Facebook, or maybe even sign up for a free trial—a great sales lead!
GREAT CONTENT
Content that is relevant to your target market is the key to people subscribing to communications from you, sharing your content with others, and helping you build a loyal audience. These can become potential future prospects that could then in turn be nurtured to become your loyal customers.
Blog posts or infographics have mass sharing appeal: Sharing knowledge and information is common practice, and businesses that get their content shared become known as somewhat experts in their field. Everyone always wants to do business with an expert…
DON’T BE AFRAID TO MINGLE
Even though social media campaigning is a fast and easy way to approach potential prospects, good, old-fashioned, in person networking should still be an essential part of your prospecting activity. Meet people face-to-face, tell them about yourself, your product and your business, and ask reciprocal questions. Don’t forget to exchange contact details and to keep in touch with them after adding them to your prospect database.
CUSTOMER REFERRALS
Unsurprisingly, the cost of retaining a customer is much lower than that of acquiring a new one. Plus, loyal customers usually tend to buy and spend more on your products. Treat them well and they will recommend you. Customer referrals are absolutely one of the most powerful tools any business can employ to attract potential customers, so make sure your clients have something good to say about you and your business.
Use emails,follow upsandautomated communicationsto keep in touch with your prospects and turn them into solid leads. Expand your audience and get your message across to more and more people; nurture leads by using targeted content distributed via email. You can easily use email with prospect generation tools such as social media (attach sign up forms to your Facebook page, for example), or at networking events (collect emails and add them to your customer database later on).
WEBSITE OPTIMISATION
There’s a high probability that your website will be the first point of call between a prospective customer and your business. Make sure that your ENTIRE website lives up to the task by making the whole experience user friendly; ensure it lives up to its full SEO potential; scrutinise your site to see if it is easy to find and navigate through information on it. Ensure that every page gives the option to the visitor to sign up to receiving your content!
DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE LITTLE THINGS
Some of the ways you can find prospects may seem so innocuous that there may be a tendency to forget about using them in your sales and marketing activity. For example: Do you have a call to action on your customer newsletters such as “Give Us a Call Now”, or a link asking the reader to visit your website in your email signature? Adding little touches like these to your activity could have big payoffs later on.
FOCUS ON CREATING LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS
While you are sourcing prospects that could possibly turn into sales leads and then into successful conversions, don’t forget that during that time you are also nurturing a long-term relationship. Building a long-term relationship between you and a prospective customer is imperative, as ideally you would like them to stay with you for the long run, not just be one-time purchasers.
Generating new leads and prospects can be both time-consuming and frustrating, but don’t give up: it takes careful preparation, perseverance, and using different marketing methods to successfully generate prospects. If nurtured well, a large proportion of your prospects can turn into valuable leads—and who doesn’t want more leads in their sales pipeline?