Five ways to find more clients

I’ve walked into any number of organisations whereby the existing team says something along the lines of “We’re very well regarded in the industry, and we work with all the major corporations in this market. I’m sure you won’t find any new opportunities”. My Dad once told my brother that I could “find myself in a room full of horseshit and I’d spend two hours looking for the pony”. I am one of those incessant, growth-mindset, optimists who really does think there is a silver lining or at the very least a decent opportunity in any pile of shit.

But it is an interesting question - how do you walk into an established organisation and an established sales team and still manage to uncover new opportunities? Or, if you ARE one of those established sales people, how do you continue to show value to your organisation by finding more clients?

I’m sure I’m aging myself with this reference, but do you remember that scene in Working Girl? Not the one where she’s commuting on the Staten Island Ferry in a power suit, slouch socks and Reeboks…. no, the scene where she’s reading the newspaper and puts two and two together that there was a business opportunity. Take a leaf out of Melanie’s book - and do some research…. carefully.

I was working for a time at a small start up where I had the freshiest of fresh sales teams who all worked REALLY well together. We would sit together every morning and compare notes on how we found new prospects to connect with. We had split the team by vertical markets which, I will say does make this exercise a bit easier to accomplish - but one of the activities knocked out early in the piece was we pulled a list of every company they had worked with. Then company by company we looked up their competitors to see if we had worked with them. If the answer was “no”, they were added to the prospect list. I ran the same activity for myself when I joined a well-established Travel Management Company and it lead us to a $20M multi-national prospect who wasn’t even recorded in their CRM.

So here are my five tips:

1) Assume there MUST be opportunities you haven’t uncovered yet

2) Clean up your CRM, and ensure you’re contacts are correct

3) Evaluate your existing clients list, the size of the organisation, the industry, their location etc - and check to see if you’re working with their closest competitors

4) Use “Emerging” company lists that are published by ASX etc to identify new prospects

5) That old annoying 80/20 rule… even when you’re really busy with existing prospects, carve out time to make calls to new prospects. Keep adding to the funnel