Beyond business leads -- new ways
to beat the bushes for new clients
By Pat Curry • Bankrate.com

No matter how happy your customers are, you need to find new ones if you want your business to grow.

Just about every owner covets business leads -- the names, addresses and phone numbers of potential buyers or clients -- but not everyone is good at generating or making the best use of them. Here are some ways to beat the bushes for business, and one expert's step-by-step plan for getting your unsolicited letter opened, read and responded to by a company's top decision-maker.

Business lead clubs
While small business owners have long used networking in client prospecting, a new twist is business lead clubs. You can find business lead clubs in your area, or in areas in which you would like to do business, on the Internet through key word searches. You can also check your local paper's business section for upcoming meetings, or with your local chamber of commerce office.

Trade shows and conferences
Trade shows and conferences are tailor-made for prospecting. Everyone you want to talk to is in one place and they're there to buy or sell.

"I've had clients do trade shows who walked away and said, 'That didn't work.' If it doesn't work, it's your fault," says Kent Capener, a consultant in Salt Lake City.

Make the most of trade shows and conferences by doing some advance work. Most conventions will give you their registration list; many post it on their Web sites. Contact registrants you'd like to meet.

"We send an invitation; it looks like a wedding invitation," Capener says. "Invite them to your booth. If you have the money, do some type of hospitality suite, and do an RSVP."

If you're not sure which trade shows to attend, check TSCentral.com, a trade-show tracking site.

Educated spam
Capener also uses a technique he reluctantly calls "educated spam." He cruises the Internet -- and everywhere else -- looking for products whose makers might want his services. When he finds something that looks like a good match, he sends an e-mail, or mails out a presentation on CD.

"I always find people I can contact in the over-the-transom approach, if I have my ducks in a row and if I've done enough research about the industry to get that first hit," he says. "Because I have 30 years of business experience, I can make my spam a little different. It's not one e-mail to 50 million people; it's targeted."

The unsolicited CDs "seem to impress people," he says. "They make us stand out vs. our competition and make people think we really want to do something with them."

He has used the same tactic since the '70s, when he sent out postcards to prospective clients.

"In some ways, my methods are innovative because they're the Internet crowd, but in other ways, they're the same-old, same-old. It's a tried-and-true method for me."

Establish yourself as an expert
"People hate to be sold, but they love to buy," says Joan Stewart, a Wisconsin-based media relations consultant and publisher of The Publicity Hound newsletter. "The trick is to establish yourself as such an expert that they can't wait to buy from you."

Stewart has found three ways to do this: speaking at meetings, writing articles for nationwide publications and being interviewed for books.

Speaking engagements can come from local business groups. Offer the editor of the group's newsletter a short summary of your talk, with a photo, to run in their next issue. That way, you put your name in front of the group a second time, and reach those who couldn't attend that day.

"It offers great marketing I can't afford to do myself," she says. "A local chamber here mailed several thousand brochures about a media workshop I presented to companies throughout southeastern Wisconsin."

Offer articles for newsletters
You can also put your name in front of potential clients by offering articles for newsletters. Find them at sites such as the E-zine List of online newsletters.

"If you can get in big ones like Bottom Line Personal or Bottom Line Business, you can get a ton of sales from a little article, and you'd never meet these clients any other way," Stewart says. Make sure your bio and contact information are at the end of the story. To be interviewed for books on your area of expertise, check the "Books in Print" database -- available at many universities -- for its list of forthcoming books, Stewart says. You can also participate in online discussion groups, which writers often check for knowledgeable sources.

Kent Capener's approach is to selectively post messages on business-related forums. Real-world suggestions to questions on message boards led to an invitation from the Idea Cafe Web site to become one of its experts, answering questions from visitors to the site.

"Through those postings, I invite people to go to my Web site for more information about my consultancy and what services and benefits we offer," he says.

Write your own newsletter
Larry Chase started Web Digest for Marketers as a prospecting tool. Now it generates most of its business directly by producing ad revenue and indirectly by leading to speaking engagements and consulting jobs.

"How many hundreds of thousands of small businesses are trying to figure out how to get into the top 10 search results?" he asked. "That's a losing game. Forget it. Go start a newsletter. The trick is to put up something so good, so compelling, other sites will point to you."

That means producing a product that strictly focused on your clients' needs.

"As we move forward in time, people have less and less time for pontifications from any kind of guru. They need news they can use. Then you have the rub-off effect -- 'Larry delivers this to me every two weeks.'"

That lets potential clients develop trust in him.

"Very often, people say, 'I want to get them when they're in the buying cycle.' No, you need to get them in the holding pattern. You can't show up as a just-in-time vendor. They want to know you. That's what an e-mail newsletter is going to do."

Good, old-fashioned snail mail
Through his books, tapes and Web site, California-based sales trainer Tony Parinello teaches selling to a company's Very Important Top Officer -- VITO.

He offers these tips for achieving an appointment with a top decision-maker through an unsolicited letter:

Start with a plain, catalog-sized envelope -- no company logo -- with your name and company address, sans suite number, for the return address. Use a stamp; not metered mail. Make sure you have the name and proper title of the person you're sending to.

Inside, include a letter on a plain piece of paper -- no company letterhead -- with a headline of less than 30 words, a tie-in paragraph, benefits bullet points, a closing paragraph, and a postscript.

Your headline should address increasing revenues, increasing efficiencies and effectiveness, protecting existing customers, getting add-on business from those customers or cutting expenses.

The tie-in paragraph brings the theme of the headline into the body of the letter. If you helped a similar company increase revenues and cut expenses, the tie-in should cover what that company did with the savings. The benefits bullets should be three or four areas in which you have a "proven track record delivering results to this type of industry," Parinello says.

"No techno-babble, no jargon, not facts, figures, features and functions."

The ending paragraph introduces "uncertainty and doubt," Parinello says, because sales letters usually assume too much.

"We say, 'We're not sure if you can achieve similar or greater results. It's too early to tell. If you take my call, we can determine what the possibilities are.'"

The final part of the letter, the postscript, is critical, and should include the name of his private assistant. It should read something like, 'I will call your office on Wednesday, Jan. 21, at 9:30 a.m. If this is not a convenient time, please have Leslie inform me when I should make the call.'

Then, when you call, you can honestly tell the receptionist that your decision-maker is expecting your call.

How do you decide which companies to write in the first place? Just look at the best of your current customers. They'll give you a good idea of who to go after next.

Pat Curry is a freelance writer based in Georgia
To comment on this story, please e-mail the Bankrate.com editors

-- Updated: Dec. 20, 2002