Now that we have a defined strategy for our local office, it’s time to identify potential customers that fit the target audience. Fortunately for you, we now have some tools available to us that were not so effective five to ten years ago.

I’m not sure if you’ve used this technique before, but Zoominfo for example, allows you to enter many search attribute including postcode or zipcode to search in a specific area for customers within, say a 5-10 mile radius for example. And this allows you to find customers close to your office, customers close to other customers, and more importantly, it allows you to target specific business types. As another example, you can search for contract electronic manufacturing, or even specific company names. All of this means that you can identify customers around a certain location or industry, which already gives you a greater advantage by just utilizing these technologies.

And when we consider our current customers, we should look at what successes we’ve had in the past. If we already have five or six fire and safety customers in our orderbook, the data shows that we are very good at supporting fire and safety customers. So let’s look at other potential customers in the sector. Again, using the geographical locations in your search function, you can identify other customers that might be either competing with current customers, or supply products that are used in conjunction with your current customers’ product. This allows you to take advantage of the successful unique selling points (USPs) that you offered your existing customers to gain potential new customers.

Another effective tool that we have available to us is social media. At the push of a button, I can see who works for a particular customer, or identify the correct people we wish to speak with. In addition to this, it allows us to identify if there’s any crossovers with your existing networks. These cross-connections could lead to a referral, or maybe even lead to uncovering a need that might not have been so obvious in your initial review.

And finally, please remember: only 5% of calls are successful. So it’s a numbers’ game in a way. If we’re only talking to five potential customers one time, chances are we won’t convert any of them. But if we increase the number of contacted leads to a hundred, chances are that we will gain five new customers.

So, to increase our chances of success, we have to use the methods and technologies available to us to gain as many qualified leads that meet our defined strategy as possible. And once we start following this process and we have good quality leads in our sales funnel, I can guarantee you that your successes during the warm calling process will increase.