One of the first things you can do when identifying a potential new customer is to check their available financials. This is important as it shows if a customer is worth pursuing – or not! Also, it highlights how many employees they have, their potential turnover, and even allows us to identify a rough estimate of how much they spend on PCBs.

During this process, if you’ve identified any C-customers, you should automatically remove them from your list. This is because the warm calling process is quite time-consuming, and we want to be certain that we focus on only sizeable A+, A and B customers as it will make a significant impact not only on our local business, but to the rest of the group as a whole. So, we will only be targeting B class customers and above.

With this in mind, it’s important to be bold and dream big. We should be confident in targeting these large customers. Until we know otherwise, we have to believe that the service and solution that we are offering will help with a need that we’ve already identified.

And finally, online platforms that allow you to see, and even visit, virtually. Before, the only way you could visit a customer is by jumping in your car and driving to the customer’s site and seeing it for yourself. Times have changed – we can now enter any business in any number of online platforms and stand outside their premises or even sit in a meeting with them at the click of a button. It means that we can get a feeling of what the customer looks like in real-time. Often, when you look at a website, it’s very difficult to actually identify the size of a potential customer. Sometimes, the smallest customer can actually have the best website, and this can trick or mislead you when validating leads, so this gives you a useful insight to potential new customers and their relative size.