Hello again! Lesson number 4 of the warm calling course focuses on how to find leads.

Now you have a define dstrategy for your local office, it’s time to identify potential new customers that fit the target audience. Fortunately for you, we now have some tools available to us that were not around 5 to 10 years ago, the main one being Google Maps.

I’m not sure if you’ve used this technique before, but Google Maps allows you to enter a postcode and then search in that area for customers within a 5-mile radius, 10-mile radius – whatever you require. 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 businesses. So, for example, you can search for contract electronic manufacturing; you can also search for electronic manufacturing services; you can also search for fire detector manufacturers. All of these means that you can identify customers around a certain location, which already gives you a USP.

And when we consider USPs, we should look at what successes we’ve had in the past. If we’ve got on our order book already 5 or 6 fire and safety customers, the chances are we are very good at supporting fire and safety customers. So, let’s look at other potential customers in that sector. Again, using your geographical locations in your Google search function, you can identify other customers that might be either competing with customers you’re already supporting or supply similar products. This allows you to take advantage of the USPs you offer the existing customers to potential new ones.

Another tool that we have available to us that wasn’t available before is social media. At the push of a button, I can see who works for a particular customer and this allows me to identify the correct people to talk to. In addition to this, it allows you to identify if there’s any crossovers with your existing network, which might potentially lead to a referral or an option to identify a need that might not be so obvious on initial reflection.

And lastly, please remember that only 5% of calls are successful, so it’s a numbers game. If we’re only talking to 5 customers, the chances are we won’t convert any of them. But if we increase the number of leads we have to 100, the chances are that we will convert a minimum of 5 of those. 

So, we have to use every single method that is detailed on here to gain as many quality leads that meet our strategy to increase our chances of success. And once we start following this process and we have good quality leads on our sales funnel, I can guarantee you that your successes during the warm calling process will increase.