Five ways to get instant business

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1991 by Paul Edwards, Sarah Edwards

Five Ways to Get Instant Business

How to Prime the Pump When You Need Business Immediately--If Not Sooner

The lead time for getting business in the door can be several weeks or several years. This is especially true if you're working with large companies that must go through layers of decision making. So what can you do to prime the pump when you need business fast? Here are five stopgap ideas for getting instant business.

1. Get on the phone. The quickest, surest way to get business is to get on the phone and call prospective customers and clients. Begin with your past client list. Satisfied customers can be a good source of instant business. Then call contacts who have expressed interest in the past, but never bought. Finally, create a list of new names, using the yellow pages or an industry directory. Although most people hate cold calling, it does work. And once you get started, it's not nearly as hard as you might think.

To conduct an effective phone campaign, you need to keep an up-to-date database of all past clients--including names, addresses, and telephone numbers--and what they purchased on which date. Contact-management software like ACT will alert you when you need to make a follow-up contact. This can be very valuable if you're making a lot of calls and need to call back within many different specified periods. ACT also combines a variety of marketing functions, such as customer and prospect tracking, service records, and correspondence.

Set a goal to make a specific number of calls each day. And just go down the list one by one. Reward yourself for the number of calls you make, not just the number of sales. It may take a lot of calls to get a sale, so the more you make, the better.

To ease the process, use any of the following ideas as an entree into the conversation and as an added incentive for people to act immediately.

2. Make a special offer people can't refuse. Virtually any season or event can serve as an opportunity to offer a special promotion. You can have a Spring Special, a New Year's Discount, or a free initial consultation. If, for example, you have a word-processing service, you might offer every fourth page free, or free page layout and design.

A newsletter publisher used a similar promotion when one of his long-running weekly advertising accounts suddenly decided to take a three-month vacation. He called companies that had been hesitant to advertise and told them that he had a special one-time, one-month opportunity and he wanted to offer it to them first. He had three one-month specials sold in just two days.

3. Offer a pricing incentive. Some money beats no money. Offer a special price that's so tempting that prospective clients simply can't say no. Lowball pricing can be one of the quickest routes to new business. For example, a woman we know started her business promoting restaurants on the radio with this special-pricing strategy. She offered restaurant owners the opportunity to promote their restaurant on her show for half the standard rate. And she gave top-notch service for that price. She prepared the commercials, interviewed owners, and invited listeners to meet her at the restaurant as part of various publicity activities. This approach enabled her to break even immediately. Satisfied advertisers were willing to renew at the regular price.

A photographer offered an apparently absurd service to advertising agencies: a 30-by-40-inch color print in an hour for $150. Obviously, if two customers took him up on it at the same time, one customer would get his color print on time and the other would have his print two hours later. But the photographer knew the chances were good that no one would rush-order a 30-by-40-inch color print. The psychological impact was made nonetheless. The idea was not to sell quick 30-by-40-inch prints but to convince art directors that this photographer could deliver unmatched photographic services.

4. Subcontract or take overload. Your competitors can be an excellent source of quick business. Howard Shenson, author of The Consulting Handbook, reports that 11 to 21 percent of new business comes from the competition. So scout around and find out who's busy and call to find out if they need backup or if they've had to turn away any projects.

One instructional designer was able to get business quickly in this way when the project she'd been working on was suddenly canceled by a hostile takeover. She called other instructional designers and told them her plight. Sure enough, one designer had just turned down a job that he didn't have the time to do.

5. Volunteer. There's nothing worse for morale than having no work. Therefore, doing some work beats doing none at all. Although volunteering is a last-ditch effort to create business, any work tends to beget work. Sometimes what begins as a volunteer effort ultimately becomes paid work.

GET STEADY BUSINESS

Ideally, you should plan your business so that you never need to scramble to find work. When you're first starting out, line up several clients before you leave the security of your job. Never rely on one client as the primary source of your business. Even if you have to subcontract business out, build a base of reliable clients. If you must work with only one client at a time, make sure you set aside several hours each week to market for future business. To avoid sudden dips in business, keep your advertising, networking, and other marketing efforts under way during your busy times.