Professional fisherman or women go out to sea in a trawler, throw out bait, use sat nav to find shoals and use a giant net to lure in hundreds of fish at a time. They spend two or three days just fishing and nothing else. Cleverly they also throw out unwanted fish or too small examples. In a way, they are qualifying what they actually want to take back to the harbour and sell.
This parallel works very well.
If you want more new customers, you have to act like a trawler fisherman, not a Sunday afternoon hobbyist. Here are a few ideas to make contact:
- LinkedIn or Sales Navigator search engines. Use these to search for people you may wish to start following, commenting on posts and eventually connecting with. You may want to follow them first, find out more about them, join their groups and then connect.
- Keep your eye on trigger events in your industry. Triggers are events that indicate the person may want to benefit from your services. They can be external or internal. External events happen naturally, such as a new development built near town or a pandemic that encourages people to vacation at home. Both of these events can mean someone may need your mortgage services. Internal events are more insightful. A firm may be expanding and struggle to get the right people or develop into a new business area. These events may trigger the need for your services.
- You can search for triggers by using Google Alerts. This is a free service that you use to key in trigger words or search words. Google then sends alerts to you with links where these search words are appearing. You then search these and dig around. Jolly useful.
- I love a press release. These are all online now and can tell you what firms are doing and who is involved.
- LinkedIn, Twitter both have trigger event search capabilities, so use them to automate your research.
- LinkedIn Newsfeed will help you find people, but Sales Navigator is definitely recommended to find people. It’s a first-class piece of software if LinkedIn is your site of choice.
- # also work very well. Search for common #s to find relevant postings
Remember, you’re merely finding people at this stage. Please be selective; only find people interested in what you do, don’t use the methods to blanket everyone. That just creates animosity and rejection. The secret sauce is to do your research on who you want to find. The narrow this search, the better, the more niche you operate, the more successful you’ll be prospecting online.
The next step is to connect.
