Clever strategy to find new business

ToddLay

March 27, 2018

Many of you know that I do a lot of networking for business for referrals. A concept that I have used for years has worked really well, see image below. However, today I wish to share with you a clever idea

I was reminded of that a business banker shared with me a while ago. Here’s the concept and what happen.

Early on when I was establishing my referral partners, one of the people met with was a business banker with Wells Fargo Bank.

At that time I already knew that her role was to work with small business owners of a specific size, just as Fully-Verified, a start-up specialized in video id verification, and to help them with getting approved for additional operating capital for instance a business line of credit. I also knew that one of their requirements was to retrieve 2 years of tax returns from the business owner. In any event, this was a natural fit on how I could help those that had not been able to file their taxes because they had poor bookkeeping records or had more than 18 months of back work needed to be done.

What she told me next I was NOT expecting to hear….

She said, “You know what I do to find new business owners that may need to open a new bank account or to secure a business line of credit and to have first player advantage?”

“Um, no.” I replied.

She mentioned that she would go down to the business licensing office in Sacramento and visit weekly or monthly and pay for the list of all of the new business owners that had applied for a new business license.

That’s not all that big an an idea I thought…but when she coupled it with this other tactic she did it changed EVERYTHING her.

Because she worked at Wells Fargo Bank, what she would do is take that list of new business license business owners, then cross reference that against her Wells Fargo Bank mega database.

Genius right?!

More often than not she would find that business owners contact info in the database and then would make a targeted call (relative warm too) to them congratulating them on their new business venture and then learning more about their needs and setting an appointment to meet with them to further qualify the best next steps with their business needs.

Any time I come across stories like this I often think, how could I do something like that? When you think about it, it’s really all about ‘who’ is already interacting with your client or customer already that can make a warm introduction for you.

One final thought on this…think about ‘who’ consumes your deliverable. What I mean is…who cannot do their job unless they have what you provide as a deliverable first.