Getting Your Business Known With Minimal Advertising

“The fish has to see the meal before it bites.” – Chinese proverb

Before selling, franchise units that are involved in business to business selling need to market and mine their business contacts to get noticed. For small businesses, this does NOT mean spending thousands upon thousands of dollars in bad advertising – dollars spent that do not reach and do not bring in new customers. Don't get me wrong. Advertising is important but I've seen new business owners, who seem to think that building a business is just a matter of how much one puts into advertising. They dump unnecessary amounts of money into ads, a very costly mistake that can lead to bankruptcy.

How can a small business effectively market to other businesses in their territory, spending little yet getting a lot back in return? In a nutshell -- invest in developing relationships close by. Here's how to market to those business relationships in your franchise territory.

1. Throw parties. In the franchise world, these are typically grand opening parties in which the owner and his cohorts attempt to visit, introduce and invite a minimum number of businesses (say nine hundred personal visits and invitations) in the immediate community. With luck, a hundred or more will attend to help kick start the new business. Then the party typically stops. Bad move. Many reasons can be created to have a business party – a one year anniversary, two-year, five-year, break-through technology that will make your client’s life a breeze, client appreciation evening, etc. When people come through your door, it’s easier for them to understand what your business is about as well as for you to follow-up with them. Parties aren’t expensive if you don’t serve vintage wine or caviar on gold-plated dishes; just have something simple to nibble on.
2. Guest appearances. According to one survey, over 80% of small businesses find customers through referrals. Any salesperson worth their salt knows that the name of the game is networking. Speaking at professional, business and community gatherings is a great way to make contacts and get your name out there but it also is an opportunity to learn in a non-pressured environment about the market place and what potential customers want from you. Guest appearances at the local Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce, Women’s Club, Golf Club, and other leadership meetings can be important for your business.
3. Develop a niche. We don’t like to visit or talk with our competitors but they can bring us business. Really! Meet them and position yourself as a niche service. If you are an accounting firm, you might find your niche is in impartial litigation valuation or accounting specialization for start-ups. Finding a niche makes it easier to network among peers without appearing threatening. It opens the door for peers to throw you a bone from time to time. Of course, you are probably able to do many of the services your peers offer but among peers, they think of you in terms of your niche. Managing perceptions of your company to different people is part of what marketing is all about.
4. Cold calls and referrals. All the soft stuff above helps but there’s also no escaping the hard stuff. You have to follow up with the contacts you’ve made and play the numbers game in making new contacts through cold calls. You know the song. “Make new friends and cherish the old. One is silver and the other is gold.” Ask your old customers for referrals. Most business franchises are not doctors and so will be able to make cold-calls to people in their community every day. I counsel franchisees to reverse engineer the daily customers needed to profitably run their business. This is a benchmark on how many customers are needed, of what kind and what the ratio of activity to results should be. Aggressively seek to achieve these. For example, if you are in IT consulting, you might seek 20 cold calls per day and at least one referral to get that number.

That’s a lot of customers, referrals, prospective customers and business information to organize. In the old days we used to do it with an all encompassing super-duper day organizer with specialized sales reports. But customers expect you to know more about them and their past history with you nowadays. We are in the Amazon.com world in which customer habits are automatically assumed to be known. That’s why a good customer relationship manager program is critical. If you will have turnover in sales staff at anytime in the life of your business, then you will need to have a centralized database so that you can track customer history after the salesperson leaves. Good CRM systems can cost from thousands of dollars to free. Yes. I said free, if you know where to look (but that’s a blog story for another day.)

Additional reading:
Getting Noticed, BusinessWeek
Selling to Small Business, Inc.com