It’s the big day, you’ve decided to take the plunge 👟 and create your business 😱 ! You are broken in, your strategy is set up but you still don’t know how to get clients? You’ve stumbled upon the right article, because today we’re going to teach you how to get clients, unearth them and get them out of their lair 🛖. Let’s go!
Let’s get back to the basics. You’ve managed to find information about starting a business because that’s exactly what you want to do. But once you have created your business, you need to succeed in selling, and therefore in finding customers. Let’s proceed step by step. Let’s first see what the term “canvassing” means.
Canvassing definition
It is necessary to know that first of all, canvassing is a commercial technique 💰. When one is part of this line of business, one will implement a marketing process to find customers.
Of course, these customers correspond to the target that we have set up beforehand. We will then contact them in order to increase our customer portfolio and thus increase our sales. This is the action of prospecting. In marketing, canvassing is a direct sales technique.
What does it mean? You’re going to contact customers who don’t know your brand yet 🤫. You’re going to put together an offer and try to create a need among them. This is a far cry from the Inbound marketing method but we’ll talk about that in another article. There are two types of canvassing:
- BtoC.
- BtoB.
In the first case, the salesman will make his product known to customers (individuals) by putting forward an advertisement for example which can be physical (billboard) or digital (with the use of Google Adwords or social networks). In the case of B2B canvassing, we will try to sell a product or a service to a company and we will focus only on the decision makers.
The different types of canvassing
There are several sales methods, so it is normal that there are several types of canvassing. We can count three types of canvassing for cold prospects:
- Telephone canvassing 📱.
- E-mail canvassing.
- Door-to-door canvassing.
We are going to speak about these three subjects in different points.
The telephone canvassing
We all know this one and we like it the least. Not a day goes by without a call from a phone company to sell us a subscription or worse, to use the CPF account… This is exactly what cold calling is all about. When you are cold calling, you are trying to reach the potential customer by phone. This is not the best way of cold calling since this contact is absolutely not expected from your prospects.
Canvassing by emailing
The famous prospecting email is the first email 📩 that will go out for one or more potential customers. Unlike telephone canvassing, it is much less intrusive and we advise you to use this method to your advantage. When you are doing customer acquisition, email is an excellent way to achieve your goals and it will become particularly powerful if you couple it with other platforms, but we’ll come back to that later.
Marketing email are far from being obsolete, you must continue to use them. It greatly improves your prospecting. We even advise you to send an email before contacting a person on LinkedIn so that they have a better chance of recognizing you.
Door to door
This method of prospecting is a bit out of fashion, it is increasingly rare to have someone at your door trying to sell you 💰 a product or service. This type of canvassing is a sales technique where a salesperson will come to your home without having made an appointment with you.
The salesperson will therefore be in direct contact with a potential customer. Now that we know a few types of canvassing, we will see how to canvass customers. Do you want to find the right prospects? Let’s start with the persona. Again? Yeah, you’re going to have to get used to it 😁.
How to get clients: making your persona
We talk about it every time in our articles but it’s for a good reason. You won’t be able to find new customers if, upfront, you don’t know who is likely to buy from you. Making a persona is an integral part of a prospecting marketing strategy. To know your ideal customer, what you need to do is to draw a portrait of him. You will therefore choose :
- A first and last name (fictitious). This will help you get closer to your target.
- A fictitious photo too. You can find some on image banks. Once again, this is so that you can get closer to your target.
- His age.
- The gender.
- His place of residence.
- His marital situation 💍.
- His/her profession.
- His/her level of study.
- The field of study.
- The value of its heritage.
- etc…
Of course these are just a few examples. You can very well add information like the fact that he owns pets 🐈⬛ if it allows you to sell some of your products or services for example. What we just did was establish a BtoC persona but maybe we’ll need to do a BtoB persona. We will see that right away.
The BtoB persona
Within the framework of a BtoB target development, we will take into account the following elements:
- The objective of the company.
- Its turnover.
- Its sector of activity.
- The workforce of the company.
- Its needs.
- The constraints.
Of course, we must not forget that even if we approach companies, we will still have to go through the decision makers so by humans 👨🦰. Therefore, you will not have to neglect them.
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How to canvass customers: Use social networks
Once you’ve set up your persona, you’re going to need to focus on the different platforms you’re going to work on to market to your leads. We don’t teach you this, but with the advent of digital, we find ourselves surrounded by social networks more and more 🤳. And that’s not a bad thing since you can use them in your customer acquisition strategy. For a long time indomitable, Facebook is a platform less and less used now. We prefer Instagram which is a platform that allows you to showcase your photos. But you can also use it to sell products.
We are not going to stop on Instagram because we want to talk to you about another social network: LinkedIn. In fact, we’re going to dwell a little on this professional social network. As you probably know, LinkedIn has millions of users on its platform. At the beginning, this social network was set up to connect with your colleagues at work and to find a new job. But ultimately, you can harness its power in a different way. On LinkedIn, you can finally find prospects and start selling products and/or services. We explain how it works.
Finding customers on LinkedIn
If you’ve ever set foot 🧦 on LinkedIn, you know how this social network works. Beforehand, you have already defined your target audience and you know what you are going to sell. Now in using this platform, you have to use the resources that LinkedIn provides you. We are talking about the search bar, of course. In this search bar, you will start putting in your keywords. These keywords can be:
- The title or function of a person in a company.
- A first and last name directly (you know who you want to target).
- The name of a company or several companies.
You can also integrate groups to ask questions about a service or a product and collect answers from your target. All you have to do is collect them afterwards. What you have to do then is to invite them to be part of your network and you can start an exchange.
We advise you to send an invitation without a note since the acceptance rate is higher. Of course, if your copywriting is outstanding, then you can go ahead with your eyes closed and leave a note. One last thing we don’t forget on LinkedIn is visibility 👀.
If you decide to post on this social network, you will gain visibility and notoriety, two essential components to put forward one’s expertise. To help you find clients on LinkedIn, we have a little extra solution for you: Waalaxy.
How do I find customers with Waalaxy?
If you land on the planet Waalaxy, you should know that it is a small chrome extension that allows you to manage your invitations and messages on LinkedIn. We’ll explain in detail what it is and how it works.
The first thing you need to know is that Waalaxy is a multi-channel prospecting tool that will allow you to do LinkedIn lead generation and to automate all your prospecting. You will be able to contact 100 people per week in 10 minutes for 0€ per month. This is the basic plan, you’ll just need a little time to set up your settings but once it’s done, you don’t have to do anything else. Waalaxy will allow you to :
- Finding clients on LinkedIn without technical expertise.
- Expand 📈 your network.
- Generate opportunities.
- Automatically send invitations and messages.
To get you started with our tool, we’ll give you an example of what you can do with it.
Marketing on LinkedIn: Example
Once you have installed Waalaxy, you just have to click on the extension and open a LinkedIn page. Once you’re there, we’ll start looking for customers. In our case, we decided to target all CEOs in France to sell them a billing service. Découvrir Waalaxy 🪐
You go to the search bar and double-click on the magnifying glass in the search bar to access all available contacts.
Then, filter by “People” and access advanced search filters to add a keyword (such as the job title, here Fullstack Developer), or also location…
This method is much more effective than a simple keyword search directly typed into the search bar (and even more so if you use Boolean operators).
A list will then appear, and you’ll just need to import them using Waalaxy.
From there, you will :
- Import your leads (you can choose your number of imports) and click “confirm”.
- Then start a campaign. We advise you to choose the campaign: “Visit + Invitation + message”.
- Name your campaign if you wish (it’s always better if you want to find your way).
- Then choose your list.
- Add all the prospects or make a selection.
- Choose the time between the visit and the next action.
- Send your invitation without a note 📩.
- Set up the delay after the invitation.
- Write your prospecting note.
- Click on “Validate” and launch your campaign.
Thanks to what we’ve just shown you, you can now start acquiring new customers, canvassing them, sending them the right message. Of course, you can also set up A/B tests to see if your message is right.
How to approach a company?
We have seen the main ways to approach customers, but mainly at the BtoC level. We will now look at how to approach a company in several steps.
#1 Gather information
As in the manner of a persona, you will have to learn about the type of business that will come to call on you in order to buy your services. You will need to know:
- The decision makers in the company.
- How to contact your prospects.
- Their needs.
- Their pain points.
This is an essential step that should not be neglected since it will allow you to retrieve data but also to be able to answer any questions from the company.
#2 Get in touch with your prospects
In this phase of prospecting, you will have to get in touch with the company in question. But we’re talking about decision-makers here: you’ll have to start contacting the company’s decision-makers. This implies that you will have to know who makes the decisions in the company and what is their preferred means of communication 💓. So you will have the choice to approach them by:
- Mailing.
- LinkedIn.
- Phone.
Of course, you will need to have done some research beforehand so that you can approach him in the best way. You have to succeed in making his approach otherwise you will not be able to close any sales. It is a decisive step since getting in touch with your prospect will allow you to lay the foundations and then expose your product or service. Don’t hesitate to ask questions to find out what stops them and what motivates them.
#3 Make a sales proposal
Once you have established the first contact and shown your product or service, you will have to make a commercial proposal. In case you don’t know what a sales proposal is, we will explain it to you quickly. In fact, it’s a document 📄 that will summarize your offer to submit to a decision maker or customer.
So you need to detail this offer by being as convincing as possible. For your commercial proposal to appeal to the prospect, it must therefore focus on him and his needs. Thus, you must show them why your solution is the right one for them. The reading of this document must be clear and concise so that your lead can understand the stakes of this proposal and know how this solution can answer his problem.
#4 Follow up with your prospect
When you make your sales proposal, it is normal that they do not respond immediately. It is even advisable to let your prospect have the necessary time to think about the proposal you have just submitted. However, this does not mean that you should forget about it.
Once you have determined a time for your prospect to think about it, you must follow up with him. In this follow up, you will need to reiterate the points covered in the sales proposal and offer him your help on points that might not be clear 👀. You remain, of course, available to help him if he has any questions. This will allow you to show the company that you are interested in their needs and that you are available. Which is an extremely good point when dealing with a company.
Conclusion of the article on how to get clients
Over the course of this article, we have been able to cover a number of different points about canvassing for customers. We have seen:
- The definition of canvassing.
- The different types of canvassing that can exist.
- How to canvass customers with social networks.
- Using Waalaxy 👽 to market to customers on LinkedIn.
- How to canvass a business.
So you should be able to start canvassing your customers with the best tips you found in this article.
FAQ of the article How to get clients
We’re almost at the end of the article and there may be some things that can improve your knowledge of how to market to customers. Let’s get right to it.
What are the elements necessary for a commercial proposal?
When you go out to market to clients, you will inevitably come to the sales proposal at some point. Your goal is to sell 🤑 a product to a customer or company. To make your sales proposal top notch, you’re going to need several things. When you’re going to write your sales proposal, you’re going to need to prepare it beforehand. You can’t just do this willy-nilly. You will need:
- An excellent knowledge of your target.
- Understanding your target‘s environment.
These are two essential points for a good propal. As we said earlier in this article, the more detailed your sales proposal is, the more you show your customer that you understand his or her needs. To make your proposal the best it can be, you need to make sure that you:
- Its good presentation (with an introduction).
- An understanding of their needs. Indeed, you will have to show how your solution is the best one to meet their needs or expectations.
- Recall his problematic. This will show that you are interested in him.
- The strategy you will implement. If you are selling a service, you can show them that your solution will address different pain points and solve problems.
- Make an estimate of the results. Of course, this will depend on the use of the solution and how the customer is going to use it, but you can set up an estimate of the results and what their ROI is going to be.
- Price. A good business proposal should end with the price you will set for your customer.
How do you market to new customers?
To get into customer acquisition, there are a multitude of strategies. In order to be able to market to new customers and to grow your business there is no secret 🤫. The first thing you will need to consider is targeting the right people. That’s why you’ll need to make a persona. But you might not just make one persona, you are definitely going to have multiple targets. Play the game and create your different targets and segment.
If you have social networks, post on them. We think in particular of LinkedIn which is a real gold in terms of BtoB database but you can use Instagram or even TikTok to acquire new customers. They may even come directly to you.
The one we prefer is obviously LinkedIn since you can both post on this platform and search for profiles. When you have a large enough network and your posts have good visibility, you will start to gain credibility.
The more you show your area of expertise, the more your potential clients will trust you. If you have a website, the next step is to participate in its good referencing and to acquire all the SEO techniques which will make your site place at the top of results. You can even go for blogging.
These are the main things you need to keep in mind in order to succeed in getting new clients. The best advice we can give you is both to combine traditional prospecting techniques but also to do inbound marketing by posting regularly on social networks. After that, all you have to do is keep your customers loyal.
And you are now aware of all the tips on how to get clients. Ready? Prospect 🚀!