Business Blog | Lilamitre-arte.com

Business contacts are the best, most effective, and most efficient way to generate business. Through networking and relationship marketing you can cultivate many business contacts. The hope is that many of these are potential sweet spot clients.

When you think about building a base of business contacts you should be on the look out for those people who have a high likelihood of needing your services. Networking for referrals is great but you should focus on business contacts who present a direct line to potential work.

Business Contacts Most Likely To Hire You

The following types of companies have a definite need for IT services. Try to develop as many business contacts within these types of organizations as possible.

Advertising and marketing consultants
Architects
Catering Companies
Commercial Printers
Distributors
Healthcare
Doctors
Dentists
Engineers
Graphic Designers
Insurance Adjusters, Agents
ManufacturerS
Movers
Publishers
Residential and Commercial Property Managers
Recruiters
Restaurants with POS systems
Transportation companies

When you seek to develop business contacts, make sure you find out who the buyers or decision makers are. It is a good idea to have business contacts with people in administrative or financial occupations. These people are often at the center of IT hiring decisions. Seek to make business contacts with accountants, administrators, bookkeepers, controllers, office managers, and operations managers and sales staff.
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Business contacts are the people you have in your network. These people are all important to your growing business. You need to build and develop relationships with your business contacts in order to move your business forward and expand your customer base.

Business contacts fall into two separate categories. It is important for you to distinguish between the two and develop relationships with them accordingly. The two categories of business contacts are influencer/users and users.

The people who are both influencers and users are prime business contacts. These business contacts have the potential to use your services themselves and influence others to use your services as well. It is true, every client is a good potential referral source, but the real influencer/users are those who are in the referral business so to speak. These influencer/users also come in two categories:

Trusted Advisors to Small Businesses
Business contacts in this arena include:
Accountants
Bookkeepers
Attorneys
Business Managers
Consultants
Just like you call your accountant for referrals to other businesses, other small businesses are doing the same. If you happen to maintain your accountant’s network, who is he or she most likely to recommend?

Niche Technology Providers for Small Businesses
This is another category of business contact that is extremely influential. These are people who are in the IT industry but who are not direct competitors. They include:
Accounting Software Specialists
Industry Niche Software Applications
Phone System Dealers
Software Developers
System Builders
Website Designers
These businesses work for companies that will likely be in your sweet spot. If you develop business contacts with these people they will be in a position to recommend your IT services to their clients.
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Since the 19th century business cards were widespread among people of all classes with a business to promote. The earliest form of business cards, known as tradecards, were used as advertising materials and as maps used to direct the public to the merchant’s store. Today business cards are among the most important marketing material that every business must have.

The business card is perhaps the best salesman that you can have. That is why it is essential that it contains much more than your name, address, and contact numbers and services. It should be designed keeping its purpose in mind – that is its being a powerful sales tool. So let’s start with the design. If you want to create a business card that contains a photo with gradient colors you can try using a glossy paper to ensure that the cards are printed as good as they look on the screen. Or else, you can get disappointed with the print out.

In addition, if your card design contains background color or images, you can use papers that have gaps between them as these gaps will allow you to make up for the unavoidable elusiveness of the printer paper feed system. However, most stock cards don’t have gaps so if you don’t want to have trouble with printing, make sure your photos, images and text are at 3mm off the edge of the card. This way the minor printer imprecision will not destroy your business cards.
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A growing number of community banks are recognizing that new and more aggressive competitors are taking new business they “believed” they would or “should” have. To help combat this they no longer accept the practice of “business as usual.” They are taking the time-proven actions it takes to train, coach and reward their key business development team members to get them out on the street. Program results are showing ROI’s of up to 30—to-1!

This isn’t easy, to say the least. A major culture change is required for most community banks when it comes to selling. Bankers have long been of the mindset that banking is a business built when prospects come to the bank and request the service they want. Unfortunately the consumer has developed a slightly different mindset lately.

“Yes, my banker and I have a good relationship but that doesn’t mean I will only consult them for financial needs and services. There are lots of other options. ” Friends are friends but when money is involved there is a different emotion involved……greed.

The CEO of First Bank in Ketchikan, Alaska, Bill Moran, decided something new must be tried when he started planning for this new year. “I realized that to meet our growth goals we must be more aggressive about taking business from our competition and improve our “unfair share” of our market. There wasn’t sufficient  market expansion to maintain our historical growth and profit levels.”

First Bank launched its’ new effort with a 120-day action plan in January 2006 for its’ six branches. The intended focus was to be solely on gaining new customers and establishing new relationships.

“Some of the participating officers found it very difficult to break away from the familiar clients to concentrate only on prospects that had no prior relationship, “said Eric Bjella, VP and Program Manger.

The first step was to assess the sales strengths of each team member. It was important to know who were likely to make calls and build relationships easily (Hunters) and those with good processing and service-related skills but less confidence in their abilities to communicate with prospects (Farmers).  This was followed with a professional sales skills training session which included each member identifying from 5-10 prospects.
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