Finding New Prospects Online

Prospecting is crucial to any business as it further increases your chances of making a sale or at least making it known to your target that you have something to sell. It might seem easy especially with today's technology but knowing where to quickly locate new, quality prospects would give you an upper hand among your peers.

Using the internet is probably the most popular if not the easiest method. But where exactly do you start? Here are a couple of ways to start finding those prospects:

1. Linked-in

There are thousands of individuals & companies from around the globe in this professional network. You can easily connect with someone by joining a group & its discussions. Searching for a specific individual is narrowed down by selections such as designation, location, industry, years of experience & more. 

You can follow your prospects activities once they've added you in their network. You might find your prospect posting a message in a similar group, asking for assistance or more information about a product or service and you might be the one that they are looking for. You can also directly message anyone in your group or network. Either way, you can connect with them easily on a professional level.

Think of it as Facebook but more for business activities.

2. Facebook

Although networking here might be more casual than Linked-in, still you'll never know if your market is out there until you start searching. They could be friends of friends. They could have liked a relevant Facebook groups/pages. Either way, someone is bound to discover your services.

3. Twitter

Look for groups or individuals by interest (entertainment, business, art, technology, etc). You can also type in a particular hashtag, which categorizes or "tags" twitted topics. Find people with such tags and look at their profile. It might a potential prospect who might also be connected to other prospects in the future.

4. Discussion Forums

Find a suitable forum where there a lot of useful content related to your business and try having a discussion with it's members. 

If you aren't familiar on how to join online discussion forums, try "lurking" around. And by lurking, I mean just observe first. Don't jump in if you're still not sure how it works. Just read the topics and how the discussion goes first, get a feel of the forum environment. Then if you're really itching to discuss something, introduce yourself first and dive in.

4. Publications

Industry leaders who have blogs, newspapers, journals and any written publication online will also have more followers that could be commenting on those articles. Try to see who seems to be the most active commentator, check out their profile and gauge if they can be a potential prospect. If not, maybe they'd know someone who's in need of your product so don't ignore them just yet. 

Communicate with them through commenting in the said online article. If you think you're already comfortable talking online, message them personally. You never know what their response might be until you do so.

5. B2B Contact Database

Dozens of companies offer a customized way of getting massive leads. But what if you could just easily select and download those contacts, without having to go through the long process of negotiating and getting data? Try an online contact database. Download a few contacts and see if they are that really accurate. If you've gotten a 95% accuracy rate, that probably means that the database is consistent in delivering accurate, validated contacts. Start picking & getting contacts would be as easy as 1-2-3.

There are a lot of ways to look for prospects; trade shows, phone/building directories, referrals, community organizations and such. The internet though, is an easier method and social media is also a great help in reaching out to those prospects.