Growing Small Businesses

Lesson 3: Getting new business

Identifying the groups most likely to buy

Once you have your target groups, your method of contacting them and your presentation material, you don't want to waste any time or money. You want to contact those people who are going to immediately place large orders so that you can get going with working on them. Once you're busy processing orders, you can decide whether to contact the rest of the people you've targeted at your leisure but, to start with, you need those most likely to buy.

The easiest way to find out is to try out your material and make some tests. One test is to find members of the target groups whom you know, present the material to them and ask them what they think. This is great for detailed feedback and comments on the material as well as feedback on whether they would be likely to buy or not and why.

A second way to test out your concept and material is to select typical prospective customers with characteristics which you think will increase the likelihood that they will buy from you. Contact these prospective customers and see how successful you are. If the results are unexpected, you may even want to follow up to see what these potential customers thought of your initiative and why they reacted however they did.

A third way to avoid going to the expense of all full contact exercise without knowing how successful it will be is to try a small test first. This is ideal if you're pretty sure of your concept and material and if you have one target group which is much more attractive than any others. It then makes sense to contact a small, random selection to see if your expectations are correct. If yes, then you can continue with the full contact plan - if not, you can re-evaluate your groups, your product strategy and your material to see where the problem lies and fix it before testing again.

Testing your marketing concept is a key way of staying out of trouble. Mounting a big push to get new orders from a new group is expensive in time, money and energy. If you've made a mistake somewhere along the way, quite possible with the extensive process you've gone through to get to this point, you want to know about it at the beginning - at that point you can fix it and proceed without a big problem.

Often the mistake is quite minor but results in a complete failure of the overall concept. A typical example is to inadvertently use a word or concept in your presentation material which is insulting or offensive to your target group. This is something you want to find out without having contacted the whole group, wasted your efforts and alienated all these potential customers. Test before you commit to avoid problems later and to find out who will be the best group to target first.

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