How to Attract New Customers and Discover Business Opportunities
Finding new business opportunities is essential for growing any small or medium-sized business. There are different ways to find them, depending on whether you sell to other businesses (B2B) or directly to consumers (B2C), and what products or services you offer. Generally, there are two main ways to gain customers:
- Inbound – customers come to you because you’re visible, offer helpful information, or meet a specific need.
- Outbound – you actively reach out to potential customers, often before they know they need your product or service.
These approaches work best when used together. Below are practical steps on how to use both methods in your business:
🔍 1. Market Research and Target Audience
- Stay updated on market shifts – like new laws, emerging technologies, and trends – and adjust your offerings accordingly.
- Leverage publicly available business databases for insights.
📞 2. Cold Outreach
- Send cold emails or make calls to businesses that fit your ideal customer profile.
- Personalize your messages to show you understand their needs and how your product can help solve their problems.
👥 3. Networking and Referrals
- Attend industry events, trade shows, networking breakfasts, and entrepreneur meetups.
- Focus on building relationships – one strong connection can open many doors.
💡 4. Use Online Marketing and Content
- Utilize social media, especially LinkedIn for B2B – share updates, insights, and success stories.
- Maintain a strong online presence through your website and other channels so you’re top of mind when prospects search for solutions.
🤝 6. Strategic Partnerships
- Team up with businesses targeting similar customers but offering non-competing products.
- Explore partner programs, affiliate marketing, or bundled service offerings.
Focus your efforts where conversion rates are highest.
What is the sales process for managing opportunities?
- Identifying potential leads and prospects
- Contacting targeted prospects
- Qualifying and disqualifying leads
- Engaging interested prospects
- Presenting a proposal or quote
- Closing the deal
1. Creating a List of Target Customers
Identifying potential customers starts with understanding the profile of your ideal customer (ICP) and is essential for maximizing business opportunities. Usually, out of a list of target customers, one becomes a customer for every hundred or fifty contacts. Correctly identifying the ideal customer helps sales representatives find potential customers who truly need the company’s products or services, have the budget to pay for them, have decision-making authority, and want to implement the solution within a reasonable timeframe.
2. Reaching Out to Target Customers
Reaching a large number of target customers can be challenging; usually, you use media marketing, participation in various events, email campaigns, and similar methods. This may include phone calls or sending personalized emails that highlight features matching the customer's needs. Salespeople can also offer free trials or discounts on products to encourage purchase decisions.
3. Filtering Out Non-Promising Customers and Business Opportunities
Focus your efforts where they matter most. Every opportunity has potential value for your company; it makes sense to concentrate on the highest-value opportunities, but this value is not only expressed in monetary terms. There are other factors that can help decide which opportunity to focus on. Once you receive responses from target customers, it’s time to filter out the non-promising ones and focus on those customers where success and further business activities are likely to lead to closing a deal. This is one of the most challenging parts of sales, and besides the intuition of salespeople, various methods and techniques for so-called lead qualification can assist you.
Here are some factors that can help you decide which leads to prioritize (see how to qualify leads):
4. Persuading Potential Customers
Sales representatives need to be in active communication with these "hot" potential customers, providing them with additional information about your products or services during the sales process and responding appropriately to any questions. All these customer contacts must be managed and well documented, as they can influence your decisions or even the terms of your delivery once the deal is successfully closed.
5. Offer and Proposal
Using data gathered during the identification and qualification stages, sales representatives can generate business offers and create tailored proposals. The offer should be based on the customer’s product specifications and prices discussed during the sales conversation. The proposal should include supporting documentation and content that helps decision-makers approve the deal.
6. Closing the Deal
The final stage in managing business opportunities is the contract. The deal is closed when both buyer and seller sign a binding agreement outlining the terms of sale. After this stage, the customer is handed over to the implementation team, which starts preparing and executing the order. It is very important for them to rely on the information and records of activities with the customer created during the sales process. If all information is well managed, you save a lot of work and communication. The chance of misunderstandings is significantly reduced. When the sales and implementation teams collaborate well, the number of hours spent resolving unnecessary misunderstandings or constantly searching for information decreases.
Proven Strategies for Gaining New Customers
Turning leads into customers takes steady sales effort. Reaching out to a potential customer just once isn’t enough—you need to follow up consistently and strategically.
1. Track and Organize Leads
- Keep all client and lead information in one centralized place.
- Record details from meetings with prospects and information about each sales opportunity.
- Assess potential deals using clear criteria to decide which ones are worth pursuing.
2. Follow Up Regularly with Prospects
- Consistent and repeated contact is key. Sales data shows that most deals close after about seven touches—whether by phone, in person, or email.
3. Assign Responsibilities and Next Steps
- Set tasks, automatic reminders, and actions for each prospect at every stage of the sales process. This keeps everyone focused on what needs to happen next, avoiding distractions.
4. Prioritize High-Potential Customers
- Regularly weed out low-potential deals and focus your energy on the best opportunities. This saves time and lowers sales costs.
5. Avoid Relying on Individual Sales Reps
- By consistently updating your CRM, you ensure that if a salesperson leaves, you still have all customer info and communication history. Data isn’t just stored in a rep’s email, where it can be lost or hard to find. Having accurate opportunity and communication records helps you manage sales effectively, track team performance, and make informed decisions based on metrics like conversion rates and average deal size.
How CRM Software Helps You Get New Customers?
Sharing and Securing Business Data and Customer Information
- Enables sales teams to focus on closing deals instead of spending time on administrative tasks like updating spreadsheets or manually tracking emails.
- Protecting sensitive business data is often more challenging than sharing it; Aptien CRM makes this easy and secure for you.
- Opportunity management tools help you manage the entire sales process from start to finish.
- Helps you share information seamlessly across the sales team and with implementation teams after closing a deal.
- With a customer database, you know exactly what your customers need and prefer. This allows you to offer personalized proposals. Storing customer information is a key step toward running an efficient, scalable business. It also supports sales forecasting so you can predict when customers might be interested in your products again.
Automating Sales Tasks, Monitoring the Pipeline, and Breaking Down Sales Stages
- Pipeline tracking gives sales teams a clear view of where prospects are in the sales cycle, while forecasting uses data and analytics to predict future sales performance.
- Breaking sales deals into stages is not a standard CRM feature but can greatly reduce issues. It provides a clear overview of the entire process, helping prevent misunderstandings.
- Helps companies track sales opportunities, automate routine tasks, and ensure each step is followed to boost efficiency and profits.
- Offers a complete overview of sales activities and customer interactions.
- Opportunity management helps sales teams focus on the most promising deals.
- CRM stores all customer contact details in one centralized system, easily accessible to sales managers and the entire sales team.
- Unlike spreadsheets, it also protects sensitive business data with permission controls and restricted access to individual sales deals.
Tracking Meetings, Appointments, and Other Sales Activities
- Keeping detailed notes from sales meetings is essential for informed decision-making.
- Recording trainings and meetings allows for easy information sharing and saves time during online sessions. A CRM should include built-in communication tools with recording features for later review.
Customer Scoring and Managing the Sales Cycle
- Score potential customers and monitor your sales pipeline effectively.
- Customer scoring helps prioritize leads by evaluating them based on factors like budget size or industry fit, so your team can focus on the best opportunities.
Automates and Reminds You of Recurring Tasks
- Automatic reminders for sales activities
- Automated follow-up email reminders for prospects
- Task automation to quickly identify sales opportunities and qualification info
- Automated scheduling for sales meetings
Summary of Why a CRM System Is Useful for Acquiring New Customers
- It keeps you on track - automatic reminders for sales activities
- You have all information in one place
- Everything related to the client - opportunities
- You can monitor activities and sales team performance
Automation: Your Time-Saving Partner
Any task that repeats should be automated whenever possible. This saves time and cuts down on mistakes. To keep things running smoothly, it’s essential to enter accurate information into Aptien CRM, so always double-check your data. Lastly, data security is crucial and often overlooked. Without solid CRM protection, you risk data breaches or loss, which can seriously harm your business. Protecting sensitive information is usually more challenging than accidentally sharing it via Excel spreadsheets. Don’t take chances—it’s just not worth the risk.
What Can It Offer Small and Growing Businesses?
For a salesperson, it clearly provides a centralized platform to manage their contacts and activities. This leads to better organization and increased productivity. Note – this shouldn’t be confused with a personal touch in customer interactions. At the same time, the system creates a task list for the user, where follow-ups are stored and reminders are sent on time. Every salesperson has heard responses like, “...please call back in six months, it’s not relevant right now.” If that note is written in a paper planner, it often gets lost. A key concept for salespeople is the “sales pipeline.” A successful salesperson naturally prioritizes the opportunities that seem most promising. But is relying on gut feeling always the best strategy? Salespeople need to have a clear view of their pipeline, especially when managing dozens of accounts.
For a manager, this system offers powerful tools for performance evaluation. Why does a manager need to track sales opportunities? Because it provides early insights into sales trends before they show up in revenue or order volume. It helps identify busy periods when orders exceed capacity, or slow times when business slows down. Managers get a better understanding of each salesperson’s activity—not just based on revenue numbers. They can also create measurable sales goals and, most importantly, enable the company to react proactively to changes.
Management also gains a way to compare past forecasts with actual results. This helps improve forecasting accuracy over time. Another key feature is the ability to monitor sales activity using ABC analysis of opportunities and regular pipeline reviews. Setting up this system isn’t complicated, but it can have a significant and fast impact on sales management.