
Simple Ways to Find Potential Customers Online - lukethomas
http://lukethomas.com/simple-ways-to-find-potential-customers/
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toumhi
"Customer Development [...] it's tough to get started" True!

A few helpful tips, such as how to speak the vocabulary of your customers, and
monitor places they hang out at (author mentions Facebook, Twitter, but you
could throw in specific forums, anywhere where your customers discuss and
share advice, linkedin groups etc).

I think getting introductions is key too. Start with your friends/linked in
contacts and ask them if they can refer to some people in <industry>. Then ask
these people if they can refer other people too.

Otherwise, it's kind of difficult to cold call or cold email these people and
have them agree to meet. I tried cold calling for a software product of mine
(filesharing for small companies, in France) and it was quite difficult,
especially considering I don't have a sales background. When you say "Mr X
told me you could be interested" you get an almost-guaranteed meet.

Another way to do it if you picked an audience who's internet-savvy is to
analyze conversations you find in forums, and find evidence of problems people
have (that's the approach that Amy Hoy recommends in her online class 30x500),
and create educational content for them: ebooks, screenscasts, podcasts, blog
posts etc. as far as I understand, it's not exactly customer development
though, as it doesn't get you in face of customers. Just a different approach
to find potential customers :-)

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lukethomas
Good advice - I wrote the article from the perspective of ways to reach out
quickly. The inbound approach works, however it definitely takes time.

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jordo37
Some of the advice in here is the usual solid advice, but that leads credence
to his ideas and tools that I hadn't heard of or used before. Nice post.

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programminggeek
This doesn't have to just be about finding potential customers. If you've
built an open source project that solves a problem, you can use similar ideas
to find people with that problem and show them what you've built.

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donebizkit
Surprisingly a lot of specific and useful information. Thanks for the share.

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kyle_t
Once you've found potential customer's what is the best way form the message
(whether by phone or email) for the initial direct contact? I've found it can
be difficult to sound genuine and not spammy.

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singold
I'm planning to reach out to potential customers to test an idea and this is
really helpful.

Thanks a lot!

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lukethomas
Glad to hear it. Have fun!

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nedwin
Nailed it.

I'd add in "Use Rapportive Gmail plugin to determine email address of relevant
contacts"

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zalew
don't you have their email already if you got them in gmail?

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klistwan
Say you're looking for the email of James Smith, and you think it's one of
jsmith@gmail.com, james.smith@gmail.com, jamesmith@gmail.com.

If you type all these when composing an email, one of them will pull up a
bunch of their social networks attached to that email, while the others will
do nothing. That's how you can quickly figure out someone's email by guessing
+ Rapportive.

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wslh
Add LinkedIn InMail, I obtained more than 20% of conversions there.

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bconway
If your recipients' experience with InMail is anything like mine, the other
80% are now your enemies. Might be an okay trade-off, depending on where
you're coming from, I guess.

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wslh
Not in my case. Can you explain a bit more why they are your enemies now? in
my case the campaigns were very focused to people that, I think, valued our
offerings.

