You need to know where to look and how to verify that the small business you are pursuing is going to be gratifying enough to work with and lucrative enough of recurring revenue to make them a good sweet spot client.
How Do You Recognize a Sweet Spot Client?
Sweet spot IT consulting clients are no more than a 30-50 minute drive of your IT consulting home base. This way you can gets lots of face time with them. You can also get there quickly if there's an emergency. You don't want to spend a lot of time driving around and sitting in traffic.
Even if you are charging for travel time or charging a service fee or a van fee, driving time is not your most profitable IT consulting time.
How Do You Find Local Sweet Spot Businesses?
You can certainly rent direct mail lists that are in that geographic range 0-50 miles, or 0-80 kilometers. Or you can join some local organizations that are within a half hour to an hour of your location.
How Big Are The Sweet Spot IT Consulting Clients?
Sweet spot IT consulting clients have from 10-50 computers, 10-100 employees, a million to 10 million in sales. And of course, you can rent direct mail lists with at least part of that criteria filled and selected.
Another big thing to find a sweet spot IT consulting client is that they will have a relationship with a local accounting firm or other trusted business advisors. You want to position your consulting firm to be a trusted business advisor of theirs.
Sweet Spot Businesses are Well Connected
Most of these sweet spot IT consulting clients have relationships with other trusted business advisors on an outsource basis. They have a relationship with a local attorney, a local accounting firm, a local consulting firm a local advertising agency and a graphic designer. They know the value of those kinds of relationships.
If you want to get in with companies that already have great relationships with sweet spot businesses, you should be looking at networking with these businesses, a local accounting firm for example.
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2007 Sweet Spot Classic
Does the Company Have a Website?
A prospect's website is important because you can search for it. Go to Google and put in the name of the town where you are, your zip code, your postal code area codes, prefixes and get a list of businesses in your area. Start to look around for potential clients for IT consulting.
Can You Meet The Leaders of the Company?
If you look on their company information or about page, you may decide they are a good prospect for your IT consulting business. Does the company belong to a local or regional Chamber of Commerce organization? You can join the organization to meet with them or go as a guest to some of them.
Make sure, though, you know the right way to get the most out of your time and financial investments for networking expenses. You need to measure and track every minute and you can justify every dollar you spend. You want to get the maximum return on your investment to grow your IT consulting business.
Where Else Can You Find the Company?
Does the company attend local B to B Expos? If so, you can attend expos to network with those sweet spot IT consulting clients.
Does the company get covered in the local newspapers, local papers, business journals, regional business journals, and magazines? You can subscribe to those or read back issues at the library or online.
By studying up on a company, you can find out how much experience they have, how many employees, and their annual revenue. You can also find out if they are about to open another office.
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