Finding new business opportunities

Have business opportunities come straight to your inbox with these two simple tips. Photo / Thinkstock

Question one. What do you do when you have quiet periods in your business? Twiddle your thumbs? Lament? Or do the right thing start activities that bring in new clients?

Question two. How good are you at business development - no matter how busy you are? Today's marketing feeds tomorrows sales. Or the sales of next month, even a year or two from now.

Question three. How good are you at customer service? Adding value grows more sales and word of mouth.

I'd like to share two of my tricks with you. Even better, you can put it on autopilot. Set it up and business opportunities come to your inbox daily (or weekly).

Trick One: Google and Giga Alerts
Both Gigaalert and Googlealert track the Internet for your topics/searches and sends you a daily (or weekly) update of them by email. You'll never have to go back and trawl through material you've read online before.

Here are three ways to put these two free service to work for you:

1. Find new business
Do you respond to requests for proposals? Do you look for business activity that you can fit into, such as what construction is occurring? Have them send the search to you, then decide if you want to investigate.

2. Help your clients
Great customer service shines brightly. Create searches for information to help you help your clients. If you know their interests, their industry problems and what their roles and responsibilities are, you can sift through the alerts for relevant material and then via email send the information to them.

3. Check your competition
Set an alert with an individual's name, the company name or a product as the search term. You might want to hone it to exclude their website, to ascertain what is happening outside of their company.

Trick Two: LinkedIn Saved Advanced People Searches.
LinkedIn has a superb search engine which you can use to target with precision. For example current or prior position, industry, title, keyword. Even location down to 15 kilometres within a postcode.

These searches can be saved, with new results emailed to you on a weekly basis.

Written by Debbie Mayo-Smith, One of New Zealand’s most in-demand speakers, trainers and bestselling authors. Debbie works with companies that want more effective staff. For more tips and business ideas sign up for her free monthly newsletter.