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You dreamt of  starting a business while you worked a job. Saving money and working a few extra hours, doing research into viable businesses.Your efforts are taking shape into a business. Take a quick readyness audit -

Your business plan  forecasts for revenues & expense projections are showing good profit projections into the next five years. Your logo, business letter head, business cards are ready to print and your website with a shopping cart is ready and tested for taking orders.

Your dream to start a business. It  is taking shape and is ready to launch into a reality. As you shape your dream  into reality, you will also help a few shape their dreams.  Your idea for a new business is right on the mark.

Have you written your press releases? Is your ad copy ready? Have you prepared the list of media for running ads and may check on getting mailers ready.

When all is ready to launch  and you are waiting for first ten orders from your customers,  Your first few customers are so critical to generate momentun for your success because they..

Confirm your offering, demonstrating that there is indeed in the market for your products and services.
They provide valuable feedback to help you improve your business operations.
Give you real testimonials and referrals

How do you go about getting the customers in continuous streams in days, weeks, months and years. You need them and they need your products/services all the time. Once you are in business, your are on the steering wheel and you are in control. You are the boss with many responsbilites, with challenges and rewards and recognition. As you take the steering wheel of business in your hands you may go the old way only if you are not comfortable with the new ways of the internet way of doing business.

Are you going the Old Way?

There are a number of ‘old school’ ways to find potential customers in your immediate network – the “warm market”.

Personal Contacts – friends and their friends, school connections, fraternity brothers, club members, church and so forth.
Business connections – former employers, employees and customers. Your personal vendors - lawyers, doctors, accountants, insurance agents, mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate agent, contractor and so forth.

After you have built your list of contacts, send them all something letting them know about your new business. Keep your message neutral to sound that you aren’t necessarily soliciting for orders but rather, you are informing them that your new venture. When your contacts know about your new business, they could decide to become a customer themselves or refer friends who may be interested in your product or service.

In order to attain your first customers, you may rely on your personal relationships, friends and family. While this method will hopefully drive business, make sure you build continuous momentum in the marketing, business development and promotions.

Taking The Internet runway - yes internet way can put you on high speed business if done right..

What better way (presumably) to launch your new company than to leverage the power of the Internet to get your first 10 customers. The (now) classic steps are:

* Your website.

Optimize and launch an internet campaign to be visible within search   engines.
Launch a pay-per-click campaign with text and banner advertisements.
Track the ads to know what is working better.
Design better ads with messages to attract your audience
Weed thru the clicks to find quality leads
Close business

While internet may look easy on the outside – it is quite difficult on the inside to get your first customers from the internet way. A survey of 800 small businesses in 2008 showed that most of them were concerned about upfront costs on any marketing program. Internet marketing offers a cost advantage that you must master to succeed in the current business environment.

Of course you could get lucky and convince your site visitors to buy your service but this could take quite a while. It is no wonder this approach is often called the ‘spray and pray.’ Think about it; you have allocated a significant amount of money (that you likely don’t have) into Google and PPC advertising in the hopes that one of the hundreds of people who will click on your advertisement will convert to a customer. It could happen…but can you rely on it for your first ten customers?

The New Way

With the proliferation of social and professional networks, there must be a better way of ‘finding the right person’ to buy your product/service. And, isn’t that what all this marketing is really about – finding the decision maker who could authorize a purchase or trial of your product/service. The “old way” as described above, finding the right person was by leveraging your immediate network. The internet way says: broadcast your message to as many folks as possible and someone (hopefully) will be the needle in the haystack.

But, the new way, and ideally the most cost effective and efficient method is to harness the business relationships of others to find the decision maker. Here is a good visual – if you were to launch your company and have 50 independent sales people ready to promote your product/service would that be a better approach to finding your first ten customers? Think of the power of having an army of people trying to open up doors for you the “master salesperson” to close the deal.

Social and professional networks have really gotten the ball rolling on this approach. Think of your ideal decision maker – the head of sales training at a company with more than 100 sales reps, the head of marketing at a consumer good company or the CIO of a retail chain. Now, why not tap into your professional network (whether it’s LinkedIn, Xing, Ning or others) and ask them to make introductions for you to your target decision maker. I know some folks on LinkedIn who have thousands of  contacts in his ‘network’. Surely, these type persons  that you are looking for could be found in Linkedin or other similar network. Getting these networked folks to make introductions for you shouldn’t be too difficult even though you don’t actually know them. How, you may ask? In todays business environment, you will not be competitive if you ask 20 independent sales reps find customers?  So why not offer the same compensation you would offer an independent sales force – on performance or based on success.

Assume you stand to earn $10,000 from an order from your first customer for your new product or service. If you hired a sales executive they would expect commission of 5%-7% on top of a base salary. So why not offer $1,000 to anyone that could bring you a customer. Maybe it is a residual payment of 5% to 7% of the monthly revenue. Think of what it is worth to you to get that customer and what it would cost you to drive that lead yourself – PPC ads, telemarketing, etc. Add on top of that the cost of commission to a full time sales executive. It certainly sounds far less expensive to leverage a 3rd party sales team than to have your own sales team –  especially if you are only paying for success. Outsourced sales and telemarketing is a huge business that usually incurs upfront fees or monthly minimum commitments.

Money motivates and is a business maker so why not offer money to network leaders to help drive your business.  Follow the principle - Get business and  compensate for results.

So here is the question; if I was looking to meet someone you know professionally and compensated you for making the introduction a percentage of any revenue I generated from the relationship – would that create more of an incentive for you to make the introduction? That would make you the middleman just like the role of a real estate broker or even an investment banker. Now if you could only earn the fees of an investment banker – wouldn’t that be something?

Additional tips for adding more momentum in your internet promotions..

Take a whole new performance audit: Include not only supplies, but also talent and assets. This will allow you to see the big picture, find opportunities that exist and see how resources can be better utilized.

Tap into local talent: Many colleges and universities are filled with students willing to intern for free to build their resumes. Younger students also tend to be tech savvy and can help improve your company’s Web site, find new ways to interact with customers online and raise your search engine rankings.

Don’t go it alone:  Communicate within business communities and  business owners and share ideas. Peer-to-peer groups, like Vistage International are helping companies stay connected with the communities in which they operate and help businesses find new solutions to their problems.

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