In my experience, the biggest issue for almost all companies is finding new business. When a customer makes the first move or they are an existing customer, new opportunities just come to you. However, when you need to create opportunities, this is where it gets difficult. Almost every company that I work with has this problem.

There are a number of facets to this problem. Finding new customers requires us to make cold approaches; we need to persuade people that they need our product and we are too focussed on ourselves rather than the customer. I could write extensively about each of these will keep it brief. There are plenty of other articles about each of them.

Making a cold approach

When we approach a new customer, we need to be mindful that they are not looking to buy or product, otherwise they would already have approached us. We should never try to sell our product in that cold approach; we are just trying to get more time with the customer to enable us to understand their problems. To do that, we need to make them think differently about their business and we do that by telling them something that they do not know.

Of course, any cold approach is helped by the customer being aware of who you and your company are. This is where marketing is so important. If they have an idea of who you are, your approach is not quite cold and customers are likely to be more receptive to you. However, it is still critical to start by making them think differently.

https://www.hoolock-consulting.com/blog/2025/10/8/how-not-to-approach-me-part-44

We need to persuade people that they need our product

If a customer knows that they need your product, they will be contacting you. If not, you need to persuade them. However, in most cases, they will either not know that your product exists or will not think that they need it. There are some examples, such as the Blackberry, when it was immediately obvious why you would want one but, in most cases, that is not so.

To persuade someone to buy our product, we first need to persuade them to change. Everything that we buy changes us and we need to be happy to change in order to make the purchase. If we are not happy, then we will not buy. So, before we can persuade someone to buy, we need to persuade them to change. Starting with the product will generate interest but not sales; start with the reason to change and people will learn that they need the product and buy.

https://www.hoolock-consulting.com/blog/2022/9/9/catalyst-for-sales

We are too focussed on ourselves

If a customer approaches us, they want to talk about our product because that is why they approached us in the first place. However, if we approach them, that is not the case. So, the conversation needs to be about them not our product. The problem is, we know all about our product so we tend to talk about that because we are comfortable with it.

However, the customer has no interest in the product at this stage so does not want to talk about it. However, they will happily talk about themselves and this is what we need. We need to talk about their business and their problems. We only suspect that they need our product, we cannot be sure. So, we need to start by asking questions of the customer to understand their problems rather than talking about our product.

https://www.hoolock-consulting.com/blog/the-power-of-questions