As a business owner, I receive a steady stream of cold calls from companies offering me everything from website design to SEO services and advertising. Most of them I have never even heard of: I've no way of knowing if they're genuine callers and even if they are, one phone conversation with a person I've never met is not going to persuade me to do business with them.
Doing business is all about getting to know people and finding out how you can help them (which is quite different from bombarding them with information about your products and services even if they're not remotely interested). One of the best ways I have found of promoting what I do is by meeting other business professionals in an informal but business-like setting i.e. networking. It's a great way of interacting with others and giving them information about yourself in a non-threatening and non-intrusive manner. Again, it's not about seeing how many business cards you can thrust at people in as short a time as possible; it's about building trust.
I met Mark a couple of weeks ago at just such an event and it turned out that he needed a mixture of formal and informal business portraits for promotional purposes. We swapped cards and he checked out my website and contacted me to book a session, which we did last week in Guildford.
The weather was bright and sunny but absolutely freezing. I'd got my locations all worked out though, and took a good selection of shots for him which we were both very pleased with. Job done - with absolutely no hard sell tactics!
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