Best medium to reach out to a business through?

When contacting a business to sell something, how do you do it? I create and sell software and so far have just been using my family's connections to get to a business owner of interest. However, I need to start to scale outside of my circle now as word of mouth is not fast enough (I need my condo!).

Here are some of them I know and what I think about them.

Email? Pretty weak, but not quite dead. I don't do it because fooling around with hitting the inbox, or banned emails is a pain.
Direct mail? Rumors say its good, but I haven't done enough volume to come to a conclusion. I do plan to try this with real volume when my sales copy is done.
Phone? I really hate speaking on the phone, I need practice. I've also looked at services like CallFire. Although the conversion may be low, CallFire is massively scalable. This seems to be hardest way to get past the gatekeeper. However, from experience, it is the easiest way to get to corporate executives if you're dealing with a big company.
Stopping in? I have dropped in to a business before to leave a brochure/proposal. Not enough volume to come to a conclusion.
Facebook page message? Never tried, but I guess you don't have to worry about hitting the inbox unless you're messaging an individual.

What have you guys tried? What has worked for you? What have I missed?

Everything you've mentioned is going to require an ongoing input of man hours to generate sales. All of the methods above can work, I am sure.

But as marketers we should probably make the job a little easier for ourselves, so my vote would be on some form of PPC.

Not knowing what your target business owner is, it's hard to suggest what to do. With that said, targeting options on Facebook for business owners are pretty good and clicks are cheap enough that it may warrant a PPC campaign.

Depending on price of software, I could see this working as a phone consult type offer where once they are interested, you jump on the phone to close the sale.

In either case, I'd say PPC or other paid advertising would be a good option if you want to scale (and get a condo).

Thanks for your thoughts krzysiekz. As for man power for the above ideas, I was thinking of programming something auto or semi-automated to contact the Facebook pages or something.

Lets use the generic example of dentists. Is Facebook PPC really powerful enough to hit the relatively small amount of dentists in the US? I mean, I bet it would, but the other 99.9% of the campaign budget would be randoms/junk. Right?

It really comes down to the very basic marketing analysis you should do. Define your customer as much as you can - segment the hell out of it. The identify what they do and when. Then target how you can communicate with them in a way that is most direct, target-able and meaningful to them.

Yeah, we can blow through a 10 million email blast and we should get something out of it. But more often a well-crafted approach directed at real potential customers will get you much better results.

So who are your customers? Not just business owners, or managers - get much more detailed. What do they do. What do they eat for breakfast? Where and when do they vacation and go to conventions?

This might be off topic but I was applying for many colleges for soccer and they all recieve constant emails everyday. If you want to stand out go the old school route and mail him. However just don't mail but make your mail look different and add a twist on the cover like 7878 die. You have to always stand out and show what you can bring to the table. Offer diagrams and how your software can help him. Don't try to post the costs or try to SELL it to him. Make him WANT your software then it makes it so much easier to close clients.

macdonjo3 said:

Thanks for your thoughts krzysiekz. As for man power for the above ideas, I was thinking of programming something auto or semi-automated to contact the Facebook pages or something.

Lets use the generic example of dentists. Is Facebook PPC really powerful enough to hit the relatively small amount of dentists in the US? I mean, I bet it would, but the other 99.9% of the campaign budget would be randoms/junk. Right?

Click to expand...

Yes with Facebook advertising you do hit quite a lot of random people but you just have to target the as as much as possible and make purple only want to click the ad they are your target audience. So write something like, only for dentists in the ad for example.