The way to get more abstracting business is to promote. You must make yourself known to be noticed and seen as an abstracting resource.
If you stay quite no one notices you. If you promote in any possible way, you get noticed. I know this seems obvious and much too simple to be useful, but this is the difference between abstractors and abstracting companies that are making it and those that aren’t.
I decided to write about this after talking to one to many abstractors in the field and hear them say that “business is slow.” While this may be the case, there are abstractors I spoke to that aren’t feeling the “slow” in business and that have plenty of orders coming in. So I decided to contact them and find out why.
What I found was quite startling. Those that were doing well were using any possible means to promote. They were calling past clients and getting new orders, they were calling current clients and asking for more work and getting it. They had ads on Source of Title and other related websites and had there names in different types of directories and handed out their cards to whoever they met.
They were “making” the business.
Those that were not getting business or were getting less business were not promoting (or at least not promoting to the same degree). One for one was counting on existing clients to continue to give them work; they were not calling past clients to rekindle the business relationship and didn’t have cards to hand out, etc.
In today’s market we need to create the work through promoting ourselves and our businesses through any means possible.
Some of the best methods I’ve found were:
- Calling current clients for more orders.
- Calling past clients to find new orders.
- Handing out cards to people they met.
- Handling out cards to local title companies, real estate offices, law offices, etc.
- Calling totally new potential clients and asking for work.
- Advertising in on line forums.
- Posting a blog.
- Commenting on others blogs.
- Writing to past and existing clients (postal and e-mail).
- For those that could afford it ads on-line.
- The obvious web-site
Times have changed.
We must create the work by getting ourselves out there, promoting, making ourselves and companies known.
Any promotion is better than no promotion.
This was a little research I did that I thought might be interesting and helpful to all those involved in the abstracting and document retrieval business.