Find Niche Clients Using Professional Association Directories

1. About this Class: If your ideal clients are all found in the same industry, you're likely looking for ways to market your products and services to those businesses. To do that, you need a cost-effective way of finding those businesses. Searching the web for clients one at a time is time-consuming. Advertising is expensive. And this is why you should consider professional associations. Professional associations are a quick and cost-effective way to find thousands of potential clients who work in the same industry. This class teaches you why professional associations or such a valuable source of new business. Where to find all the professional associations in any industry, and how to find the member directories that contain the names and addresses of the businesses that you want to target. This class includes a project at the end in which you will create a spreadsheet feature in all of the professional associations that you're wanting to target. This exercise will help you determine if the niche market that you're aiming to approach is viable and worth pursuing. See you in the class. 2. Introduction to Professional Associations: If your ideal clients are all found in the same industry, you're likely looking for ways to market your products and services to those companies. To do that, you need a cost-effective way of finding and reaching those potential customers. Searching the web for companies one at a time is really time consuming. Advertising is expensive. This is why you should consider professional associations. Professional associations are a quick and easy, cost-effective way to find thousands of potential clients who work in the same industry and who are looking for a supplier like you. But first of all, what are professional associations? Professional associations or organizations that act as umbrella organizations for professionals working in the same field. These associations define the profession, control entry into the profession, maintain standards. They help members further the profession through ongoing learning, quality control, and research. And they represent the profession in discussions with other governmental and nongovernmental bodies. Examples of professional associations are the National Association of security professionals, the Association of American educators, and the American Bar Association. Professional associations are different from trade associations because everyone who is a member of a professional association shares the same credentials. Every member of the American Bar Association, for example, is a person who is licensed to practice law. The same goes for the National Association of Professional insurance agents. Every member of that professional association is licensed to sell insurance. This is important if your ideal client must deliver a particular service or offer a particular product. For example, if your ideal clients are firms that offer civil engineering services, your best source of leads is not your state association of builders or your local chamber of commerce? Yes. Your ideal clients may be members of these associations, but plenty of other members of these associations aren't civil engineers. But the American Society of Civil Engineers, On the other hand, is comprised entirely affirms that practice civil engineering. This association represents more than 150 thousand members in 177 countries. This brings us to the main benefits of finding clients through professional associations. Number one, professional associations are the easiest way to find businesses that operate in a particular industry. Professional associations are where you will find the largest concentration of potential clients in a particular industry. And finally, and this is the top benefit. All professional associations publish member directories. In other words, they publish the names and addresses of your potential clients. This is why professional associations, such a valuable source of potential clients. And the even better news is that many industries have more than one professional association, which means even more potential clients for you. As you'll see in the next lesson. 3. How to Find Professional Associations: If you operate in a particular industry or a vertical, and if you are looking for new clients, you should consider professional associations as one of your sources. Professional associations are a great source of leads for a number of reasons. One, they are the easiest way to find clients in a particular industry because everyone who practices in the industry is a member of the association. And to professional associations published their member directories. That means they publish the names and addresses of every company that you want to reach with your marketing messages. Your first job when reaching out to members of any professional association is finding out just how many associations there are in the industry that you're targeting. Most professions have more than one professional association. Start with a straightforward Google search, search for lists of. Then the industry, combined with the word associations, you will invariably discovered that someone has created a list of the top associations in the industry. For example, if the industry you're targeting is supply chain search for lists of supply chain associations. You'll see that there is a list of the top ten associations in the supply chain industry listed on Google right at the very top of the search results. Click on the link and you arrive at the site. And if you scroll down the page, you'll come to a block of text like this, where the person who compiled this list has compiled what they believe are the top ten associations. So this list shows you the top ten associations in the supply chain space according to one webpage. Now, if you look carefully, you'll see that some of these entries are not actually Associations. Number four on this list, for example, is project manager, professional? That's not an association. It's a professional designation and it's not even specific to supply chain. And the same goes for number ten, Certified Management Accounting at that's a professional designation. It's not an association and it's not even a designation that is specific to supply chain. I recommend you repeat your search and examine any other lists of supply chain associations. Don't just go with the list of associations that you find on Google. Go at least four pages deep in the search results. And make sure you find every professional association in the industry that you want to target. And this brings up a good point. Not all professional associations are called associations. Going back to our search results for supply chain associations, note that these organizations go by different names. There's the Supply Chain Council and the Institute of Supply Chain Management. So to make your search, thorough, search for the following terms. These are the terms that associations tend to use in the professional associations space. They go by association, council, Institute, society, and federation. So conduct multiple searches for the industry that you're wanting to target, followed by the word association, then Council, than Institute, society, and then Federation. After you have completed your search, you will have a list of all of the professional associations in the industry that you're targeting. Once you have that list, you're ready to start the third and final step in the process of finding clients through professional associations, and that is finding their member directories. See you in the next lesson. 4. How to Find Member Directories: If you are looking to find a list of companies that operate within a particular industry, or a particular vertical or a particular niche. One of your best sources is the member directories of professional associations. Professional associations consist of members who share a common certification or professional designation. Professional associations published lists of their members. If you want to target those professionals, you need to get your hands on these member directories. Here's how you do it. The first method is to visit the website of the association and browse around looking for the directory. For example, let's say your target audience is architects. So you head on over to the website of the American Institute of Architects. The best places to look first are the About Us page and the Membership page. On the website of the American Institute of Architects, for example, their member directory is found under architects directories. Click on the member directory and you land on this page. As you can see, there are member directory is only available to members. They require you to have a username and password to access the member directory. But there is a way around this good at Google and search for American Institute of Architects member directory. Here you'll find a link to their firm directory. Click on that. And you arrived here. There. You've just discovered a backdoor into the member directory. As you can see, this member directory contains the company names, website addresses, and mailing addresses of 23 thousand architectural firms. Notice at the top that you can filter results by country and state to make your search even more specific. Sometimes you'll visit the website of her profit of a professional association and the unable to find the member directory. Here's what you do to find it. Let's visit the website of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. We look under the About a SME. We looked and we look and we look, and we don't find a member directory. So we look under about a SME right up here. Again, we look we look lots of talk about membership and how to become a member, but no, they don't list the remember directory. There's nothing. We scroll to the bottom of the page, look the navigation down there. This is sometimes where you'll find the member directory. We can renew our membership, we can access benefits, we can join. But there's no member directory listed. Sometimes you'll find it listed down at the bottom here like this in the footer. But we can't see it. When this happens, use Google Advanced Search to find the directory within the website. So here's what you do. You go up to the URL. At the very beginning, and you type in member directory. Then the word site, S-I-T-E. and a colon. And what this is gonna do, Google is going to search this website for the phrase member directory. Alright? And here you can see that you can locate certified companies that are certified by the Association, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. So you click on that link, and here you are. You can click on the link. I beg your pardon. You can click on this button and you can start your search. So let's search for companies that are in the United States. United States. We're going to search in all of the states. And we're going to look at all certifications and we're gonna look at everybody, every firm that is active. And we'll do a search. Here, you can see the companies. These are the results that you find on the, on the, on the site. This is their directory. You can see that there are 49 thousand, sorry, 4,922 pages of results. You will notice if you look down the left-hand side here, these are the companies listed. You'll notice that sometimes there are two or three, the exact same company at the exact same address. This is because this company, Seattle boiler works, for example, has a number of certifications and they've got a listing for each of the certifications that they have this mechanical engineering certifications, you'll notice that this directory gives you the company name, the street address, the city, the state or province, and the country. Now, it doesn't include the zip code. To find the zip code, you would have to click on certificate like this, and you can see the zip code right there. Your goal when searching for member directories of professional associations is defined. Directories that contain not just the names and addresses of companies, but ideally the contact names, phone numbers, email addresses, and the websites of those members too. You can sometimes find these online because some associations upload their member directories to their website in the form of Excel files. Here's how you can find them. What you wanna do is go to Google Advanced Search. So just search for Google Advanced Search. And there it is. Now in the keywords up here you're gonna wanna search for member, directory. And under site or domain, you're going to want to enter the website of the association that you're targeting. Let's just assume for the sake of this illustration that we're searching the Ohio chapter of the surety association of Ohio so that it's down here. You're going to search for the domain down here. And the file type that we're looking for is going to be Microsoft Excel. So just to repeat, we're looking for a member directory on the website of the Ohio chapter of the surety association of Ohio. And we're searching for any excel spreadsheets. Do advanced search. And here we find, right here is the 20-20 must not go member directory here we are. Surely Association the material. Now this is going to bring up an Excel spreadsheet. We can save it right here. Desktop. You can see that this is a directory of 311 member companies that are part of this local chapter. Notice that this is a directory of individuals. You'll see here, you've got individuals. So at the Westfield Group, you'll notice that you've got many individuals who are part of the Westfield Group and lots of them work at the same. But notice that this chapter has done all the work for you by giving you the company names. That's right here. The contact names of the individuals, their email addresses, their phone numbers, and their mailing addresses. This is absolute gold. This brings up a vital point and that is that chapters of national associations are typically not as careful as the National Association at password protecting their member directories. So if you search for a professional association in a particular state, you will often find multiple chapters. Many of these chapters will have their member directories in plain view on their website or easily found using the Google Advanced search that I just showed you. This brings us to the end of this module on how to find clients using professional association directories. By now, you likely have three concerns. One, you're wondering how you can get a copy of a member directory onto your computer in a format that you can work with, such as an Excel spreadsheet or even a Word document to your likely wanting to know how to find the names of the people at a given association. And three, you're likely trying to figure out where you can find email addresses for each of those contexts. So be encouraged ideal with each of those three panes. In a lesson, a couple of lessons actually, at the end of this course. 5. Find Contact Names and Email Addresses Part 1: By the time you get to this lesson, you've discovered more than a dozen ways to compile lists of hundreds or even thousands of potential business clients. You've learned how to find the company names, addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and websites of companies in industries or niches that you want to target with your marketing messages. You've also discovered along the way that many of the online sources that supply the names of companies don't give you the names of individuals at those companies. And they also rarely give you the email addresses of individuals either. So that's what you're about to learn. In this lesson. Let's start with contexts. To market your products and services to a business, you need the name of a person at the business who is likely to hire you. So your first job is to discover the job title for that person. If you know your business well or if you know your industry well, you already know the job title or job titles of the people that typically hire you. But if you're just starting out or if you're entering a new industry, you must do some homework to discover the job title or role that hire someone like you. Once you have a job title, you are ready to search for a contact name. Start with the company website. The first place to look is the About Us page. Companies typically have a section on their About Us page that describes their executive team. Here is where you find the name of the founder, the owner, the president, the CEO. And here's where you find the names of the vice presidents and managers of the various lines of business. Here, for example, is the website of environ. Next, analytics. Look across the site navigation and you find there About Us section. Hover over that section and you'll find a link to their team and click on that link and you arrive at the pages that lists the names of their senior leadership. This list would be more helpful if it included both names and job titles, of course, because if you are looking for a particular job title, which is what you are, you must click on each name in turn until you find that person that is mighty clumsy. But at least you find the person. If you can't find a section that describes the executive team, look for a section on the About Us page called our history. Some companies, especially those that are still managed by their founders, tell you the name of the person that founded the company who today is likely the President. Here, for example, is the website of fruit land manufacturing. Go to the About Us page. Look over to the left and you see they have a link to their history. Click on that link and you discover that they were founded in 1957. Scroll all the way to the bottom. And you discover that the president is Chris White and the CEO is Rod. Better. If you don't find any names on the About Us page, go to the Contact Us page. Some companies, but the names and job titles of their customer facing team members. Our Contact Us page. The smaller the company is, the more likely you are to find people mentioned by name on this page. The larger the company is, the more likely you are to find just a job title or a department and a generic email address. Here, for example, is the website of bird Construction. Go to the top right-hand corner and choose contact. Here they give you the name of their president or CEO or CFO and five other people who serve on the executive team. If you still don't find the name of the person you are looking for and go up to the website address and type the job title at the start of the address, followed by a space, the word site, and a colon and hit Enter. This does an advanced search of the website for that job title. Here, for example, we are on the website of way jacks. Go to the website address and type President, Space, site, colon and press Enter. These search results. Show you every page on this website that has the word president on it. Now scroll down the list and you find a page called Environment, Health and Safety way jacks, look at the page description and you see that this page contains a quote from Mark foot, President and Chief Executive Officer. Click on the link, scroll to the bottom of the page. And there you have it marked foot, President and Chief Executive Officer. If that doesn't turn up a name, head over to LinkedIn in this search box at the top of the page, type in the name of the company. Let's just say we're looking for the CEO of a company called architect us. So we type architect this into the search box. We select the second result, since that is the one for the company. And we land on their LinkedIn company page. Over on the right-hand side, we click the link that says, see all employees on LinkedIn. We scroll down the page looking for the CEO, and there he is, Ray Brown. Now this method isn't foolproof because the data on LinkedIn is only as accurate as the people who enter that data, namely the users. Some people will leave a company, start work at another company, and they won't change their LinkedIn profile for months if ever. But if the person you are looking for is the president or the CEO. And if LinkedIn says the person that you're looking at on LinkedIn is the president or the CEO. Linkedin is probably right. Your last option for finding contact names is to pick up the phone and call the company. This may be old school, but it works. Asked the person who answers the phone to give you the name of the person you're looking for and say please, of course. 6. Find Contact Names and Email Addresses Part 2: There are essentially three ways to find email addresses of potential clients. There's the time-consuming way, there's the faster way, and there's the outsourced way. The time-consuming way is to search the web yourself. Go to Google and enter the last name of the person, followed by a space, followed by the email portion of their email address. For example, let's say you're looking for the e-mail address of Brad Smith at Microsoft, you type Smith space at Microsoft.com. Here on the results page you scroll down and there he is, Brad Smith at Microsoft.com. The faster way is to use an online tool like a hunter dot IO, which lets you find e-mail addresses in seconds. Hunter works by showing you the pattern that companies use with their email address, such as first name dot last name, or last name dot first initial. Which means with their tool, you don't search for a person, you search for a domain. So we search for Microsoft.com. In the search results, 100 tells us what they're most common pattern is, namely lastName, first letter of firstName at Microsoft.com. But as we have just seen, microsoft also uses first name dot last name at Microsoft.com. So sign up for a free account and discover what the other patterns are. Once you have a name and once you know the pattern that a company uses with his e-mail addresses, you just follow that pattern with the name you have. And presto, you have a working e-mail address. The outsourced way is to hire a freelancer to do all of this grunt work for you. There are freelancers on Upwork who specialize in compiling lists of contexts. Just give them a company domain name and a job title. And they will give you the name and email address of that person at that company. Some of these freelancers have paid subscriptions to a hunter, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other online tools that make them super efficient at finding contact names and email addresses. And by super efficient, I also mean super affordable. The big advantage of outsourcing this task is that it frees you up to work on more important things, like talking to prospects, drafting proposals, negotiating deals, and signing contracts. In other words, making money. And that's a better use of your time and talents, right. 7. Project: By now, you have reached the end of this class on how to find clients by finding the member directories of professional associations. So here is your class project. You're going to create a master spreadsheet of all the professional associations that are in an industry that you want to target. Go online and search for all of the professional associations in the industry. Be sure to use all the best practices that you've learned in this class. Then create a spreadsheet in the first column of the spreadsheet and show the names of the associations in the next column and to the total number of members of each association. And in the third column, enter the website address of the association. By the end of this project, you will know the total number of associations that are in your niche, and you'll know the total number of potential clients that you can start targeting with your marketing messages.