How do you go about prospecting if you sell shoes and bags for ladies online?

Prospecting is the art of looking for people to talk to who could be potential buyers or users of your product or service.

For this scenario let's assume that you are a female undergraduate in the Federal University of Agriculture in Makurdi, Benue state. You are currently studying a 4 year program in Botany and you would like to get some extra income from bags and shoes that you buy in Lagos. It also helps that you have a cousin who sends you a few items from the UK about twice a year.

Prospecting here involves asking a few questions like, "where do my ideal customers hang out?", "what kinds of things are my customers interested in?", "which kinds of people are likely to use my product or service?"

For now it'll be hard to answer all these questions because we have limited information, so we'll have to do some guess work!

Let's assume that FEMALES will be our main focus. Let's also assume that it'll be mostly UNDERGRADUATES buying our accessories and not the female university professors. This is a reasonable assumption to make because I doubt a young undergrad will have keen insights into the shopping and dressing habits of middle aged women.

Let's also assume that since we might be looking at a university crowd, we might also get some attention from SCHOOLS NEARBY like Benue State University (about 20 minutes away), and maybe Kogi State University and Nassarawa State University which are in the adjoining states. There is also the University of Mkar which is in Gboko, also in Benue state.

The key assumption here is that we also want to be LOCAL meaning that we are selling to people who can reach us without much difficulty... also so that if we have to deliver anything to someone, we don't have to erode our profits on transportation costs.

Now that we have made all these assumptions, it's time to start TESTING these assumptions to find out who our ideal customer is and how we can reach them.

The results of our experiment are going to serve as the basis for our prospecting template in the future.

With all these assumptions I think it's clear that we can start looking for people to talk to 1. locally in the flesh or in person conversations, and 2. online communities.

How do we start those conversations? We will explore those in a later post on how to chat up female students in tertiary institutions who are local to us concerning our bags and shoes.

In the meantime, feel free to ask me anything in the comments!