Many manufacturers offer great products to markets, sadly, these products may not be able to bring them profits since their sales may be unpleasant. Generating new sales, usually a big challenge for salesmen, because it consists of so many factors, advertisement, quality of products, demands of the products, and so on. Salesmen may have excellent sales skills, but they may be frustrating on finding the potential customers . Going out to the streets and asking pedestrians one by one about their buying desires may seem to be the easiest way to reach out for customers, using quantity to make a difference. However, its efficiency is way too low, taking too much labor cost, and the rate of Return presenting so low. In this article, I want to introduce a modern way to you, web scraping, which can get you thousands of sales leads in a very short time.
Salesman having communicating and marketing skills is not enough, setting the right target group is also very essential to create sales. Having a target group means having a direction, salesmen would know where to get sales leads, after gaining the information, salesmen can use their technics to turn leads into sales. And in this article, I will mainly talk about how to gain the information of sales leads.
As a supplier/manufacturer, products usually do not sell directly to end-users, instead, grocery stores, or restaurants may be the right potential clients. Finding the linking middlemen and getting connection with them is the wisest move.
For example, let’s imagine I’m a seafood manufacturer, because as a manufacturer, my output is huge, so the best way for me to sell my products is to become a supplier for as many restaurants as possible, therefore, in this case, I will set restaurants that offer seafood as my main sales target.
First, I will go to visit the website of Yellowpages. Yellowpages refers to a telephone directory of businesses, the directories used to be printed on yellow papers, but now Yellowpages has also applied online, more information and features of businesses can be easier discovered. Since I’m a seafood manufacturer, I would like to seek for restaurants that offer seafood. Location is also needed to be considered because of the transportation cost. Therefore my final search is seafood restaurants in Los Angeles.
There were 481 results under this search, and we can see from each column, they got phones, addresses, reviews, and rates all types of information, if we read after it one by one, it would cost me too much time, so, I would use the method I mentioned above, web scraping.
Click into the detailed page, I found these messages may be useful for me to learn more about the restaurants, Names, Addresses, Rates, Telephones, Descriptions, Price ranges, Neighborhoods, Payment methods, and websites. These info might help me with grouping these restaurants, whether useful or not, I will take these messages down as well.
Getting to know my own needs, I used Octoparse, a free web scraping tool, to scrape down these information for me.
After some times waiting, Octoparse got me a chart of structured data, exported the data to Excel so I can use Excel to do the screening job.
(In the picture, there were more columns not captured)
Basically we can separate these restaurants into different groups of neighborhoods, by which we can separate salesmen into different teams of taking charge of different districts. And we can rank these restaurants by rates, so we’ll get to know which one should our focus be at.
In the use of this method, we can easily get thousands of quality sales leads, the amazement of Web Scraping does not stop from here, find out more in Octoparse’s blog!
