An I/T Guy doing Sales

Work is hard to find these days unfortunately. But hard to find just means I have to look harder and do things outside my comfort zone. I can't sit around waiting for the mythology behind SEO to bring everyone to my company website. The bills for life don't stop coming after all. :-) A tool I recently found has been helping a little though. For anyone else looking for ways to get work here in Oregon I found a great site run by the state (really, no joke, I couldn't believe it either...):

http://olmis.emp.state.or.us/olmisj/employers

I can enter the NAICS number for the business sector I'm interested in reaching and get all the businesses matching that code for the county I live in. Then I sort by city and start contacting them. Some have websites listed in their entry, some don't. For those who don't you can click on the "Map to employer location" link by their address. That gives you a Google Maps entry and there's usually a Google Places entry as well. Some of these have more information like a website that isn't in the state site, an email address, etc. It's great really, but let's face it. I'm a cowardly computer geek! Cold calling businesses looking for work isn't my strength. If they have an email address, or Contact Us form on their website, I usually chicken out of calling and use that. I can double back some other time and call the ones who don't answer the emails.

I haven't done this yet, but another nice use will probably be the office buildings that have "No Soliciting" signs up, but clearly have businesses I could do I/T work for in them. Until this tool I hadn't realized that Google Maps tells you all the businesses at the same address. So now if I'm doing door to door sales I can use Google Maps to get the numbers or websites of the businesses inside and contact them from my car.

It'll be nice when I have enough work again to pay the bills so I don't have to do sales like this. I'm way out of my comfort zone. :-)

About The Author

Ron Grove draws on over ten years of training, network administration and development experience. He loves to work with new technology and see how that technology can be best utilized by his clients. You can find him through his company Evanoah I/T Services or through his LinkedIn profile.