Jimmy Kyriacou of Unbox London looks at how companies can identify new target markets and how best to reach them. 

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<p>Jimmy Kyriacou, founding director at Unbox London, explains how to finds your niche and build your market share.&nbsp;</p>

How to find your niche and grow market share

Presentation

Jimmy Kyriacou, founding director at Unbox London, explains how to finds your niche and build your market share.

Building your business to target micro niches and grow your market share

The entrepreneur selling the benefits of the nut that's not a nut

Ayesha Grover tells the story of tigernut brand, strp'd.&nbsp;

&lt;p&gt;My motto in life and work is 'Meet people, make friends, and help them.'&amp;nbsp;Getting to know people is the best way of finding out what makes them tick in terms of goals, ambitions, dreams, interests and life in general. I help people by listening to what they need, suggesting ideas, sending links, making introductions, adding value, and offering relevant products and services, where appropriate. When friends have a problem, I love to help them fix it.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;My varied portfolio career means I have knowledge, experience and contacts in many fields. I am an expert in book publishing, media, mentoring, writing, editing, marketing, crowdfunding, sponsorship, social enterprise and commercial start-ups.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I'd love to get to know you better, so I can help you get to where you want to be.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Career highlights:&lt;br /&gt;
• Book trade professional since 1990&lt;br /&gt;
• Consultant Producer, YOU'RE BOOKED! (ITV book series)&lt;br /&gt;
• Pioneer, World Book Day UK&lt;br /&gt;
• Research Director, StoryCode (online recommendation engine for fiction, featured on BBC TV’s DRAGONS’ DEN)&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Current roles:&lt;br /&gt;
• Founder, CopyGhosting Publishing Services (editorial, marketing, PR &amp;amp; digital agency)&amp;nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;
• Editor &amp;amp; Development Executive, Insight Film Festival&lt;br /&gt;
• Founder, Jolabokaflod CIC (promoting Icelandic 'Christmas book flood' tradition)&amp;nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;
• Director of Crowdfunding, CrowdPatch CIC: free crowdfunding platform for social enterprise&lt;br /&gt;
• Founder, The Wisdom of Coffee: a network for Meetup gatherings &amp;amp; a community that shares best practice about business, enterprise &amp;amp; alternative finance)&lt;br /&gt;
• Founder, Smart Crowd Productions: integrated arts, media, business &amp;amp; alternative finance production consultancy&lt;br /&gt;
• Director: Corporative Sponsorship, SMGlobal Catwalk, Inc: global fashion events brand&lt;br /&gt;
• Social entrepreneur, 12R Prizes: solving social issues and commercial problems via sponsored cash-prize comptetions&lt;br /&gt;
• Mentor, Founders and Mentors: networking platform, comprising forum, communities and courses for mentors to help pre-launch founders launch start-ups successfully&lt;br /&gt;
• Social entrepreneur, 12Ronnies: hub that provides founders, inventors and creatives a toolkit for launching a startup successfully&lt;br /&gt;
• Co-founder, CrowdMall: virtual shopping centre for ideas that do not yet exist&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Charities:&lt;br /&gt;
• Chairman, Seeds Creatives (charity): runs the ‘Artist in Your Own Residence’ collaborative network mentoring scheme for creatives in all disciplines&lt;br /&gt;
• Director, Arts Centre Group (charity): membership organisation for arts &amp;amp; media professionals&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Committees:&lt;br /&gt;
• All-Party Parliamentary Committee for Crowdfunding (chair: Barry Sheerman MP): meets quarterly at the House of Commons&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Author:&lt;br /&gt;
• Six published books&lt;br /&gt;
• Two books in progress&lt;/p&gt;

Serial entrepreneur

Pre-launch founders, inventors & creatives

Signposting for advice, tools and resources for members wanting to start turning an idea into a business.

The typical technician-turned-business-owner: that’s the best way to describe my sales technique. I have always been confident talking to prospects about the subjects I know well, and I’ve been fortunate to win a few relatively sizeable contracts in my time. However, I have never held a pure sales or business development role for any organisation. I am responsible for business development within my company, but it’s just one of the many hats I have to wear. Let’s just say I was not born to be in sales.

I am not obsessed by targets or closing deals. I hate overpromising. I hate interrupting people. I hate making people feel like a number, and I hate pressurising them. Why? Because every single time someone else does those things to me, I hate it. And every time it happens – which is a lot when you are running a business – I lose a little more faith in the traditional ways of contacting a cold prospect.

Still, I am a businessman, and being successful in any business requires the ability to attract customers. Which is why I believe that when you have created something of genuine value which can help other businesses to succeed, you are performing a service by bringing it to the attention of the people who can benefit. Continually going above and beyond for customers is the best way to build a business; but sometimes, situations and circumstances dictate proceedings. Sometimes, necessity demands you to be proactive in business development, instead of merely sitting back and waiting for the right people to hunt you down.

How is it possible to accomplish this without resorting to all the things that I – like so many other business professionals – hate about outbound sales?

For more than 14 years running my own business, I found myself struggling with this puzzle – and not just any business, a marketing agency no less. Not only was I routinely experiencing personal business development headaches, but I had daily exposure to the attempts of clients who were trying to wrestle with their own.

Over the years I tried everything my time and budget would allow: cold calling, email marketing, networking, direct mail, exhibitions, advertising and public relations all played various roles in my ever-evolving business development playbook. All ended up costing me a lot in both time and money, with little reward to show for it. Social media offered me a glimmer of hope, but it’s so saturated with ill-conceived, generic sales tactics that it was proving increasingly difficult to cut through the noise.

In truth, the reason I find myself where I am today is primarily through desperation. I was desperate for a way to actively generate quality B2B leads for my business. Desperate to fight against the generic, one-size-fits-all spam that plagues my inbox and in-tray daily. Desperate to avoid wasting time and money, neither of which I could afford to lose. Desperate to measure effectiveness, instead of repeatedly flinging mud against a wall in the hope that some of it would stick. Above all, I was desperate to leave the people I approached with a lasting, positive impression of me and my business – reputations are built over years, yet can be destroyed in minutes.

It was in the desperate search for solutions that I finally stumbled across the solution I had been searching for all those years. A method that enabled me to achieve a reach rate of 55 per cent, a response rate of 44 per cent and a lead-generation rate of nearly 11 per cent. The results proved to be almost 20 times more effective than cold calling.

Best of all, the whole process allowed me to keep my integrity firmly intact.

I know full well that I’m not the only business owner who has struggled with business development: there are plenty, even in my tiny corner of the world. Multiply that across the globe, and there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, just like me. Businesspeople looking to showcase their abilities proactively, in a way that doesn’t alienate the very people they are trying to attract.

For that reason, I decided to document my methods and processes in my (now Amazon US #1 bestselling Sales & Selling) book, 'Wonder Leads: Remarkable lead generation for positive small businesses'.

My goal with Wonder Leads is to help raise the bar of business communication, and help the smallest businesses to start building positive connections with the people that matter to them; if the whole world could do that, then who knows what incredible things we might all accomplish.

Author & Founder

Learn an outbound sales framework that is 20x more effective than cold calling

&lt;p&gt;Small business owner? Hate sales? Need to approach potential customers but don&amp;rsquo;t want to sacrifice your time, money or integrity? I have the solution you&amp;rsquo;ve been looking for.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am an award-winning marketer and &lt;a href="https://wonderleads.com/book" target="_blank"&gt;bestselling author&lt;/a&gt; with more than 14 years experience running a successful small business.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;As some who always found cold outreach their achilles heal, I can show you a lead generation framework that:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
	&lt;li&gt;Is proved to be &lt;strong&gt;twenty times more effective than cold calling&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
	&lt;li&gt;You can do yourself from any location&lt;/li&gt;
	&lt;li&gt;Is non-invasive (you won&amp;#39;t feel awful doing it)&lt;/li&gt;
	&lt;li&gt;Can help you start incredible conversations with even the most hard-to-reach prospects&lt;/li&gt;
	&lt;li&gt;Does not require advertising or large capital investment&lt;/li&gt;
	&lt;li&gt;Can be implemented by anyone with a positive mindset&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Sound like the right fit for you? Click the &amp;lsquo;&lt;strong&gt;Enquire Now&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;rsquo; button to take your first step to a brighter form of business development.&lt;/p&gt;

The world of business is changing and Sara Osterholzer is leading the charge. She believes there’s a different way to do business that positively impacts people and the planet while still being profitable and is demystifying what that looks like to support business owners create sustainable businesses, for themselves and the world. 
 
Sara is an experienced entrepreneur, most recently the co-founder of The Good Business Club, and a mentor to the next generation of leaders looking to redesign the world of business, for good. When she’s not banging the drum for purpose-led business, you can find her touring around on her motorbike or breaking the taboo around mental health. 

Sara offers 1-2-1 advice or mentoring sessions, hosts a number of practical workshops, and recently launched The Good Business Roadmap - a course that will leave you feeling confident, clear, and ridiculously productive, ready to launch your purpose-driven business into the world in 11-weeks.

Building your business to target micro niches and grow your market share

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