 Arguably one of the most stressful and unfavorable tasks of a meeting partner is to research meeting planner clients. We're trying to find new business and sometimes it just isn't that easy. So today we're going to talk about some tips and tricks you can use in researching your next meeting planner client. Hey everyone it's Leanne Calderwood from LeanneCalderwood.com and if we're trying to grow our meeting planning business, one of the tasks on our plate is prospecting. Not a lot of people love prospecting. It's the fear of rejection, it's the tedious task of finding the person that you need to talk to and then of course knowing your product so well and selling it to them so that now they will actually trust you and buy from you. It is a very stressful being a salesperson. So what I want to do today is provide you with some tips that will help you in researching and finding those people and learning more about them before you even send that introductory email or pick up the phone or meet that person at a conference. So let's go through some of these tips, see if they resonate with your current prospecting style or maybe if there's something new that you can add to your research. Idea number one, check out that person's organization's website. Now again there's a chance you've already done this or you've looked at organizational websites over the years to find meeting planners but that is a great place to start is to identify the organization you want to work with and then go into that website to learn who the people are but more importantly what is that company like and you can learn a lot of that from the website about their company culture, their mission statement, you can learn if that's even going to be a good fit for your property or your brand. The other thing you can glean from the organization's website especially if it's an association is their conference links and on there you're going to find potentially the conference planner's name but more than that you're actually going to find out a lot about their program and those are things that you can now weave into your prospecting messaging when you know more about the program before even having to say to that potential client, tell me more about your program. So do some research on their actual meeting planner website to find out about the format and the agenda and then you can ask some really really great questions and that's going to put you ahead of the curve. Second place to find clients and information is my favorite place, LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn of course is a social media tool but it's so much more than that it is a great search engine. So by using some of the advanced functions in LinkedIn you can find meeting planners all over the place and then of course learn about them through their LinkedIn profiles. My biggest tip though with using LinkedIn is make sure that your profile is robust before you start connecting with people on there because in turn they're going to try and take a look at your profile and if your profile isn't up to date or compelling they might click away from your profile right away. Below this blog post is a link to a blog that I wrote about optimizing your own LinkedIn profile. Please do check out that blog post before going into LinkedIn to find some meeting planner prospects. Idea number three is Twitter. So in the same way that you can find clients on LinkedIn you can find conferences on Twitter and you can do that using the search functions in Twitter, using different hashtags to find out where people are meeting. So if you're not familiar with Twitter there's obviously some other things you need to learn about the social media platform before you start to dive into searching but if you have a Twitter profile I would recommend looking for meeting planners on there. You're going to find conferences and meetings all over the place. Idea number four is Facebook. Yep I'm going through all the social media platforms because this is how we're finding business these days is through social media. So Facebook again is rich full of conferences and meetings that are taking place. You just got to start using those advanced search functions and those event functions in Facebook to find out where all the conferences are being held and in that you're finding potential business that you can bring to your property. Tip number five is good old Google. It is the ultimate search engine and a lot of us forget that when researching our clients. If you have a name of someone simply Google that person to see if you can find out more about them. It might even link you back to the organization's website maybe even their Facebook profile their LinkedIn profile. So using Google to find a person is great but it also is a great tool for finding conferences. You can Google all kinds of things and find a plethora of information. If you simply Google Ontario Association a whole slew of records are going to come up for you and if that's your ideal client profile now it's all in one place and you can start going through them to see what would be a good fit for you. So always look to Google. Idea number six are association directories. Now the associations I'm referring to here are our professional associations like MPI and PCMA. If you're a member of those associations you have access to the member directory and you can certainly find some clients that are a good fit for you in there. Again once you find those names then you probably want to fact check it and take it back to either the Google or LinkedIn to see what you can learn about those people further but it's a great way to get a name as a starting point. Final place to research some prospective clients are conference attendee lists. A lot of conferences that we attend now are publishing the attendee lists in advance and there are prospective clients on those lists. Now again make sure that you are approaching these people in a very respectful way because they did give permission to the organization to have their name public on the conference attendee list but it's a great way again as a springboard to find someone who is planning meetings who's taking the time to invest in their professional development and hopefully is a good fit for your firm as well. I hope you found value in some of these prospecting tips. Like I said there is so much business out there but hopefully with these tips you're able to narrow down your pool a little bit and make your prospecting a little bit more focused. For more tips on tricks on how to attract meeting planners jump over to my website at liankalderwig.com. Over there you can download how to attract a meeting planner's attention which has tons of good tips and tricks for bringing business to your property. Thanks for watching this week's video we will see you next time. Bye for now.