You’ve got all the warehouse shelves you need to get stuff organized, you’ve got the perfect location in the suburbs to make deliveries on time, you’ve got a hardworking staff – is anything missing from your warehouse?

Oh, right – customers.

Finding and attracting clients for your warehouse can be a surprisingly complicated endeavor. Even with a dedicated sales team out there trying to find anyone that needs additional retail space, it can be tough to know just how to look more appealing to potential clients and what you can do to find businesses that may need your services.

In order to start appealing to potential customers, you first need to understand who your customers are. This may require a little introspection on your part, but it’s important to know what kind of clients you can potentially be working with and what sort of products you have the capacity to deal in. Can you offer cold storage or any kind of food shelving for perishable goods? Is your warehouse equipped with pharmaceutical shelving to help you deal in storage for medical products? Defining your customer base should start by analyzing the services you can potentially offer, and then working to see what businesses still have those needs to be met.

But in these days of interconnected commerce and faster-than-ever delivery times, it isn’t enough to just be able to offer different shelving types. Explore what services your warehouse can offer and use those to sweeten the deal, as it were. Do you only handle order fulfillment, or can you provide some kind of logistical/shipment solution? Can you offer inventory management services from your front warehouse office to help your client understand sales volume and figures? These days, customers need a pretty flexible warehouse to keep up with the demands of online retail, and being able to offer services above and beyond “a place to keep inventory” will go a long way.

In any business that focuses on the transportation and delivery of goods, location is key. Defining a geographic area of service can be a crucial step in finding clients for your warehouse, particularly in areas that may not be properly served by warehousing. Getting more specific in this instance can be beneficial – with how quick deliveries are expected to be these days, you may actually be able to get more business by limiting yourself to a certain radius or a specific metropolitan area to help with the lighter-than-load or expedited shipments that have become more popular in recent years.

As you’ve probably started to gather, finding the right customer base is just a matter of being specific and clear about your goals and capabilities. So long as you have that (well…and maybe a little in the old marketing budget) you’ll be able to easily find the right sort of clientele that needs the storage that only you can offer.