Building momentum with corporate balloon sales

I've been running my business for ten years. I do a lot of corporate balloon sales. And I have absolutely no system for going out and getting it; most of it has just found me through word of mouth and Google.

That's why I wanted Carolina of Balloon Element / Grow My Balloon Biz on the podcast. She went full-time in her balloon business in three years, got a warehouse, bought a van, hired contractors... and built almost all of it on the back of corporate clients she went out and found herself.

Here's what she shared...

Why Corporate Clients Feel Like a Mystery

I said this to Carolina before we started recording and she immediately validated it: most decorators don't pursue corporate work because they genuinely don't know where to start.

Who do you even contact at a Jersey Mike's grand opening? The construction workers on site don't know. The corporate office is somewhere else. There's no obvious door to knock on. And if there's no obvious door, most of us just don't knock.

Carolina felt the same way when she started. She began by walking into schools (literally door to door), asking if they had events coming up. The first school she walked into booked her on the spot for $1,500. That was the biggest job she'd had at the time.

But door to door isn't scalable. So she started attending chamber meetings, getting a website, showing up on Instagram. Then a municipality found her through Instagram and became her second corporate client. And that's when it clicked: if she could reach out to one municipality and get booked, she could reach out to all of them.

She now has over 4,000 contacts on her outreach list. It took three years of trial and error to build that. But the method itself? It's simpler than you think.

Who to Contact

The decision makers you're looking for have specific titles. Carolina looks for sales catering directors, events managers and sales event managers. Put any of those into LinkedIn's search bar and you'll get lists of people currently in those roles... people whose literal job is booking events and vendors.

These are not people spending their own money. That's the key. They have a budget, they have events on the calendar and they need reliable vendors to execute them, meaning you are a solution to a problem they already have.

There are also software platforms... some with free trials, some with monthly fees... that let you search for specific decision makers and pull their contact emails directly. Carolina uses these to build her outreach lists efficiently rather than hunting one contact at a time.

What to Actually Send

The intro email is simpler than most people expect.

Your name, your business, your city and two or three photos of your work with a one-line note that you'd love to be a resource for their upcoming events.

That's it! No pricing, pitch deck or elaborate proposal. Just an introduction with visuals so they can see what you do.

Carolina also includes branded attachments that go out monthly; seasonal content tied to upcoming holidays so that her name keeps showing up in their inbox with something relevant and useful. When Easter is coming up, she sends Easter ideas. When corporate holiday party season approaches, she sends holiday content. The follow-up is the whole game.

One thing that came up that I've experienced too: Carolina lets students in her program use her photos as promotional material in their outreach emails. I have a product called Sales Sets that works the same way: coordinated photos of balloon products that decorators can use to build a menu or send to clients. Someone once told me it felt weird to use photos that weren't their own work, and I pushed back the same way Carolina does. The reality is corporate clients are sending you blurry Pinterest screenshots; they do not care who built the arch in the photo. They care that you can build something like it for them.

If there's a shortcut available and it doesn't require you to misrepresent yourself, take it.

Rethinking "No"

This part of the conversation stuck with me.

Most of us were raised to believe that no means no. Don't follow up... don't impose... don't be annoying. And then we start businesses and wonder why our cold outreach isn't working... because we sent one email and stopped.

Carolina reframes it completely: no doesn't mean no. It means not right now, or, it means you reached the wrong person and need to find another door into the same organization.

She's called on companies where the first person she spoke to said they don't use balloons. So she then asked who handles events, got a name, called that person and booked the job. The "no" was just a misdirection.

And, you have to follow up every month. Not because you're being annoying, but because timing matters and corporate events are planned on a rolling calendar. The month you stop following up might be the month they start planning something.

What Corporate Clients Are Actually Looking For

Here's something else worth remembering: the bar to work with corporate clients isn't as high as we think.

They're not always looking for the most creative decorator. They've been burned by vendors who didn't show up, sent the wrong thing, or disappeared after the deposit. What they want is someone they can trust to do exactly what they said they'd do.

Show up when you said you'd show up, deliver what you quoted and communicate. That's it. Those are the simple things that make you stand out in a corporate client's mind.

Most of us are already doing that for our residential clients every single weekend. 

The Mindset Piece

Carolina said something I want to end on: we have to recommit to our businesses every single day.

Even at the highest levels, even with a full calendar and a warehouse and a team, there are still days where you wonder how delivering balloons became your full-time career. The answer is to drink your own Kool-Aid. Remind yourself what you've built, what people have paid you, what problems you've solved.

And be careful who you let into your head. The people who love us most sometimes have the hardest time seeing our value and if we're not careful, that doubt creeps in and starts sounding like our own voice.

You're not just doing balloons. You're providing a service that people pay real money for, again and again. 

Hear my full conversation with Carolina on The Bright Balloon podcast: episode 417.