Prospecting

Beyond enquiries, referrals and recommendations - the case for adopting a scaleable prospecting routine

Prospect to grow your business - The need for prospecting

"We're pretty good at converting enquiries into business... it's just getting enough of them"

"I'm not bad once I'm in front of a prospect... it's just getting to that point"

are comments that crop up virtually every day.

Many small companies start out by selling their products, services or solutions to existing contacts, and continue to grow the business by referrals and recommendations. That's fine but in most cases there will be peaks and troughs and referrals and recommendations alone won't be enough to enable the company to reach its full potential.

To cope with the troughs and grow the business beyond a certain point entails making contact with people you don't currently know and persuading enough of them to buy from you.

This is often where it starts to become uncomfortable because the core ability of your key people is to devise and provide the products, services or solutions, not sell them 'cold'. Consequently the idea of prospecting for new business can be a bit daunting and there's a tendency to use the need to meet the demands of existing customers as a reason for not having time to undertake prospecting activities as well.

That's understandable but let's be honest.

Unless you

• Have so much profitable work via referrals both currently and lined up well into the foreseeable future
• Are a networker par excellence, known throughout your industry, with people coming to you begging to do business with you
• Or are deliberately winding the company down

Your company will need to undertake prospecting activities if you want to grow the business. In fact it will probably need to undertake prospecting just to stand still. One reason for this is that there will be times when you lose business through no fault of your own. Think about it:

• A project you've geared up resources to work on progresses so far then gets indefinitely halted
• A contract that you've had for several years suddenly isn't renewed
• A competitor comes up with a superior or cheaper alternative
• The list is potentially endless

How well placed is your business to weather one or more of these hits? We are all familiar with Vilfredo Pareto's principle: Applied in this case it's that 80% of business comes from 20% of customers. If your customer base is small, that means you are relying on less than a handful for the majority of your income, and you are very vulnerable.

Is your prospecting activity like a well oiled machine that you can rev up or slow down according to the needs of the business at any given time? Or is it more like a knee jerk reaction to external influences and events?

If you wait until you can no longer sustain your current level of business before you start prospecting for more, you will suffer - because it takes time to identify, contact, qualify, sell to, close, deliver to, and get paid by new customers.

You need

• a plan
• a scaleable routine and
• an approach

that works for your company, in your industry and your marketplace. And you need the research, contact marketing and sales skills to enable you to

• Accurately "read" what your market wants and
• Convincingly communicate how your offer meets those requirements better than any of your competitors'

Your potential gold mine

• If you haven't already analysed your existing customer base, I really would strongly recommend you do that first - you'll soon see how this will help your prospecting as it focuses you more specifically on what kind of companies or individuals you should be looking to attract
• Then make a list of the traits that will help you to identify those likely to be your best potential prospects
• Next you'll need to try and source a list of raw data that replicates the traits of those companies or individuals as closely as possible
• Once you have a list of raw data you'll need to decide on the prospecting approach that suits you

Your approach

My views are very much influenced by the less-than-perfect accuracy of the majority of raw data I've ever seen.

So the very least I'd do would be to telephone check the details of the company and individual contact I had been given before sending out any kind of mailing.

I'd probably want to identify all of the individuals involved in the Decision Making Unit, too.

Then I'd test by telephoning half and mailing the other half and following the mailing with a telephone call, but it's up to you.

Just a note here

I'm not behaving like a dinosaur in not mentioning email addresses here. If your business meets the criteria in the Health Check on this web site, it is unlikely that it would be appropriate to use an outbound email as an opening shot to introduce your products, services or solutions to your target market.