Prospecting

What is it?

Prospecting is the process of going and finding people who might buy your product or service. This is the earliest stage of acquiring a customer, although how you go about prospecting might change as your business grows, it’s a vital part of creating a sustainable business. As your business becomes more established your brand and reputation will bring customers to and prospecting will be less important but for startup and growth stage business it is essential.

Who should do it?

Prospecting is part of our Startup and Growth business blueprints

When should I do it?

You should start as soon as you’re ready to serve customers.

How often should I do it?

Prospecting is a repeating task in your business, you should be allowing time in each week. As a rule of thumb; when you are not servicing customers or building products this should be the majority of your remaining time.

How do I do it?

Gather a List

The first stage of prospecting is to gather a list. The list is the names and contact details of folks who might want to buy from you. The common ways of obtaining a list are:

  • Research. You can head to Linkedin and search for people or companies that you think would be a good fit for your product or service. For example if you’re providing retirement advice in the UK you might search for people in senior roles who live around your area because they are more likely to be considering retirement, more likely to require advice on the options available and will be close enough that you can meet them face to face to discuss this personal topic. This option is zero cost but very time intensive.

  • Purchase. There are companies that will sell this data to you for you to use. This is less common since GDPR legislation came into place but there are still organisations who go out and gather information on individuals and companies with their consent and will sell that too you. In most cases you can ask for just what you need and they will provide you with a sample of maybe 100 contacts for you to test and will charge for more contacts. You can expect to pay £300 - £700 for a list containing 100s of contacts.

  • Use a Tool. There are tools available for you to create lists too. We’ll list some of the popular ones below. In these cases you pay a subscription for the tool and then you search using your own criteria to narrow a huge list into one that is suitable for you. One of the advantages of these tools is that they can often search on ‘intent’ so you can find people who are searching for services like yours. In most cases you will be able to have a one to two week trial for these tools. These tools are more expensive so expect to pay £2,000 - £5,000 per month to get all of the benefits and features of these.

    • https://www.zoominfo.com

    • https://www.apollo.io

    • https://www.cognism.com

  • Leverage your Network. Last, not not least by any means, you should consider using your own business network. If you have more than a few hundred connections on Linkedin and in your email gained over a few years you have a business network you can draw on. If you google how to export contacts from Linkedin and Gmail you’ll quickly be able to build an Excel spreadsheet of everyone you’ve interacted with for business over the last few years.

Start Outreach

Once you have your list the process is the same and we call it Outreach. We’re going to work through the list and contact each person to find out if they are likely to be a good customer for us. I know what you’re thinking; no one responds to a cold call any more. And you’d be right - so we’re not going to do it that way. We’re going to start a conversation so that if, and when, the time is right we can ask them about business. No hard selling and no chasing.

  1. Contact. Email or send a Linkedin message to say ‘Hi’ and check in with the person. If you’re not sure what to write just ask them how they are, let them know that you’re keeping in touch with your network, try not to over think it.

  2. Engage. Some folks will get back to you, some won’t. For those that do you can start a conversation with them. Again, don’t over think it, ask about what’s changed since you last spoke to them, how is their new role, have they seen your mutual friend.

  3. Ask. If the conversation flows and it feels right you can make a request. Again we won’t try and sell to them directly so there’s nothing odd here, just explain what you’re doing and ask them if they know anyone who might be a good customer for you. There are three ways this goes

    1. They say no

    2. They refer you to new prospects

    3. They say that they might be interested. 🚀

Gather Leads

When you get someone who says they are interested, they are a ‘Lead’ you add them into your CRM system and start to develop them into an opportunity. This process of using a CRM and prospect development is the subject of our next section.