Farquharson/Tedesco on Business Development: How to Hunt Successfully

Now you get the point! We can't guess where your expertise lies, but no matter who you are and where you've been, your experience translates to customer benefits for like-minded groups of people and organizations somewhere, someplace.

Now you've got your areas of expertise nailed. What next?

Work a FINITE List of Verticals

What does your list of suspects look like? Have you combed through your metro area's Book of Lists? Scanned your business associations' member lists and imported them into your CRM system? Googled until your eyeballs turned to Jell-O?

How about focusing on your selected areas of expertise? Build a finite list of these verticals. For example, your authors have both put their kids through the college admissions process and therefore can claim some expertise in that area from the other side of the aisle. A reasonable next step for us would be to make a list of admissions officers for all of the universities in our areas and create a systematic plan of attack. Sounds simple, but simple is best.

Forget about qualifying the hundreds of suspect companies tucked away in a rarely used corner of your CRM system. Instead, choose the ones where your background adds value and qualify only those.

Your hunting effort is limited by hours in a day. We will argue 'til we're blue in the face that too many names on a list is a negative, not a positive. Wildly successful reps tend to work far fewer accounts, all of which are extremely well-qualified.

We're going to stop well short of recommending a specific number of accounts to call upon, because the right number can be significantly different for different people and types of printing businesses. When deciding upon the number of accounts you can effectively work, consider how demanding the servicing requirements are in your current book of business. For example: