Prospect Like a Pro in 5 Easy Steps

No matter how you define success, effective prospecting is the key to reaching it every time. You could be a consultant seeking clients, a job hunter seeking employment, or a member of a polycule seeking additional polyamorous family units. All of those require good prospecting.

Bernice, owner of Green Growing Things plant stores, has decided it’s time to enter the corporate market. Her carnivorous plants, especially the Audrey IIs, have been a huge hit with consumers. She’s built the company this far through direct-to-consumer outreach. But corporate clients are an entirely different matter. 

She’ll need a concerted, systematic effort in order to make a name for her business in the corporate world. That means being as rigorous with her prospecting efforts as she is with her yoga practice. Her year-end goal is mastering the prospecting equivalent of the Bird of Paradise pose. (If you don’t know what that is, look it up. If you dare). 

Know the prospecting roadmap

Prospecting isn’t as simple as it seems from the outside. It involves not only finding prospects but reaching out to them, tracking the results, and following up. Regularly.

Most people (and by “most people,” I mean “me”) tend to intermingle these phases. They’ll randomly go to a conference, randomly meet some people, and randomly follow up. Then they randomly wonder why they aren’t randomly getting more random business.

These steps take most of the random out of prospecting and replace it with something much more on-purpose.

Step 1: Generate prospect sources

Bernice is smarter than most people (and by “most people,” I mean “me”). Rather than going right out to knock on corporate doors, she makes a list of prospect sources. Not prospects, prospect sources. She’s looking for companies that might use plants, so she realizes she can find those companies through:

• Her Chamber of Commerce
• The monthly Human Resources Best Practices Dinner
• The Inc. 500 List of Fastest Growing Businesses in her area
• A subreddit about “humane working environments.” (After all, strategically-placed person-eating plants are a very humane way to make sure employees don’t raid the supply closet.)

You don't have to be a business owner to benefit from...

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips