Researching

Sometimes clients come to us first. If you think that the best way to find your soulmate in dating is just to sit in a corner and wait to see who approaches you in a bar, then this is fine. But we don't want to rely on that, and think it increases the odds of finding a good match if we go looking too.

That means we first need to understand what makes a client an ideal match for us. Then, we start our recipe by researching:

1. Research to find those types of organisations. This could be in online trade publications, at events, through our network, or through knowing about organisations we would love to work with.

2. Next identify suitable contact people at that organisation, and add their details into our CRM, Contactually.

3. Create a card in the New Clients pipeline under the 'Researching' column.

4. Research what they are working on, what is important to them, what their strategy is, and what problems they face, and create notes in the CRM to remind us in future.

During this we may find out that the organisation is not a good match, in which case mark the card in the new client pipeline as 'lost' even at this early stage. We want to track how early we 'lose' new business. We will never win everything, but our aim should be to move the loses earlier and earlier in the process. This is the perfect stage at which to lose. Marking something as lost now, rather than at a later stag is a big success.

Once we have the basics of research on a client, the contacts and the potential opportunity in place, we can move onto Connecting with them.