Researching the Prospect

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Prospecting Tools (Home); Unsolicited Mail ; What Criteria? ; Researching the Prospect ; Establishing a Group ; The Introductory Kit ; The Follow-up Call ; First Day's Experience ; The Second Version of the Harvester ; My Working Documents ; Scripts ; My Experience

I have three press release in front of me, gained first thing this morning from the 300 releases issued yesterday.

I read each one of them, and choose the one which I think most closely matches my skills.

One of my skills is document post-processing and document pre-processing, also known as document conversion, document cleansing, document coercion, and so on.

Any report that mentions a firm which makes extensive use of document manipulation tools will be interested to hear what I do, and hopefully, to make (paid) use of my knowledge.

If I can't find a good match to my skills, then there is not a good match, and I have no prospect today.

But not to worry; there were TWO prospects yesterday, and since I chose one of them, the other is available for today!

I avoid the temptation to fake a match where there is none. Any executive will catch me out in a lie in the first minute of conversation.

I make a folder on my hard drive ("G:\Greaves\Clients\V\Vision\") for the new prospect, and introduce a Diary.doc into that folder. In the Diary I will paste every snippet of information I can gather over the next 30 minutes. The diary soon swells to 20 or 30 pages.

I use the press release as the first item, prefaced with the hyperlink to the Canada News Wire story and today's date; I have a record of where and when I first found about this firm, just in case they ask me!

I use LinkedIn and Google search to locate as much data as I can on the organization and their staff. I'll grab the contact address and phone numbers, lists of executives, board of directors, with photos wherever possible.

From LinkedIn I'll paste each member's profile and a list of "other people who have visited" where their organization matches my prospect.

Within 30 minutes I have an unformatted dossier crammed with names, email addresses, phone numbers, prior appointments, and often enough, a face that helps me asses age, gender of course, and the nature of the executive (humorous, stern, golf shirt or business suit).

Note on LinkedIn: My experience with LinkedIn is that executives and staff members who have "moved on" do not necessarily update their LinkedIn entries. I can understand this. If Global Conglobulations have eliminated the position of "Director, Business Development Mid Atlantic", after the initial shock (one week), reality sets in, and you put on a brave face and start looking for work. You hope that anyone who stumbles across you will get in touch with you privately, rather than by corporate head office, so that you can control the question-and-answer turf.

Bottom line: Never assume that the LinkedIn entry is correct without first verifying it!

I have made no contact yet, but when I do I will have in front of me printed out (yes! I use hard copy for this most important task!) a list of all people I can find at that company, and data on them. If their name gets mentioned I can nudge the conversation along with "Oh yes, she is the manager of regulatory standards?".

I open up a hanging folder and file the sheets in that folder. That's right. I may not call them today, I may have other things to do.

I make an entry in my contact database for the one person who seems to be my best first-call. That person my not be the one mentioned in the press release; I may pick someone closer to my age , or with a similar background.

If I ever stumble across an executive who was raised and educated in Western Australia, they're IT!

Establishing a Group

Toronto and Mississauga, Sunday, December 05, 2010 9:12 PM