I have just had a conversation with a prospective client, Clive Robinson from Experiential Agency, The Factory Live .
During our chat, I tried hard to check that Clive had established a solid process for business development for his organisation. It was clear that he has really strong sales skills, the collateral was all in place – but a huge gap was apparent.
The Factory Live team has a great opportunity creation campaign that works well for them producing up to a dozen new leads each week. But the gap became clear when I asked how many companies they had on their database. The answer was 25.
For a company that has been trading for two years, producing a dozen leads a week, that's a remarkably low figure.
We had a short conversation to clarify our terminology and it became clear that all these organisations were being contacted once.
What a great sales-led opportunity development programme – to get pitches, proposals and new clients all from cold or nearly-cold calling.
This business has a great opportunity to improve its hit rate by setting up three steps of the business development cycle:
- Relationship development
- Creating Opportunities
- Analysis and Feedback
They do not yet have a database in which to record all the companies with whom they make contact, and to record the conversation and subsequent actions.
Here are my previous posts on database selection for agencies .and the databases summary document
Once this is in place a programme for relationship development can be put in place to keep in touch with these organisations which will lead to improved opportunity creation and hopefully some stunning conversion figures as the database builds up and repeat contact is made and the relationship and company profile built up.
Clive has kindly given me permission to write about our conversation.
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