Most of what I'm going to talk about in this article can now be done using AI with human interaction. Technology can research businesses, organise information and dramatically reduce the amount of time we spend manually working through prospects.
Because underneath all the technology, you still need a prospecting strategy. You need to know where to look, which businesses to capture, how to qualify them, where the opportunity might exist, how to approach them, how to execute that approach and when to follow up.
I've worked in strategic business development for more than thirty years, and what I'm going to take you through isn't a theoretical seven-step sales framework. It's the process I actually used to find, research and develop prospects.
It was manual. It took time. Sometimes qualification alone could take me four or five hours in a day. But it gave me a structured way of working an area and concentrating my time on businesses that I believed had a genuine opportunity.
Today we can do much of this considerably faster. But before we talk about the technology, let's go through the process itself, because understanding The Right Prospects starts with understanding how to find them.
The first thing I believe you should do is establish exactly where you're going to prospect. Let's use North West England as an example. Go onto Google Maps, take an image of North West England and either work with it digitally or print it off.
Personally, because I'm old, I like hard copies. What I used to do was print the maps and pin them to a cork board. There is absolutely no reason why you can't do exactly the same thing on a laptop today, but the principle is identical.
Start with the large map of your complete territory and break that picture down into four sections. You are now left with the large overview map and four smaller maps representing different parts of the territory.
Then take each of those smaller maps and divide it again. Put a line straight down the middle and another line across it. That creates four smaller prospecting areas within each map. If you want to go further, create a star by drawing from one corner to the other as well. That gives you even smaller areas to work.
Using the simpler cross method can give you 16 areas. Divide them further and you can create 32 smaller areas.
Why do this? Because prospecting should be a regular activity. Ideally, it should be built into your working week rather than something you suddenly decide to do because the pipeline looks empty.
Think about a normal month. Based on a five-day working week, you have roughly twenty working days. I used to prospect for four days and then have a Friday without prospecting. Somebody else might decide to work two areas across two days each week. There isn't one schedule everybody has to follow. Build the territory around the way you're actually going to work it.
Once you've decided on the size of the areas, number every one: 1, 2, 3, 4 and keep going until every territory has its own number.
Now you have structure. Those numbers can represent days or weeks depending on how you want to work. I personally worked by week and concentrated on saturating an area weekly.
Before you've found a single prospect, you've removed one of the biggest problems in prospecting: randomness. You already know which area you're working, when you're working it and where you're going next.
Once your areas are correctly mapped, you know where you're going each day and what you're going there to do.
For me, working in strategic business development, I would go out in the morning and select two industrial estates within the area I was working. At this point, I wasn't trying to decide whether every company was a good prospect. I was capturing businesses.
I would drive around the industrial estates and physically write the names of the businesses down on a notepad.
At the time I was selling a product that included a service, which meant potentially I could approach almost anyone and everyone. But that didn't mean everybody I captured would ultimately be the right fit. That decision came later.
A typical morning might give me approximately 30 business names. I would take those names back to my office, which for me was at home, and begin the qualification process.
One of the biggest advantages of working small territories was how easy they were to plan. I could map practically an entire month into my diary. The industrial estates were already written down against the days I intended to visit them.
There was very little decision-making required on the morning itself. I'd look at my diary, see where I was supposed to be that day, put the postcode into the satnav and away I'd go.
Depending on where the industrial estates were, I could normally complete that physical capture process and be back at the office within around two and a half hours.
The important distinction is that capture isn't qualification. At this stage you're building the raw pool of businesses within your chosen territory. The next stage is where you start deciding which of those businesses could actually become The Right Prospects.
Number three is qualification, and this is one of the most important parts of the entire process.
I'm now back in my home office with the list of businesses I've captured that morning. I would take that list and work through every company one by one.
I created my own A4 qualification sheet. The business name and address went onto the sheet, followed by everything I needed to investigate and tick off before I decided whether that company was qualified.
The first place I went was Google. I'd enter the business name, find its website and start looking for anything that resembled or hinted towards what I was selling.
But I didn't stop there. I would look at how old the website was, what kind of calls to action it had, what products the company was selling and how big its potential market appeared to be.
I would look at page speed. I would look at SEO. I would look at whether they were using paid advertising.
Why?
Because if they're investing in themselves, they might invest in me.
Then I would investigate the wider business. How many people did they employ? Were they growing? How many people had ownership of the company? Who were the directors? When did the business start? What were they doing when they originally started? How had the company developed?
There were many different things I looked at, but they all fitted onto that one A4 qualification sheet.
And if you look carefully at what I was researching, you'll notice something.
Almost everything relates to growth.
The company might not currently use the product I was selling. That was fine. What I wanted to understand was whether this was a business investing in itself and whether there was evidence that it actually wanted to grow.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks you can face in business development is a company that simply isn't bothered about growing. They're happy with their turnover. They're comfortable with where they are. They don't particularly want to change.
That isn't the business I want to target.
I want to target a business that wants growth. If a company genuinely wants to grow, there's a much better chance that it will listen to something that could help it achieve that growth. It is also likely to be interested in opportunities to save money, although simply cutting costs isn't necessarily the answer — that's a subject for another blog.
Qualification therefore isn't simply asking, "Could this company buy what I sell?" You're looking for evidence that tells you whether this is the type of business that's prepared to move forward.
You've now worked through the 30 businesses you captured. Let's say that after qualification, ten of those companies are strongly aligned enough to move into the next stage.
That next stage is Opportunity.
Take everything you've learned during qualification and identify the five strongest things that you believe could represent an opportunity within that particular business. You might find more than five, but five gives you a strong starting point.
For example, imagine you've discovered that the business has recently employed a salesperson.
To me, that's a signal. Before that salesperson produces a single sale, the company has potentially committed to a salary, a car, a laptop and the other costs associated with employing them.
That tells me two things: they're prepared to invest and they're looking to grow.
That's an opportunity.
Another example could be discovering that they had a completely new website built at the beginning of the year.
If you don't know what a website like that might cost, research it. Google it. Get an understanding of the level of investment the business may have made.
I already had enough experience to have an idea, but if I had a particularly strong lead, sometimes I'd go further. I'd look at the bottom of the website, find out which company had built it and actually ask that company for a price.
Why would I do that?
Because that information could later help me build familiarity in a real conversation.
I could say something like: "I saw you've had the new website done. It looks very nice. You went with Active8, didn't you? A friend of mine had one done by them — cost him around five grand."
I'm now talking about something familiar to that prospect. I'm demonstrating that I've looked at their company. I'm building trust because the conversation is about their business, rather than immediately launching into what I want to sell.
And underneath all of that, the new website itself remains another growth signal.
That's what Opportunity is about. Qualification tells you that the company could be right. Opportunity starts identifying the specific reasons why a meaningful conversation might exist.
Now we move into Outreach.
You've qualified the business and identified five, if not more, potential opportunities. Now you're looking for the most appropriate ways to approach that particular prospect.
I would normally look for two or three potential outreach methods, and personally I would usually settle on two.
The important thing is that I wouldn't automatically choose an outreach method simply because it was the method I wanted to use. I would look for outreach signals from the business itself.
If they're not displaying their telephone number on their website, cold calling comes off the list.
If they're not showing an email address, email comes off.
If they aren't displaying or actively using social media, social outreach comes off.
If they don't show a physical address, then that potentially removes a physical approach or direct mail.
Then I start looking more closely at the channels they do use.
How active are they on LinkedIn? Are they active in Facebook groups? How active are they on Facebook or other social platforms? How regularly do they publish a telephone number? Do they actively ask people to call them?
Look at the email address they use. Is it info@? Is it hello@? Is it team@? Is it a general platform address, or can you identify an actual individual?
I would also look at the Managing Director. During qualification, I would already have investigated the directors and looked at Companies House. Now I wanted to know whether the MD had contact details available through LinkedIn or elsewhere online.
The business is giving you clues about how it communicates. Pay attention to them.
My own main outreach method was direct mail. One of the reasons was that I could physically hand it into the business face-to-face and then return the following week.
I appreciate that not everybody likes face-to-face business development. But from the research I've carried out, including around one hundred hours looking into outreach methods, I believe face-to-face remains an extremely powerful method.
People like receiving something that has been created specifically for them.
If your letter is personal and clearly demonstrates that you've researched their company, you're not simply handing them another generic sales message. You're showing that you've invested time understanding their business before asking them to invest time listening to you.
And again, that begins building the thing I believe matters enormously in sales: trust.
Number six is Execution.
You now take your chosen outreach methods and combine them with everything you've discovered during the previous stages to work out exactly how you're going to execute a plan to win that prospect.
The first thing I would do was take all of the data I'd collected and start looking for ways to get through the door.
You've qualified the business. You've identified the opportunities. You've chosen the outreach methods. Now you're looking for the best ways to introduce yourself.
Once you've done all of the previous research properly, this stage can actually become relatively simple because the information starts showing you possible ways into the conversation.
Does that mean they're going to say yes?
No.
They might say no. They might completely ignore you. You might do everything properly and still not get through the door.
But you're approaching the business in the right way.
There could be another hundred or even a thousand salespeople trying to get the attention of the same companies you're approaching. Many of them won't be doing this properly. They'll be sending generic emails, making cold calls without understanding the company, firing out messages and repeatedly following up.
Eventually, they're just annoying the hell out of people.
When you've researched the business and chosen your execution techniques based on what you've discovered, you have a much better chance of becoming memorable.
The prospect knows you've researched them. They can see that you understand something about their company. The conversation relates to their business rather than simply being another salesperson trying to sell something.
And that matters even when they don't buy.
Because the doors that shut today won't necessarily be the doors that are shut in six months.
If you've approached somebody professionally and demonstrated that you've taken the time to understand their business, you've given yourself a much better foundation from which to return when circumstances change.
Number seven is something incredibly important: following up.
You must follow up. But you must not follow up for too long.
The way I always worked was a four-week, approximately 30-day cycle.
Week one for me was delivering the direct mail.
Week two was returning to the business if I hadn't managed to speak to the person I wanted.
Week three would move to the second outreach method I'd identified.
Week four would use the third method where appropriate.
Then I stopped.
Following up doesn't mean chasing somebody indefinitely. After that 30-day period, if the prospect hadn't moved forward, I would log them for six months.
Within my CRM, I had a specific re-qualification section. Prospects could be organised into weeks one through four so that when their six-month point arrived, they were ready to come back into Qualification.
Why re-qualify them?
Because things change.
A business that wasn't ready six months ago could be completely different today. They might have grown. They may have employed new people. Their management might have changed. They could have invested in their website, marketing, sales or other areas of the company.
This meant I gradually built a huge pool of qualified prospects that I could call upon even after six months.
And this is how you really work an area.
Eventually, something interesting starts to happen. You don't necessarily need to keep going out simply looking for businesses at the same rate. Increasingly, you're going out because you've got appointments and because the prospect pool you've already built is continually moving.
If you're using direct mail as I did, you can continue capturing new businesses and repeating the process while previous prospects are moving through outreach, follow-up and re-qualification.
I had a huge turnover of successful opportunities using this approach. That's why I believe it's worth trying.
If you look back at the seven things we've covered, none of them starts with sending more emails, making more calls or trying to contact as many people as possible.
It starts with structure.
Map the territory. Capture the businesses. Qualify them. Find the opportunities. Identify the right outreach methods. Execute the plan. Follow up properly.
That was effectively my working day.
I would capture businesses, return to the office, qualify them through the process and then deal with follow-ups later in the day. Then I'd do it again.
The problem was time.
Qualification was particularly demanding. It could take me approximately four hours and sometimes five hours every day because I was manually researching businesses one at a time and trying to understand whether they were genuinely worth pursuing.
Today, even using ChatGPT, you can research a business considerably faster and potentially go much deeper than was practical when I was doing this manually. But you're still generally researching those businesses individually and then organising the information yourself.
This is one of the reasons we built Prospexto™.
Prospexto takes the process I've described throughout this article and puts it into a programmed AI-Human operating system.
The prospect moves through Capture, Qualification, Opportunity, Outreach and Execution, with the information and intelligence required at each stage being built around the process.
A process that used to consume the majority of my working day can now move approximately 15 prospects through the process in around 20 minutes.
But there's something important about the way we've built it.
The human still makes the final decision at each stage.
That's deliberate.
At this stage, we believe in AI-Human business development rather than simply handing the entire process over to fully automated AI. Let AI do the research, organisation and repetitive work it is good at. Let the human use experience, judgement and understanding to decide which businesses should move forward.
Because ultimately, finding The Right Prospects isn't about having the biggest database.
It's about understanding which businesses are worth your time, why an opportunity might exist, how they want to be approached and what you're going to do next.
AI can make that process dramatically faster.
But the strategy underneath it still matters.
Explore how Prospexto™ brings Capture, Qualification, Opportunity, Outreach and Execution together into one AI-Human prospecting operating system.
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