Here’s an interesting question. What % of potential deals do you know about?
Regardless of what method you use to generate leads, many of your target prospects still don’t know about you or the products or services you sell.
Therefore, a great OPTIMIZATION opportunity is to identify ways to get the attention of more of your qualified prospects so that you get the opportunity to “be in the game” when they are ready to buy. For many businesses this simple shift alone will certainly increase the number of new clients, customers, patients or members that do business with you.
In the first part of this series, I WILL focus on businesses that utilize a direct sales force, whether in person or over the phone.
Often the sales representatives, as well as the business in general, rely on their warm network to learn about potential opportunities. And this is a highly effective method for ensuring that you are invited to the party when there’s a potential purchase opportunity available.
However, it often leads to missing out on a number of, potentially significant number of, potential deals they would been involved in if they merely knew about the potential buying opportunity.
As an example, a Soils Remediation client of ours has an incredible reputation and a very high closing rate when they’re invited to the GAME. Their average job can range from $50,000 to well over $1 million. That’s great news. The bad news, and therefore the opportunity to OPTIMIZE, is that they know about less than 10% of the jobs awarded in advance of the bid process.
Therefore, by simply expanding the focus of their current marketing to learning about these missed opportunities, in advance, they can produce significant upside potential.
There are many methods, depending upon the type of business, that can be used to learn about more potential purchase opportunities. One of these, is to employ a Bird-Dog. That is, someone that is dedicated to learning about these opportunities in order to arm the sales representatives with both the precise timing of any upcoming purchase; and other information that will enable the sales rep to target their efforts on getting invited to the game and therefore bidding on far more jobs than they do today.
The Bird-Dog not only can uncover opportunities that otherwise would have been missed but they also can follow up on opportunities that are likely to come up over the next several months, year, or even within the next five years. The key is to know about the job opportunity and the timing in order to create a strategic and tactical plan for ensuring that your company is one of the companies that is asked to evaluate and potentially bid on the job.
In order to determine if a Bird-Dog, whether full-time or part-time, make sense for you, simply ask yourself these questions:
- Based on our current marketing efforts, is it highly likely that we will we NOT know about at least 15% of the potential qualified opportunities for our business?
- Would knowing about an additional 5 to 10% of the potential opportunities produce added margin that would more than cover the cost of a Bird-Dog multiple times over?
If the answer is yes to these two questions, then a Bird-Dog may be just the thing for your business.
I will cover more ways to increase your exposure to YOUR target prospects in coming issues.
