5-Step Strategy to Turn Prospects into Profitable Business Relationships

Published on 04 December 2024

I’d like to share another business development tip today. Today, I’d like to talk about a structure that can be used to help meet and build relationships and close more prospects.

You invest a lot of time in meeting new people and building relationships, and over time you may lose track of people. And over the years, you may have developed a long list of targets that people that you have met but you just, you don’t have any action. So you’ve got lots of targets, but no action.

And I’d like to suggest that there is a structure that you can develop and learn that will help you convert the names of these targets into actual profitable business relationships.

So the structure works as follows. There’s five steps.

First, you meet people. You meet people in a variety of ways. You meet them through organizations. You meet them through people that you know. And then as you meet them, you want to keep track of their names. You want to put them into a contact database, ideally just so that you remember who they are and you don’t lose track of them. You might even take the most important ones and put them in a target list. We recommend a target list of no more than 10 people at a time.

So now you have this list of targets. And the next step is building trust. And building trust is something that you do over time. And often it comes as having conversations, learning more about their needs and demonstrating your credibility, your knowledge and certain characteristics that you have, like your personality and your empathy and your understanding and knowledge of a particular topic. So you want to build trust and then you want to qualify the target. You want to make sure that the time that you spend in your business development effort is devoted to people who are genuinely good targets.

So you might have a series of questions that you ask to make sure that you’re dealing with qualified targets. A qualified target is basically somebody who has the need and the authority to make a decision, and the capacity to afford your services. And of course, if you’re getting most of your business from referral sources, then a qualified target is someone who does business primarily with the kinds of people that you’re looking to meet.

So you want to qualify them. And once you’ve determined that someone is a quality target, the next step is to get approved. And what that means is you have to find out what the steps are to get approved with a particular either a prospect or a referral source. You can simply ask the question, what are the criteria that you use in working with providers like myself? And find out what they offer so that you can get approved.

You can’t get business until you’re approved. And the final step in this process is the close. That’s where you ask for the business. As we’ve talked about many times in the past, you can make a low barrier to entry offer. It’s much easier to get work from somebody if you can give them something that allows them to get started. And once somebody gets started, even if it’s on a small matter, It makes it much easier to build the relationship after that.

So that is the five step process. I recommend that you learn this and you can look at every single target that you have on your target list or in your contact database and ask yourself, have we built trust? Have we qualified this target? Have we gotten approved? Is it time to make an offer? And you will then always know what the next step is with every target.

Testimonials