It turned out that he was the owner of a local company that was struggling with sales and adding to the prospect base.  I asked him what he was doing to fine tune his Business Development efforts to channel more sales to his various vertical markets.  Initially I was met with a blank stare, and then a very uncomfortable if not weak response, “Our marketing department is on this.”

We talked a little more and I came to realize he’d let his Biz Dev efforts fall off over the past few years; not because he didn’t think it was important, but because he was channeling more money into marketing and selling to a diminishing customer base.  There wasn’t a real effort, with the exception of some print advertising, to generate targeted new leads.

I told him that I was of the opinion that Business Development operations within a company are like a high-performance car, they require constant maintenance to stay in perfect working order.  Just like in sales, a business needs to have the metrics in place to see how it’s business development efforts are paying off.

A little more discussion revealed that his sales team had challenges prospecting, there was no real contact management system in place, and they didn’t have a lot of tools in place to help them be more successful in garnering new business.  I came to realize that this is an all too common occurrence when business achieve early success; sales people can fast become order takers and not prospecting machines.

My advice to him was simply to revisit the basics that got his company off the ground, look at a good CRM system, and develop a strategy for hunting out new business instead of waiting for it to come to him. That and I told him to call me!