You’ve refined your sales Target Filter and all of your criteria. Now you are ready for some very important parts of your whale hunting business development process–all related to research!
And if your company is small, that probably strikes terror in your heart. It sounds hard, and it sounds time-consuming, and it sounds expensive, right? Well it is time-consuming, but you can make it easy and inexpensive.
I always recommend that you team up with a college or university Business School to find a class that needs a real-world project or an intern who needs experience. If you have internal resources, this is a marketing or sales-support function.
The tip for today is to work with a student team, an internal team, or a librarian to assess your criteria within relevant business databases to produce lists of companies that meet your criteria.
Let me emphasize–at this stage all of your data should be free. If you decide later to purchase high-caliber sales data for a particular industry or market, that is fine, but at the outset you can find 95% of what you need by working through databases available at your local university or public library.
The research is all online, Internet based; however, it is worth a trip TO a library to talk with a reference librarian about what you are trying to accomplish. Don’t forget your local or statewide Chamber of Commerce as another source of data.
How are you identifying your whale targets? Are you satisfied with your process?
