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Sales Speak: Relationship Building: Systemizing Prospect Engagement
A prospect has been identified and qualified. Now what? Building rapport with prospective or existing clients and referral sources requires intentional ongoing communication and patience. Relationship building with qualified targets is the longest stage of a sales cycle, sometimes taking up to two or three years to see results. When relationships fail to progress, it is most often due to a lack of follow-up.
Attorneys should be thoughtfully connecting with each qualified lead six times per year at minimum, with two of those times face-to-face. At times, outreach can feel awkward or even like an insurmountable hurdle because of time constraints. Fortunately, with minimal upfront investment time, systemizing one's outreach and identifying all resources available to leverage, can drastically improve results and help you add value to your targets.
Track
While it's impossible to know exactly how outreach to each contact will happen over the next year, it's important to plan for it and do it in a way that adds value to the person you're contacting. (The how is addressed later in this article.) Outreach should be treated like an important meeting or deadline and added to calendars with reminders, and a CRM if one is in place. Compile all targets by rank into one document (table or spreadsheet) for tracking purposes. Work with a business development colleague if you need help ranking contacts. At minimum, the document should include a target's name, company, rank, columns for each planned outreach (six minimum), and next steps. It can be helpful to have a column that records quick notes that include major events or personal details about the contact such as upcoming travel.
Be In the Know
Staying apprised of news and industry trends that impact prospects in real time creates opportunities to keep in touch in a meaningful way that adds value and shows that you are genuinely interested in their business and success. The key is to leverage technology to automate how we receive this information. Connect with each person on LinkedIn and follow the person's company. Check to see if your high priority targets are using other social media platforms like Twitter. If so, do the same as LinkedIn. Create Google alerts for the person and company. If one has access to law firm library services, ask what competitive intelligence tools are available. There are many tools that can send a customized rollup of news. All of this allows us to identify opportunities to thoughtfully reach out to prospects with minimal investment time.
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