Opening a market when there is nothing.

Before prospecting: knowing what had already been tried

My first task was not to call. I took stock of everything that had been tried before me: how it had been done, what it had cost, what it had brought in, and what had failed.

It looks slow when you want quick results. In fact, it is what provided the ammunition: a documented precedent becomes an argument, and a documented failure stops you selling the same thing again to the same kind of person.

Then building the tools, which did not exist

• Choosing the tools and platforms from what was within reach of a small company, with its real budget constraints
• Building the CRM from scratch: structure, stages, qualifying fields, and feeding it with new prospects
• Creating the sales documents for first contact, which did not exist in any form
• Finding the right contacts and their details, company by company. And when the network could shorten the path, we used it: our professional and personal contacts opened several doors a cold call would not have opened, including McDonald's
• Testing new niches, so as not to stay stuck on the only segment the company thought was its own
• A sales strategy set with management, reviewed against quarterly objectives

Then selling

Phone and written prospecting, qualification, meetings, costed proposals, follow-ups. More than 100 companies contacted, more than 15 leads taken to an advanced stage, and proposals scoped up to CHF 200,000.

In concrete terms: a tender with McDonald's Switzerland that went a long way, a quote of CHF 22,052 for the Foire du Valais, and open discussions with retail brands and events in French-speaking Switzerland.

The problem

In the US climate insurance market, the companies BP Corp needed to reach ranged from a nine-person start-up to a group of 23,000 employees. Sending a generic message to an organisation like that leads nowhere: the difficulty is not getting in touch, it is knowing who with.

What I did

I rebuilt the organisation chart of each target organisation, from public sources only: the roles, who they report to, and the likely path between the person who has the problem and the person who signs.

• Around twenty organisations mapped, from 9 to 23,000 people
• Identifying the decision-maker, the influencer and the end user, who are rarely the same person in large organisations
• A reasoned contact order rather than a flat list

What it produced

On the campaigns the client ran with these lists, which it used to judge the quality of the contacts: open rates of 67 to 100% and click rates of 67 to 88%, depending on the vertical. These figures are for targeted volumes, not mass mailings, which is precisely the point of the method.

The situation

A digital services offer to take to shopkeepers and independents who have neither the time nor the technical skills, and a team of four with no established sales process.

What I do

• Phone prospecting and leading client meetings, in person and by video call
• Qualifying incoming requests and scoping the need before handing it to the technical side, so that my brother can build instead of sorting out requests
• Structuring the CRM and coordinating sales follow-up across the four members of the team
• Producing and standardising the sales documents: costed proposals and order forms, on a single data-driven template, so that an amount is never typed twice
• First-level technical support backing up the technical side, and teaching myself to build website mock-ups so I can show clients what the result will look like before they commit

Where it stands

A sales process that exists and can be handed over, where everything used to live in people's heads and separate inboxes. This is not a past experience I am describing: it is ongoing, and it can be checked.

What I have built does not only serve my own sales. The list, the call, the qualification and the follow-up feed the whole team's diary: some of the meetings I book are led by a partner, and that is the part that gets handed over.

And to answer the question that always comes next. It is a family venture, four of us, born because we knew how to build websites and people asked us for them. It will stay what it is, a side activity. What I am looking for is elsewhere: a stable job where I can put what I have built over the last few years at the service of an organisation, and keep developing my skills there.

nexel.ch