For Effective Prospecting, Use a Scorecard.

When you’re looking for new business, keep score. Otherwise, you won’t know whether you’re doing the right things.

Most of us have sales goals and some form of a “sales pipeline” to track closed deals, proposals and key prospects. But that is only part of the process. You need more.

Your networking/prospecting/marketing activities create the meetings that create the pipeline. Set goals for those activities.  Then, track them (systematically).

A detailed scorecard can measure the effectiveness of your business development effort and allow you to change course, if necessary. Without one, you’re simply guessing.

Where Do You Want to Go?

Let’s say you’re a business coach.  Your goal this quarter is to land five new clients.

First, determine the work effort needed to generate those clients.  Your objective is get meetings with prospects or with people who can introduce you to prospects.

Some meetings will be with potential prospects (“Suspects”). Others may be purely networking discussions.

Let’s say half of your meetings are with suspects. Half of these become genuine prospects. You send 80% of them proposals and 60% of the proposals close.  

To get five clients you’d need 40 meetings a quarter. That’s three meetings a week.

How do you get all those meetings? You go to networking events. You make phone calls. You make lots of introductions. You write. You give speeches. You make connections on Linkedin.

And then you measure all those things.

Develop a Score Card

Below is an example of a quarterly scorecard. It shows the results of your business development activities: closed deals, proposals, meetings. It also shows all the activities that drive those results. That means setting goals for all your business development activities.

Quarterly goals – even monthly goals- are too vague. Make your scorecard as granular as possible. Track your activities daily and keep a weekly scorecard.

Here is your weekly scorecard

 At the end of each week, you look at your activities to see whether you met your goals. Look at both quantity and quality. Did you do enough (quantity)? Was it effective (quality)?