This week’s outline continues the biz-dev theme, this time with a generic framework for lead segmentation. Although developed for colleagues in the consulting industry, slight variations have been used by salespeople in the industrial/manufacturing sectors, software marketing, and other areas.

Blah, blah, blah… why does anyone care about lead segmentation, right? Three reasons:

• You have to know how to deploy deploy marketing resources to the people most likely to buy… or you’ll fail.

• You have to let potential customers know what the next steps are and encourage them to take those steps… or you’ll fail.
• You have to have some idea yourself what a customer needs to know at each step of the sales cycle… or you’ll fail.

In other words, you need to divide the swamp/pie/universe/whatever of your customers into… segments. Here’s a quick way to do it.
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Business development (any sales function, actually) is a lot like dating. Or hooking up. Or whatever the kids call it these days.

• You can stand outside the supermarket, asking every passer-by to kiss you — but it’s hard work and you’re going to get slapped a lot on the way to that first kiss. (Corallary: People would rather go out with someone they know than with a stranger.)
• Politeness and attentiveness count.
• You hold hands before you kiss, and you kiss before things get busy.
• Once things do get serious, there’s a correlation between how well you knew each other beforehand and the success of the subsequent relationship.

All of this is a way of reinforcing the following points:
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Because this is the first week of the Friday outline feature — and because this is so closely related to the first outline on proposal contents — I’m making today a two-fer with the outline below. This time around the topic is proposal processes: What to look at and how to divvy up the work, from the time an RFP first comes in the door until you put it in FedEx.

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Being a creature of habit and schedule, I like recurring blog features. And, as someone asked for a lot of advice, I like to boil things down to outlines.

Which brings us to the first regular feature of Engage: the Friday outline.

Each week, I’ll post an outline relevant to management, business development, marketing, or PR. And because I’m all about priming the pump, I’ll kick things off with three outlines this week.

First up: Creating a great new-business proposal. I’m often asked how to put together winning proposals, either as part of counsel given to clients or water-cooler conversations with colleagues launching their own consulting careers. While best practices are going to vary a bit from industry to industry, the following outline can win work if executed strongly.
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Talk to PR and marketing agency types, and you’ll hear all manner of moans and groans over Requests For Propopsals (RFPs) or their lesser-seen siblings, the Request For Information (RFI) or Request For Quote (RFQ).

Why? Well, part of it is just Pollyanna-ish thinking about how business comes in the door — a surprising number of agencies grow their practices through purely organic networking and word-of-mouth marketing. This isn’t a bad move (more on that in another post), but it’s hard to be known by all the right people all the time. Now and then, a great piece of work will come up and you’re going to have to walk through the beauty pageant just like everyone else.

But the other reason agencies sometimes shy away from competitive bids is a little more basic: There are a lot of unreasonable, unclear or otherwise undesirable RFPs out there. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

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A weekend conversation about social media and the value PR brings to the table got me thinking about our industry’s value cascade — how we transmit value to clients and employers under the best scenarios, vs some less-than-best variants. Here’s what I think it looks like on the consulting side:

Ideally, we deliver expertise, which drives the formation of custom strategies. These strategies, combined with access, deliver results and value.

If we lack any one of the three legs of the proverbial stool, we can still make things work, albeit with different approaches. Read more …

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