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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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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