5 Keys to Building a Book of Business in Tough Economic Times

Financial and economic challenges across industries and geographies are making it harder to grow business opportunities for professionals at all levels. If you’re in the early stages of building your portfolio of work, it can be even tougher. Focusing on a few key ways to shift your mindset and your approach to business development can help.    

Use your time intentionally and with specific goals

You want to be focused in your business development efforts, rather than being stretched too thin with activities that are unlikely to produce meaningful ROI. Start by asking yourself what is realistic with your time and budget. Then hone in on the activities that are most likely to be productive for you. For example, you want to be at the meetings or conferences where you most likely be face-to-face with clients that are on your target list, not events where your competition outnumbers your prospects.

Consider also what you can do to engage most effectively with your strongest potential clients. It might be an email check-in for some, and a phone call for others. Also determine what approach may be best given where they are in their work and what is going on with their company. For instance, if your goal is to get work through a company’s new senior executive who you just met but they aren’t yet sure how they will engage firms like yours, you may want to think about what you can offer to do to support them in their transition to the role.

Have a strategy but be ready to change it

You should have a plan for which prospective clients you are going to approach, and how you are going to do so. But you must also be willing to adapt that plan when circumstances warrant. For example, you may have been pursuing a longtime prospect who has repeatedly told you that they want to send you work. But after multiple outreach attempts, perhaps even some free advice on specific matters or lunch-and-learn sessions, no paid work has materialized. At some point, it’s time to stop focusing so much on that prospect and to move on.

Too often, professionals believe that they are so close to securing an engagement that they lose sight of the need to be making efforts on multiple fronts, instead committing themselves to only one or two lines of pursuit. Companies change leadership and product lines, especially in the face of economic headwinds. You need to be prepared to pivot when the landscape for a particular company or industry changes. Take time periodically to ask what is or isn’t working with your business development efforts. Don’t hold onto the ones that no longer seem likely to succeed, instead putting them aside for now while you follow other paths.

Seek feedback

It’s tough to ask someone why they decided not to select you for an engagement. Maybe you’re puzzled as to why they went to one of your colleagues instead of directly approaching you. Or perhaps you can’t figure out why they opted for another firm with less experience and capability than yours. But hard though it might be to reach out and see if the person making the decision about the work would be willing to share with you what you could have done differently, you need to do it. Gathering information about what worked and didn’t work in your pitch, and what factors in the client’s decision were or were not within your control, will help you better evaluate your strategy going forward.

It could be that the client’s financial position meant that it had to go with a lower priced competitor. Or it might be the case that another firm already had experience working with the client on a particular issue, and so was better positioned to handle a matter quickly. You’ll also want to consider if the client’s response tells you your firm isn’t well-suited for handling certain types of work for a client for whatever reason. Or if there are areas of work that you should be pursuing instead. In short, you have to learn what you could do differently, and then consider how to respond to the feedback you receive, both in your dealings with this client and with others.

Know your prospect before you pitch

Responding to RFPs or RFIs without really knowing what the client is looking for or how they want you to structure your proposal isn’t a great strategy for business development. You might think you know what they are looking for but you want to dig deeper and do your due diligence. Clients want you to understand what they are looking for and their priorities. The pressures on their business, the way they work, and how you meet them where they are can be critical. When in doubt about these factors, ask questions to see what you might need to do differently to craft a better proposal.

A client of mine once interrupted an attorney pitching his services based on how effective he had been for other clients, saying: “You keep telling me how well your approach works with other clients, but that isn’t helpful at our company. We need something different.” The client felt that the attorney had not appreciated some of the company’s unique constraints, including its ongoing restructuring and much of its legal work being handled in-house. Without being aware of those factors and incorporating them into his presentation, that attorney lost the chance to make an effective pitch.

Make a clear and definitive ask

Too often, professionals are frustrated when they have worked to form a relationship with a potential client, or believe they have a reliable relationship in place already, but the client doesn’t engage them when an opportunity arises. But many of those same professionals are reluctant to end a great meeting or well-received presentation by making a specific ask or call-to-action. They believe they’ve presented great credentials, and that the request to be engaged for work is obvious. Or they are concerned that following up after the meeting to ask about the status of a proposal will be perceived by the potential client as annoying or unnecessary. Or they simply forget to make the ask.

Of course, timing and tone are everything when it comes to closing a deal. But you need to find ways to ask, and to ask clearly. You might say: “I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to talk with you about this work, and I believe I’m well-positioned to do it for you. I hope you’ll ask me to lead this matter.” Or you could close with: “It sounds like we offer many of the things you’re looking for on this project. We would like to be considered for any RFPs that you issue.”  And following up, professionally and politely, to ask about the status of the selection process or the timing for deciding on who to engage, is critical. You don’t want to make the connection or secure the meeting that you’ve been seeking, only to not speak up to state your goal and advocate for yourself. Building your book of business requires being deliberate at every step.