Business development has typically been a numbers game -- a formula derived by tracking activities and successes. The formula predicts that X percent of the number of prospects you contact will grant you an appointment, Y percent will qualify for a presentation, and Z percent will become a customer. The "numbers" make the results of your activities predictable, and they will tell you how many additional contacts you have to make on average if you want to close a specific number of additional accounts.

The numbers tell a story, but they don't tell a complete story. And, the numbers can be misleading. They focus on the quantity of activity, but not the quality of activity. Tracking activities and successes reveals how hard you are working, not how smart you are working.

An underlying premise of the "numbers" approach is that everybody who could conceivably use your product or service is a prospect on whom to call. If you sell materials handling equipment, for example, then every warehouse operation, every manufacturing facility, every parts distributor, every shipping facility, (you get the idea) is considered a prospect. Maybe they are; odds-on, they aren't. More likely, there are aspects of your products and services -- reflecting the core capabilities of your company -- that are more appealing, useful, necessary, required, or beneficial to a subset of the "everybody" list of prospects. That subset represents your ideal prospects on whom to focus your prospecting efforts.

To make the numbers work for you and realize the most from your business development activities, target the prospects for whom you can provide the "best-fit" products and services to meet their real, perceived, or yet undiscovered needs. Identifying and calling on those prospects transforms working the numbers hard to working the numbers smart.

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