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1.2.2 Prospecting For New Business

What’s your mental image of a prospector?  A grizzled man in a bush hat, clutching a hammer and roaming around the outback, chipping away at rock outcrops for months on end? 

That’s the cold call, Yellow Pages equivalent of prospecting for new business. 

These days prospecting is done from satellites, planes and computer terminals with the result that exploration companies dramatically reduce the odds of finding the ore that they are looking for.

You can adopt the equivalent of these latest techniques when prospecting for new business.  Divide the prospecting into three stages.

  1. Stage 1 - Identify all the options for new business

  2. Stage 2 - Select the best of them

  3. Stage 3 - Start the drilling program

Stage 1 - Identifying the options

This is the business prospecting equivalent of deciding what metals you want to find and then analysing all known geological data to identify all the areas where these metals may exist.  The Growth Opportunities Grid provides a model to work from.

The growth opportunities grid

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Market Penetration - Selling more of the same products to the same customers

Product Development - Selling new products to existing customers

Market Development - Selling existing products to new market segments or into new geographical areas

Diversification - Selling new products into new markets

Vertigal Integration - May be forwards - orchardist goes into juice production, or backwards - wine maker grows own grapes

Networks, Strategic Alliances, Mergers, Acquisitions - Inorganic growth

Stage 2 - Evaluating the options

Using the Growth Opportunities Grid, you will generate many more options than you will have the resources to explore on the ground.  Therfore you will need to evaluate them to identify those that you wish to explore. 

Evaluate the prospects using the following acronym TCR3:

The message is to select your business prospecting program carefully – don’t put all your eggs into one basket but don’t make it so diverse that you lack the resources to do it properly.  Above all, does the program play to your strengths?

Stage 3 - The drilling program

Stages 1 and 2 are both designed to make your business prospecting program more focused.  But having decided where the best prospects are located, you need to go out into the field and drill. 

From here on in, it’s a numbers game.  The more holes you drill or business opportunities you explore, the greater the chances of success. 

What the preparatory work does is to raise the success rate so instead of contacting 50 prospects and turning 5 into customers, you may only have to contact 25 – or better still – contact 50 but turn 10 into customers.

The huge Olympic Dam mine in South Australia’s outback is located in an expanse of red sandhills.  There is no rock anywhere.  The original owners, Western Mining, decided to drill there as a result of a geologist’s PhD thesis on sedimentary hosted copper deposits of the type found in Zambia and Poland.  WMC drilled 15 holes at the spot where the copper was predicted to be some hundreds of metres below the surface.  Nothing.  They decided to drill another hole, only this time, deeper still.  The drill intercepted the massive ore body that is now Olympic Dam.

Good prospecting! 

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