How to Do Agile Prospecting
What is Business Development?
If you're still waterfall prospecting in 2024...
You're probably going to lose a lot more.
Waterfall moves prospects through pipeline rigidly.
Every prospect must go through...
1. Discovery
2. Demonstration
3. Solutioning
Downsides to waterfall prospecting...
• Frustrates the prospect. They don't want to go backward.
• Wastes resources expending prospector time
• Serves your needs, not the prospect's
Agile prospecting meets prospects where they are in their journey.
Waterfall prospecting is a vestige of the industrial era.
Agile prospecting is an information age prospecting method.
Buyers are now more enabled to Self-Navigate the buying journey.
66% of prospects prefer self-navigation (2021 McKinsey)
Agile prospecting adopts principles of the Agile software development manifesto published in 2001.
1. Focus on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs
2. Deliver value early and often over waiting for perfection
3. Learn through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
4. Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies
5. Responding to change over following a static plan
Agile prospecting increases efficiency and effectiveness by continually managing the allocation of prospecting resources based on lead score and PWIN.
Agile prospectors don’t navigate the NICE model in a rigid sequence.
Instead, they meet the prospect wherever they are in the NICE model.
For example, a self-navigated prospect may already know the corporation meets their explicit requirements. In this case, the prospector meets the prospect at NICE stage two and exchanges valuable content serving the prospect’s intrinsic requirements to maximize the Prospect Intimacy Level (PIL).
The prospector's mission is to rapidly respond fill the gaps and offer fresh perspectives about the prospect’s pain points, problems, and possible solutions the prospect may have never discovered during their self-navigation journey.
This Performance Based Budgeting method prioritizes resources on prospects with the highest lead scores, PILs, and PWINs.
Tony Gray, BDP
Author of the Business Development Body of Knowledge
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