Knowing your 5 Ws - Part 1: Who

So, you want to win new business? That’s great news, but to move that forward you’re going to want to build a picture so you know what good looks like for your business.

I’m going to use the five Ws as my framework to build the picture.

The first W is Who. The customer you are looking for.

To start with you’ll want to look at the sector – automotive, software development or health and beauty, as examples. Choose one to start with – just to keep you focused. 

The next step is to identify the size of business that’s right for you. Is it small companies with less than 10 staff, or is it much larger with 1000+ employees? Or anything in between.

This helps because job titles vary quite widely across different sizes of organisation, so it just narrows the field.

Now onto job titles… Take a look at your existing client list to help with this. What are the job titles for your clients? Who else is involved in the decision making? Who influences the decisions? Build a list of all the relevant job titles, as it’s worth building relationships with more than one person, particularly in bigger organisations. 

Of course, this is just the start, but you have already started to filter down your search to something a little more targeted.

We’ll move on to Where next time.