Research Techniques for getting to know your prospect
Research Techniques
How can you relate to your prospect company? How can you really know what is best for the company? Researching your prospect company is essential for full, well-rounded understanding.
Do your homework
Researching about your prospect company must be completely on your end. Keep in mind that prospects, especially top executives, have minimal interest in educating you about their company. Their expectation is for you to come in with a solid knowledge of their company. This takes a lot of self-motivation from you.
What to look for and what to use
- The first and most obvious tool is to get to know their company website. Really explore the site instead of just looking for obvious things. Take a look at all news releases, management team biographies, Board of Director biographies, and Investor relations (annual reports, presentations to investors, and so on).
- Using other websites, get to know the company’s profile. A great website is Hoover’s. This is a premium website because it allows you to set-up alerts to track the company, stocks and news companies. This will keep you up to date and in the know about their current standing. Hoover’s also has a build-a-list capability for identifying companies by demographic, size, location and provides a new e-mail capability for 7.5M contacts through JigSaw.
- LexisNexis is a very useful resource for U.S. and International company searches, news stories, personal property searches, etc
- For insider information, a great place to get private company is Dun and Bradstreet. This provides company profiles and financials for U.S. companies.
- Don’t forget to use the power of Google! Google Alerts is always a great tool to get real-time updates.
