Okay, hang in there on this one. It’s loooong.

Let's say you have 1000 companies in a prospecting list.

Let's assume that those prospects review their agency provisions every couple of years (I know something like rebranding, or a whole new website will be less regular, but plenty of other things are more regular, so cool your jets, just change the maths to work for you).

And now let's assume that a review or an agency selection process takes around a month, with a window of a few weeks where approaching them would be likely to get a response (with a decent value proposition linked to their commercial outcome offering).

This means that on any given day, A little under 5% of your 1000 prospect list are reviewing and considering approaches. So your list on any given day has 50 active prospects.

This excludes prospects where your approach provokes a review. It happens, but rarely enough (by comparison to the organic reviews) that we can disregard for this.

Of that 50 prospects, 80% will select an agency referred to them by a peer. There are numerous studies that come to this conclusion, including a huge one by the American Association od Advertising Agencies. The remainder will either have a review process with no referred potential supplier – or the referred supplier will make a mess of their opportunity.

That leaves 10.

BUT…

You don’t know which 10.

So you have to swing for the fence on all 50.

The problem there is that it brings your conversion rate down and massively exposes the inefficiency of cold outreach.

So what do you do?

Well, if you contact each prospect every 20 days, you’ll never miss a “window”. But you’ll irritate a proportion of your database.

So you can make your interval short at first (maybe 10 days, then 20 days, then longer). And while you’re at it, make your secondary outcome perhaps using a PS. in email 2 or 3 to find out when they tend to review. Not many will tell you, but those who do can be taken out of the interval-based contact and moved to a more qualified list. So now your list is more efficient, because each time you discover when a review is happening, your average contact-time-accuracy goes up.

Eventually, your 1000-prospect list will yield a win, because the ~5% reviewing ratio is true throughout the 720 days, and your intervals mean you’ll get your timing right at least once for 80%+ of the prospects (accounting for shorter reviews, no reviews and people who opt out) within the window. And with a 6% meeting->conversion ratio (which is possible), you ought to win once if you only arrange 20 meetings in two years (this is with a +/- 100% margin for error in the conversion, and assuming that only 2% of your 1000 prospect list agree to give you permission to sell. These aren’t crazy numbers.

And that win is where your next referral might come from. How many of your clients give you referrals? How much is one more client generating referrals worth? Because the answers to those questions change everything. If you’re not asking for referrals, you should be. Today.

Waiting until you NEED new clients to commence outreach is the wrong thing to do, because of the inherent inefficiencies in the outcomes possible from cold outreach. Running solid cold outreach while you’re in a good place financially, with growth in mind, is the right approach. Because the simple fact that cold wins come from a mix of timing, value proposition and luck (along with your own tenacity and organisation skills!) means that you can’t make it go faster. You can increase volume (but this usually means less research and personalisation in your approach, reducing response rates) and enjoy larger numbers, but with that comes cost (both financially and the quality of the outreach).

But don’t forget: 160+ of your 1000 prospects won’t hire a referral. They’ll hire someone that contacted at the right time, addressing the right commercial concern.

What’s stopping that from being you?