What is Your On-the-Move Strategy?

An important part of the MarketLauncher service offering involves building and validating a client’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) lists. This is a critical step required when prospecting for a complex sale. If you aren’t targeting the right accounts and the right decision-makers, even the best sales strategies will fail to achieve optimum results. Building a great TAM list takes time and focus but the rewards more than make up for the effort.  

Once lists are created, one of the next questions we ask our clients is, “What is your "on-the-move" strategy?” That question usually leads to a deeper conversation about the value of treating this carefully cultivated list as a strategic advantage.  

Change Is Constant 

We all know that executives regularly move on to new opportunities. The average tenure for senior executives is difficult to pin down, especially since “the great resignation” skewed a lot of the data. A quick search led us to stats that ranged broadly. We saw average tenure quoted as everything from 18 months to 3 to 6 years; and 6 to 10 years for CEOs and CFOs.   
 
From our own outreach efforts across a broad range of client companies, one thing we have noted in the past couple of years is a lot of movement in the C-suite in healthcare. These executives in particular are moving around now more than ever. But it’s important to remember that in any industry, the relationships you forge, and the intel you gather about your prospects moves with them. And that is where an on-the-move strategy comes into play. It's important to keep your pulse on all of that movement… knowing when your point-of-contact leaves, where they are going, and who is taking their place. 

A Three-Step “On-the-Move” Strategy 

Here are three ways you can maintain contact with potential buyers as they move around: 

1. Meet the new team members. Map the decision-making structure in the accounts you are targeting and proactively work to gain entry to new decision-makers. Ask for introductions. 
2. Follow the leader. Have a systematic process for following individuals from place to place so they stay in your biz dev pipeline even when leaving a client or target account. The goodwill that has been created with that person over time is too valuable to lose. Flag contacts in your CRM when they leave an account, and schedule timely research to find where they landed. LinkedIn is a great resource for this. 
3. Stay in touch and top of mind. Use omni-channel communication to stay top of mind with this audience. ML sends a monthly email directing clients and prospects to our thought leadership content and we also publish social media posts. For those contacts that you have come to know well, personally reach out by email, phone, and text to share intel and assets that you know are likely to be relevant to them.  

Proven Results 

The ML team has our own on-the-move strategy. Seven years ago, we switched from being reactive to this group (waiting for them to call us when they had a need at a new company) to using intelligent, proactive outreach. This one change in our strategy, immediately doubled the amount of annual new business. And then it doubled again the following year. And then within 2 years after that it doubled again. This is a strategy that builds on itself because rather than churning your prospect database, instead you are allowing it to grow bigger. And the greater percentage of that prospect database that are fans (people who know you and your work) the higher the closing ratio when you pitch proposals to them. 
  
For the past year and a half our market has been unpredictable. However, ML’s on-the-move strategy has kept our new business activity healthy and productive. In the first half of 2024, we brought on 17 new accounts and 12 were returning clients we’ve worked with in the past, a third of which had been on the move and brought us into new accounts. Two were accounts we had not worked with in over 6 years, but our proactive outreach kept ML top of mind. 

An On-the-Move Strategy Keeps You Connected to Valuable Allies 

When our clients provide the ML team with a list of contacts who have moved on so that we can re-engage them, we do the research to find out where they went and reach out to pre-qualify if they are still a fit. When a new executive comes on board at a prospect account, we name-drop conversations we’ve had with their predecessors.  

One client recently gave their ML team a wish list of accounts they want us to try to get them back into new C-suite contacts. Within a couple of weeks, we had already secured meetings with decision-makers at two of those logos. 

Want to test out an on-the-move strategy? Give us a list of 100 contacts and 60 days and we will help you reconnect and uncover new sales opportunities with your old friends. 

Thanks for reading. 

Lara