Business development is a numbers game

A few months after creating the company, we had won our first project but the paperwork wasn't signed yet.

We had started off so strong, but now we were in the doldrums where we had meetings that weren't quite leads, or leads that weren't quite contracts.

At some point, I added up the number of one-on-one meetings I had had in the past month: just ten. What?

I had felt like I was doing so much, but I wasn't doing the single most important thing: I wasn't talking to potential clients.

After that rude awakening, I became more disciplined and methodical about reaching out. We built a CRM so we could track contacts and meetings.

Once I started talking to people, it felt like our opportunities really started to grow.

But it's easy to lose the momentum and lose the focus, so this is a discipline we have to revisit constantly.