Achieving new business development success takes time and patience. These resources are frequently in high demand, but there are few better ends to which your time and patience can be devoted than in developing new business. Without new business, your sales numbers and ultimately the revenue of the organization for which you sell will falter. Here are four tips for ensuring that you can achieve new business development success with your outreach.

New Business Development Success Tip #1: Test Your Attitude

New business development success depends on attitude above all else. Although internally you may be confident of success, it is important to double check how that attitude is coming across to prospects during your first contact. Prospects can easily tune out if they feel that they are being given a hard sell or a lofty pitch. No sales person sets out to deliberately condescend to new prospects, but it is possible for your attitude to be unintentionally sending the wrong message. Try hearing your message with the prospect’s ears and make sure that your confidence is coming across as confidence, not patronization.

New Business Development Success Tip #2: Create a Most Wanted List

There are leaders in every industry, and as a sales leader, you want to do business with the like-minded. So does everyone else in your particular industry, making it more difficult to access the decision makers at the top. To remind yourself how important it is to prospect for quality and set a new bar for yourself, create a most wanted list of the ten people or companies you would most like to add to your new business development success story and start pursuing that business through whatever avenues are available to you.

New Business Development Success Tip #3: Learn How to Stack Your Message

When you get through to a prospect who you have been actively pursuing, you might be drawn to provide talking points on everything you have thought of that might be interesting to that person. Afterwards, you are sure that at least one of your well thought out points got through; the prospect, on the other hand, will probably walk away from the contact feeling overwhelmed, with nothing to focus on from the tangle of information he or she just received.

To avoid leaving your prospects with this feeling, stack your message appropriately, starting with high-level information and working down to foundational knowledge according to the interest level and language the prospect is using. Start with a one minute elevator pitch, and then work on developing a longer pitch for when the prospect shows interest. Work your way up by one minute intervals and practice these different pitches so that when the time is right you are ready to use the pitch most tailored to your prospect’s interest level and time constraints.

New Business Development Success Tip #4: Stay in Tune with the Strategy

In most organizations, the marketing department is supporting the sales department by sending out strategic messages representing the organization’s viewpoint and long term goals. Sales people who stray away from their organization’s core messages may be losing out on opportunities for new business development success simply by confusing the prospect. Make sure that you stay in touch with your organization’s marketing messages and long term strategy to avoid involuntarily confusing your prospects.

By practicing the keys to new business development success you can reduce the time it takes to reach and convert new prospects and streamline your business development efforts. This frees up more of your time to attract more new business, leading to a positive earnings and revenue cycle driven by your constantly improving sales numbers.