In the bevy of Alaska-based reality shows are two great nuggets: Gold Rush and Bering Sea Gold. I love these shows, maybe because they struggle with the same things that many of our corporate clients struggle with: finding an incredibly valuable nugget of gold in a huge pile of dirt.
These guys move thousands of yards of dirt, and suck up a good portion of the Bering Sea floor to find kernels – on a good day – but most specks of gold that, together, add up to an incredibly valuable vial of gold.
There’s a process:
- A landowner tests his land to see where it has the potential to produce a significant amount of gold.
- The bulldozer and backhoe work together to shovel acres of dirt into the trommel.
- The trommel shakes the big rocks and the dirt, allowing the heavy gold specks to fall into the fibers of the miners moss.
- The moss sheets are rinsed by hand in buckets of water, leaving a layer of fine silt – and gold – in the bottom of the bucket.
- The silt is washed again with a little more water, again allowing the gold to again settle on the bottom as the silt washes off.
- Finally, the gold is heated to let the last of the water evaporate so the exact weight can be known.
It takes tons of dirt to go through this process that results in two ounces of gold at the end of the day. A GOOD day.
There’s a reason our company is called Rally Prospecting. We:
- Work with the business owner (or guy in charge) to determine what group of companies – based on size, geography and type – has the potential to produce a significant number of new customers.
- Find as many companies and people at those companies as we possibly can – so we can find the one who will engage in a conversation about doing business.
- Filter out bad email addresses and verify good ones.
- Continue to work the database with emails and phone calls to find the few prospects who are ready for a conversation.
- Hand those over to our clients.
Clients handle step 6: Evaporate those who aren’t interested or ready to buy, and close the deal on those who are.
This business has its own dirt, but at least we can work year-round, and we don’t have to wear a hardhat.
