Financial marketing

Drilling for Oil

20th November 2016

What made Jean Paul Getty wealthy was his tenacity and commitment to drill further and deeper than anyone else had ever done before him. Not content with discovering an oil seam, Getty didn’t stop drilling around the area until he found a bigger seam and then another and another. Most entrepreneurs and their investors would have been more than content with 1 million barrels a year from a plot of land, Getty wasn’t and kept on until the equivalent plot yielded an astonishing 16 million barrels a year.

Are you like Jean Paul Getty? Do you maximise every business opportunity? Do you ask all of the questions you could do? Would asking three-times the number of questions, yield three times the opportunity?

Many companies are content with ‘striking oil’, getting the initial new business win. They work hard, satisfy the client’s business requirement and move on. The issue is that had they asked more questions at the outset they would have discovered several other projects, perhaps even more lucrative than the first.

You can get away with a new business strategy in good times, even prosper with the right momentum. In these times when the pipeline may be slower, when firms merge, sectors polarise and the number of players in the market is reduced, there is even more reason to cross-sell and upsell than ever before.

JP Getty said: “To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business”. The same can be said for your clients’ needs.