When is the right time to approach a potential client?

One of the parts of business development I have become increasingly interested in is timing.

A studio might do all of the strategic work properly. It knows which markets it wants to develop, has identified the organisations it would genuinely like to work with and understands the people inside those organisations who matter.

That still leaves a difficult question.

Where should it focus today?

Imagine there are 100 companies on that list and every one of them is a legitimate potential client. Most traditional new-business processes effectively treat those companies in the same way. They sit in the same CRM, receive the same priority and eventually somebody works through the list.

But the real world isn't static.

Something may be happening inside company 17 that makes it much more interesting this month than company 43, even though both are equally good fits on paper.

That is where signals become useful.

A signal is context, not proof that somebody is ready to buy

I think this distinction is particularly important because the language around “intent data” can make it sound as though technology can somehow tell you exactly who is about to commission an architect.

I don't believe that.

If a company appoints a new director, starts hiring, enters a new market or announces a change in the business, none of those things automatically means it needs your studio.

The same applies to activity from people. Somebody viewing your profile or engaging with something you've shared does not mean there is suddenly a project waiting for you.

What those things can do is give you context that wasn't there before.

Perhaps the new person has responsibility for an area in which the practice has strong experience. Perhaps the expansion connects with a market you understand particularly well. Perhaps somebody who has been loosely aware of the studio is beginning to show more interest.

The useful response isn't automatically to send them a message.

It is to look more closely and decide whether anything has genuinely changed.

Sometimes the best action is no action at all

This is one of the reasons I don't want technology making the final decision.

A system can surface information far more efficiently than a founder manually checking 100 companies every morning. It can help organise what is happening and bring something interesting to the surface.

It can't understand every nuance of the relationship.

Do we already know this person? What happened the last time we spoke? Is what has changed actually relevant to us? Would getting in touch now feel natural, or would it feel opportunistic? Do we have anything useful to contribute?

Sometimes you look at all of that and decide there is no reason to do anything.

That's fine.

The point of better intelligence isn't to manufacture more outreach. It is to make better decisions about where attention goes.

That matters because studio founders don't have unlimited time

The founder of an architecture or design practice may also be leading projects, reviewing work, meeting clients, recruiting, dealing with fees and trying to run the company.

Business development has to compete with all of it.

If that founder has two hours available this week, I don't think the best use of those two hours is necessarily working through a static list in order.

I would rather help them understand where there are reasons to look more closely.

This is one of the ways technology can genuinely improve a relationship-led approach to new business without making it less human. It handles some of the enormous amount of information around the market so that the person can spend more time thinking about what it means.

People are often more important than companies

There is another reason timing becomes interesting in architecture.

People move.

Someone you knew at one developer joins another. A former client takes on a bigger role. Somebody you've stayed in touch with suddenly becomes responsible for a market the studio wants to enter.

If your new-business system only understands companies, much of that value disappears every time somebody changes jobs.

I prefer to think about the company and the relationship together.

A person you've known for five years isn't suddenly a cold prospect because the logo next to their name changed. In some cases, the move makes the relationship more relevant than it was before.

This is also why the language of “leads” has never felt particularly natural to me in this industry. Relationships have history, and that history can matter years later in ways a conventional sales funnel doesn't capture particularly well.

The right time to become visible is often much earlier

There is also a difference between the right time to start a conversation and the right time for somebody to become aware of you.

Ideally, when a genuinely relevant moment appears, the studio isn't introducing itself from nowhere.

The person may already have seen the work, read something useful from the founder, heard the practice mentioned, met somebody from the team or had a small interaction on LinkedIn. None of those things necessarily created a project, but they created familiarity.

That is why I increasingly see visibility and proactive business development as two sides of the same thing.

One helps the right people understand and remember the studio over time. The other helps the studio recognise when there may be a sensible reason to move a relationship forward.

Neither guarantees an appointment.

Together, however, they make the process considerably more intentional than simply waiting for the phone to ring or contacting everybody on the same list.

For me, the most useful business-development question therefore isn't simply “Who should we contact?”

It is “Where does our attention deserve to go now, and why?”

Once a studio can answer that consistently, business development starts to feel very different.

By Richard Hall, Founder & CEO of Grand House.