I was asked a great question during a recent conversation with a founder: When should you take a spearfishing approach to finding new customers and when should you use a shotgun?

It depends on what you’re hunting.

Large vs small

How important is a particular company to you? What is the payoff for landing this account? When thinking of this payoff I recommend thinking of lifetime value (in terms of profit ideally not just revenue.) Maybe the account also has strategic value, like a key new logo you want to brag about, maybe to get other firms like that on your bandwagon.

Once you have a sense of how important the account is, you will have a better sense of how much to invest in getting a meeting there. You will want to apply some kind of math. For example, if on average we close 1 in 5 accounts we meet with, and the lifetime value of that account is $50k in profit, then a meeting is worth something like $10,000.

I probably only want to invest a fraction of the value of the account right now to land it. Let’s say I decide I am OK investing up to $1,000 to get a meeting here. $1,000 may sound like a lot of money to just get a meeting but I’ve seen situations where this is the cost for large accounts.

Swords, cartoons, golf clubs and salespeople

If you’re after a big account and you realize you could be in the “$1,000 per meeting club” then doing some “unreasonable” direct marketing campaigns, could actually be totally reasonable.

As Stu Heinecke points out an entrepreneur (we both know) used to send Fortune 500 executives customized swords! Not cheap at all! Stu himself has made many a customized framed cartoon to get a meeting (also not cheap, when you value in the time), and many marketing programs have utilized golf clubs.

All this sounds crazily expensive and extravagant, except that the default out there is to have very expensive salespeople spend hours of their time trying to get meetings. When you consider a senior salesperson might easily cost $150,000 per year when fully loaded and divide this by 2,000 hours you come up with an hourly rate of $75. If this salesperson spends five hours trying to get a meeting with an account (which spread out over time is on the low side), then that’s $375, not including any marketing expenses, travel, etc.

Email may not be enough

Email is free, but it’s not really. Email is largely free to send but it takes plenty of time. Time to develop, time to write, time to research the prospect (assuming some customization) and time to send.

The real problem with email is there’s way too much of it. Way too much of it in your prospect’s inbox. The success rates with email are getting smaller and smaller. To have success you need a lot of it! Can it still work? It can but it’s not necessarily cheaper, once you factor in all the time it takes, than using mechanisms you pay real money for, which may well have higher success rates.

Spearfishing or shotgun? For large accounts, I’d pack my spear and consider sending some chocolates or handwritten notes. For small accounts, some version of shotgun may work fine, but consider media beyond email. These days getting through to small accounts takes some work.