You must have guessed by now, the ways to research a prospect I am talking here are web based. To do a successful background research for your prospect, all you need to do is follow the following steps:

Step 1:
As any web-based services it all starts with opening a web browser. Run your favorite browser and type hoovers.com. Once you are on the home page, search for your prospect’s corporate name. If the company is not closely held or if it is not very small, you will get a brief description of the company, its business model, company’s financial condition as well as the names of some of top executives. If you do not find the name of the prospect on hoovers.com, skip step two for now and move on to step three, and once you are done there, resume from step 2. If the prospect’s name is there, copy the relevant information to your prospect research template that you use to organize the research data.

Step 2:
Next step is to go to “Companies and Other Filings” passing through “Search for Company Filings” in sec.gov and search for the prospect’s company. You will get a list of documents. Look for the prospect’s recent 10Q and 10k reports. These reports will give you some key information on the financial health of the prospect. It will give you the various financial tables, a list containing the names of the executives, details about the prospect’s current business model, and information about the issues and uncertainties related to prospect’s business.

Step 3:
Visit “About Us” section of client’s website and read what prospect has to say about its company. Pay particular attention on the biographical details of the management. Also look under “Press Release,” “Media Relation” or “News” section to see what different media has to say about the prospect. If you are short on time, you can stop here or else keep on exploring client’s website.

Step 4:
In the final step, use the ultimate tool, Google. Google with your prospect’s name and name of the decision maker (or key management executive) in quotes and go through the first two result pages and see what you can get from it.