You can’t build revenue on a foundation you haven’t inspected.
I run two practices. Florida Man Innovations handles business development, partnerships, sponsorships, go-to-market strategy, and revenue systems. Farsight Intelligence handles investigations, due diligence, background research, asset tracing, and corporate intelligence. On paper they look unrelated. In practice they’re the same problem from two angles: organizations make consequential decisions about who to work with, under what terms, and with what expectations, and most do it on incomplete information.
Most organizations that have a revenue problem don’t have a bad product. They have effort without architecture. Effort is not a system. It doesn’t scale and it doesn’t protect you.
Here are 20 things you can do right now to make your business development function smarter using intelligence.
1. Google every prospect before the first call. Not a deep investigation. A basic sweep. Recent news, litigation history, LinkedIn gaps, Glassdoor patterns. Five minutes tells you whether the conversation is worth an hour.
2. Search PACER or your state court system for any significant prospect or partner. Federal court records are public. State records vary but most are searchable. A pattern of vendor disputes, breach of contract suits, or collections activity is information you should have before you’re invested in a relationship.
3. Pull the corporate filings on every company you’re about to contract with. Secretary of State websites are free. Check who the registered agent is, when the entity was formed, whether it’s in good standing, and whether there are related entities under similar names. Dissolved predecessors are a flag. Shell structures are a flag.
4. Verify that the person you’re negotiating with has actual authority to bind the company. Operating agreements, bylaws, and corporate resolutions are sometimes obtainable. At minimum, ask directly and get it confirmed in writing before you spend time on deal terms.
5. Run the principals, not just the company. Companies don’t make decisions. People do. A clean corporate record with a principal who has a history of fraud, bankruptcy, or litigation at prior entities tells you something the company record doesn’t. Search the individual’s name, prior companies, and state of residence.
6. Check UCC filings on any company you’re about to extend credit or exclusivity to. UCC-1 financing statements are public and show who already has a lien on a company’s assets. If a prospect’s receivables, inventory, and equipment are already pledged to a lender, your position in a dispute is worse than you think.
7. Map the competitive landscape before every major pitch. Who else is competing for this deal. What have they proposed before. What’s the prospect’s history with similar vendors. Public procurement records, press releases, and LinkedIn activity tell you more than you’d expect. Walk in knowing what you’re walking into.
8. Search your own company the way a prospect would. Google your name, your company name, your principals. Check what your corporate filings expose. Look at what a 10-minute background check on you returns. If the picture is incomplete, inconsistent, or unflattering, fix it before it costs you a deal.
9. Build a qualification checklist that includes verifiable criteria, not just stated ones. Revenue, headcount, decision authority, budget cycle. Ask for it. Then verify what you can independently. Prospects misrepresent capability all the time, not always maliciously. Sometimes they just want the meeting.
10. Track your referral sources the way you track your pipeline. Who referred what, when, and how those deals closed. Most small businesses have no visibility into this. When you map it, patterns emerge fast. Two or three sources usually drive most of the good business. Build a program around them instead of hoping it continues.
11. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to map the org chart before the first call. Who reports to whom, who used to work there and left, who recently joined from a competitor. Org charts tell you where decisions actually get made versus where they nominally get made. Those are often different places.
12. Set Google Alerts on every active prospect and partner. Free, five minutes to set up, runs in the background. Leadership changes, press coverage, funding announcements, litigation news. Things change between the first call and the close. You want to know when they do.
13. Review a prospect’s job postings before the meeting. What they’re hiring for tells you what they’re building, what they’re struggling with, and where budget is moving. A company posting six sales roles is in a different position than one posting six engineers. Both are useful to know.
14. Check Glassdoor and Indeed for patterns, not individual reviews. One bad review is noise. A consistent theme across 40 reviews is signal. High turnover in the roles you’d be working with, leadership credibility issues, and payment complaints from vendors are all worth knowing before you’re dependent on them.
15. Pull property records on any deal involving real assets or physical operations. County property appraiser and tax collector records are public in most states. Ownership structure, assessed value, encumbrances, and tax status are all there. Useful for commercial leases, facilities-dependent partnerships, and asset-based deals.
16. Do a basic social media sweep on key principals in high-stakes deals. Public posts are public. People are often more candid on personal accounts than in business meetings. You’re not looking to build a dossier. You’re looking for information that changes your assessment of who you’re dealing with.
17. Identify your top five referral sources and have a direct conversation with each of them this quarter. Ask what makes them refer. Ask what would make them refer more. Ask whether there are types of clients or deals they’d never send your way and why. Most people have never had this conversation. It’s the highest ROI call you’ll make.
18. Map what’s publicly known about your top three competitors. Their clients, their pricing signals, their recent hires, their content themes, their partnership announcements. Competitive intelligence doesn’t require spying. Most of it is sitting in public view. The PI license helps at the margins, but 80% of what matters is free and legal.
19. Build a simple partner vetting scorecard and use it before every new partnership conversation. Entity age, principal background, litigation history, financial signals, reference checks. Not a 40-page report. A one-page checklist with pass/fail criteria. Discipline on the front end eliminates most of the bad outcomes on the back end.
20. When a deal goes sideways, run a post-mortem using the same intelligence tools. What was knowable before the commitment that you didn’t look for. Where were the signals. What would have changed your decision. The answer is usually something that was publicly available and nobody checked. Build that into the front-end process for the next one.
Here’s a short example.
A founder was in advanced discussions with a larger firm. Three calls. Good rapport. Letter of intent on the table. Before bringing in outside counsel she asked for a quick review of the larger firm’s recent activity. Public records showed two active lawsuits from former partners alleging breach of contract on arrangements that looked nearly identical to hers. She walked away before drafting a page. Saved six figures in legal fees and a year of her company’s attention.
Information that costs nothing to gather can save everything you were about to spend.
BD without intelligence is optimism with a budget. You’re closing deals without knowing what you’re closing into. Most of the information that would change your decisions is public, free, and takes less time to pull than the average sales call.
The practices that produce durable revenue qualify early and qualify hard. They know what a good partner looks like and what a bad one looks like and they have a process for telling the difference before the commitment is made.
Want to build that process?
Paid consulting available for business development strategy, partner vetting, and due diligence. One conversation to determine fit.