Economic Development, Investment Attraction

How to Impress Site Selectors

So, you got the lead and started having conversations with that new big investor, and they are now coming over for a site visit. This is a massive deal that you don’t want to mess up. There are five important decisions you need to make to ensure your site visit leads to a closed deal.

Communication

• The most important aspect of impressing a site selector is communication. You need to make sure that you have a strong understanding of what your site selector wants and what their goals are. This is vital to ensuring that the site visit goes according to plan.

Dry Run

• Before the day that your site selector visits the town, make sure you have an order of events and run through exactly what is supposed to happen on the big day. The best plans can fall flat on their face due to assumptions about certain situations in your community. For example, if you planned to take your site selector to a local park and on that day there is a major construction project going on, you may come across as unprepared and unorganized. A simple run through avoids these embarrassing situations and makes sure that your community presents a united front.

Base of Operations

• To ensure that your community presents a united front, it is important to have a clear leadership framework. Depending on the size of the opportunity, this can be given to the mayor of your local community or a Chief Administrative Officer. Regardless of the visitor coming in, it is vital that a community has a clear chain of command to help visitors know where to go about specific questions. It’s important to always appear as a unit. This is vital to success in Economic Development

Adjust to the site selector

• Sometimes because we are so excited about a possible deal, Economic Developers miss the boat when they forget that site selectors are people too. A quick glance into their LinkedIn or social platforms can give you some key insights into the people you are working with. Approaching a site visit from a people perspective goes a long way to making sure that you can close a deal. Examples include dressing well, managing time and feeding your visitors.

Always say thank you

• No matter what happens in a site visit, a thank you note will always go a long way to leaving a mark on your site selector. Even if you don’t get the deal a show of gratitude can open doors for future opportunities. This improves your reputation as a community and can lead to something greater in the future.

With these 5 tips, every site visit has the potential to lead to amazing investment opportunities for your community.