The Four-Hour Work Week is full of interesting ideas that distill business down to its minimal essence. I had previously blogged about the idea that interested me most.

Now that my company has some successful projects behind it, I’m going to do the following:

1. List the business problems we solved in our projects. I'll keep the list in the 5-10 range.
2. Make each solution a column in a spreadsheet
3. Go through my contacts: 1,491 in SalesForce.com and 560 in LinkedIn. (The latter are more likely to be fresh and up-to-date.)
4. Make each contact a row in the spreadsheet
5. Note which contacts might be interested in which solutions. "Interested" means they have the same or similar problem and would pay for a solution.

This will give me qualified leads. This is a time-consuming exercise, but I think it is valuable for a number of reasons:

• I will have to carefully articulate my solutions. If I am too general, then lots of people will be very mildly interested (excessive false positives). If I am too specific, then people who would benefit from them will not realize it (excessive false negatives).
• I'll re-visit (initially, only in my mind) people I have not met in a long time. I may spot patterns that suggest particular marketing/promotional activities.
• If I get a lot of qualified leads, that's always a good thing.
• If I get very few qualified leads, well at least I know where to focus!