Hunting: making every milestone count

Hunting comes easier to extroverts

If you’re extroverted, you’re more willing to put yourself out there. You’ll pick up the phone to people you barely know, stand in front of a crowd, or pitch the story across a boardroom table.

But I know plenty of introverted listed leaders who run excellent hunting campaigns. What they have in common is that they’ve made themselves comfortable with it. If you want to be a better hunter, it comes down to comfort and friction: increase comfort, lower friction and you will be a world class hunter.

The friction problem

Apart from reporting, hunting is ad hoc. Nothing forces you to book the roadshow or make the calls. If it happens, it’s because you chose to do it. So if you want to increase the frequency of the hunt, you need to lower the friction.

Nobody is more time poor than a listed leader, so this has to be scientific to maximise the time you do have for it. Where are the minutes going, and what are they buying? The better your data and feedback, the more you know what works. And the more you know what works, the more likely you are to keep doing it.

Take results day

You’ve spent months, sometimes years, building to an outcome. You finally achieve it. You fire off the ASX release. Then you hope.

You hope people pick it up. You hope they understand what you wrote and why it matters. You hope they buy, and not just on day one, but on day two, day six and day 12. We don’t want a blip. We want it to hold.

Rather than hoping, put in the minutes and hours to make the most of years of work. That means a plan, broken into steps, each with an owner. The more you break it down, the less uncontrollable it feels, and the more likely the work gets done.

Then track it. By your next results you’ll know what worked and what didn’t, both for your team and in market, and you can adjust.

Four ways to hunt better

1. 01Build a processAccept that hunting is more natural for extroverts, and build a process rather than waiting to feel like it.
2. 02Invest your timeTreat your time as an investment and aim for the best return on it.
3. 03Track what you doTrack what you do so you can actually measure that return.
4. 04Break it downBreak every event into small, owned steps so no single part feels daunting.

Do this and the bespoke events stop feeling bespoke. They become more natural, even if you’re not a born extrovert. And each milestone builds on the last, so the market keeps understanding your story long after day one.

Hunting wins the attention. Harvesting is how you keep it.