25 Ways to Get Your Site Eliminated - #19: Provide Only One Site Option for Your Prospect
January 02, 2012 | by: Tim Davey, PE
Timmons Group has helped recruit economic development prospects to many Virginia and North Carolina communities. Most recently, we were fortunate to help Chesterfield County and Dinwiddie County, Virginia recruit and land fulfillment centers for Amazon. We congratulate both Chesterfield and Dinwiddie Counties in securing these tremendous investments and thank them for allowing us to be part of their strategic team. These high profile, fast moving prospects feature many positioning strategies that help keep your site from being eliminated. One that specifically comes to mind this morning is Flexibility.
Earlier in this blog, I posted that some clients assume their existing building is the perfect fit for every prospect. This same fault sometimes eliminates sites from consideration because we try to “sandwich” a prospect into your specific parcel. Depending on the expertise of the site selection consultant or committee, they may not fully understand the architectural/engineering perspective of a site plan showing parking, building footprints, or stormwater management ponds. Even if the site clearly meets their technical criteria, the particular graphic may give the sense that the site doesn’t provide sufficient screening or constrains their potential expansion. My experience suggests that you offer 2 or 3 alternatives (maybe more) to every prospect that is considering your community, industrial site, or business park.
This approach was extremely important to the site selection team working for Amazon. As one particular site was featured and the list of technical items grew, we could tell there was concern whether it could meet the developer’s long term needs. Fortunately, our client had authorized an alternatives analysis that pro-actively considered three other potential site layouts within the park. As it turns out, we presented the alternatives analysis which ultimately helped to find the site selected by the developer. The Amazon fulfillment center is currently under construction on that site.
So remember to present alternatives to your prospects in order to stay “in the game”. Happy New Year to everyone.