The Challenge
Premium Parking was expanding its footprint into Central New York — a market with significant opportunity but limited existing relationships. The challenge was to build a repeatable, scalable business development operation from the ground up in a region where the company had little brand recognition.
The Approach
Rather than relying on cold outreach and intuition, I built the market research first. That meant:
- Mapping the landscape: Identifying key property owners, developers, and operators across the CNY market through structured research using tools like ImportYeti and direct public records research
- Scoring the opportunity: Developing a lead scoring model to prioritize outreach based on property size, location, current parking infrastructure, and likelihood of interest
- Building the pipeline: Translating the research into a structured CRM pipeline with clear stages and follow-up cadences
The Automation Layer
To make this sustainable at scale, I'm architecting an automated business development engine that:
- Pulls structured data on new commercial developments and property changes
- Scores and ranks leads automatically based on defined criteria
- Surfaces high-priority targets for human review and outreach
The goal is to shift team time from manual data collection to the high-value work: strategic conversations and relationship-building.
Results
- Established relationships with key property owners and developers in the Syracuse and Rochester markets
- Built a prioritized pipeline of qualified leads across CNY
- Reduced research time per lead through systematic data collection
What I Learned
Market development in a new region is fundamentally an information problem before it's a sales problem. The teams that win are the ones who show up to conversations better informed than anyone else in the room.