MBDinsight #52

Change is coming. Are you ready?

Change is in the wind and you’ll have to deal with it.

If this year follows expectations, there will be economic realities to deal with resulting in a major realignment of business priorities regardless of ’08 election results. So, if you’re looking at new opportunities and concerned that it may be too late to re-position your company’s resources, then you’re among a growing crowd. But, it’s not too late ... if you get going right now!

There is a price to pay in making new product or service initiatives work. So, how do you leap the hurdles to make the numbers? To ensure revenue results in the Business Development game, the following is a methodology that works developed from nearly 30 years’ BD experience.

Step #1: Assessment. Evaluate Business Development in the company from all angles to uncover the problems.

Step #2: Delivery. Delivery is execution and responsibility to tackle BD challenges and fix problems at both operational and tactical levels.

But there’s more to it. In the end, real success involves interfacing between the assessment and delivery components which results in sharing of information, creating common ground, and moving forward toward a common goal. With these criteria, the BD assessment/delivery methodology can be broken down into the following:

1. The Plan’s the Thing ... get busy and craft a realistic BD plan.
2. If people are your most important asset, do an evaluation of your BD team.
3. Got Process? That’s Business Development Process. If you don’t have a customized BD Process designed, installed and used, then get one.
4. To deliver the goods, identify your team's education requirements, then develop and implement a corporate BD curriculum to match their needs.
   
   

Change is coming. Are you ready?

MBDinsight #51

Are You a Strategic Business Leader?

Many individuals with this title bring a working, personal relationship with the senior management of organizations being pursued. There are a lot of individuals with this basic profile who declare they are strategic business development professionals. However, in reality, they are not.

To be a true Strategic Business Leader who is innovative, creative, and successful, you must be able to innately apply the following seven critical concepts.

First you must exhibit the hunter profile, always pursuing the next best strategic opportunities for your company and crafting those opportunities before competitors recognize them.

Second, it’s critical that you understand the goal and purpose of business development. You should understand that the purpose of your role is to help organizations understand their real issues, challenges or concerns, and identify their pain.

Third, you must have a developed knowledge of psychology … understanding how and why people behave. The application of people knowledge is what motivates a prospect to trust an individual and share information.

The fourth concept is the capacity to develop behavioral characteristics of an intelligence-gatherer. This is the critical ability to know what information is important to gather early on, and then who to gather it from, and how.

The fifth important aspect of the strategic business leader is the ability and courage to disqualify opportunities early and efficiently. That means let go, close the door, walk away and move on to a better opportunity.

The sixth must-have is the skill to quickly build both a short and long-term pipeline. To do this you must develop and hone the thinking, have the character and be educated or re-educated in the role of professional business development.

The last quality is the ego drive to continually pursue new opportunities as an alpha-wolf. With their heightened sixth sense they have the ability to see leverage points and make connections that others fail to make.

Are Strategic Business Leaders born with the BD gene, or can they be developed in this role? From three decades in this business, the simple answer is that it’s a little of both. Few bring it all. That’s where professional development and mastery education come into the strategic BD equation.

Are you a Strategic Business Leader?

MBDinsight#50

What is Your Business Development Culture?

Every organization has a business culture. Like the tale of the tortoise and the hare, some businesses choose to take a commanding lead in the marketplace, while others prefer to hang back and survey their options more carefully.

A firm’s Business Development culture is less clear and less well defined, because most people understand very little about BD. Business development is a term used for everything from sophisticated selling to business growth through mergers and acquisitions.

A Business Development culture is anchored either upon goals or purpose. A goal-driven culture is focused on revenue growth, bookings, stock appreciation and internally focused metrics, primarily intended to drive behavior and desired results. A purpose-driven culture is focused upon understanding the problems and issues experienced by your market, your customer, and most importantly the individuals who purchase your products and services. A purpose-driven culture focuses on how to provide solutions to client or prospect problems, whether or not there is an immediate purchase or an immediate revenue result to the firm.

Given the benefits and risks, can a balance exist between a purpose-driven and a goal-driven BD culture in a firm? Yes and ideally there should be. The resulting culture also requires buy-in/ownership of all within the organization engaged with customer contact. If personnel exhibit conflicting Business Development cultures, the inconsistency causes confusion in the marketplace. This will tend to seriously erode the overall client/prospect confidence in a company, weaken competitive advantage and dissolve any hard-earned trust. No firm can afford to let that happen.

Revenue generation derives from the trust built relationships produced by a strong, consistent and well-balanced Business Development culture.

So what is your Business Development culture?

MBDinsight #49

What is Business Development?

For nearly three decades, we’ve been challenged to describe what Business Development is all about. More often than not, it's been defined by explaining what it isn't. It’s not the same thing as selling. This is a simplistic, inaccurate answer and does a disservice to both perspectives.

Business Development is a thinking and process involved with our delivering the best possible solution to a client to solve problems or alleviate concerns, whether or not we actually provide it ourselves. It’s based on a philosophy and methodology that builds a long-term, trust-based relationship. On the other hand, selling is a largely transactional process that is usually defined in vendor or provider terminology for products and services. Both perspectives are needed and valuable in the marketplace.

While the concept of Business Development can be used effectively in all industries, it’s an exceptionally appropriate fit for leveraging knowledge or intellectual capital to solve problems. Over the span of nearly 30 years in consulting, we’ve challenged our engineering, energy, biotech/pharma, utility or government services clients to do just that: to use what they know about people, business, money and technology to initiate a dialog and build relationships as trusted advisors. What binds these diverse industry groups together is their valued expertise which is leveraged into revenue and profit.

By no means are we expecting engineering, science or IT professionals to become salespeople. However, individuals can learn to transcend from the colleague to the partner role. Professionals learn that understanding people and what motivates them to buy is more vital to the BD process than their technical knowledge. This evolves through embracing Business Development thinking, expertise and behaviors to strategically meet client needs and, as a consequence, produce revenue for their firm.

In Business Development, revenue generation is never an accident.

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© 2007 Mastering Business Development, Inc. All rights reserved.

MBDinsight #48

How Good Are You At Successfully Failing?

The philosophy of risking, failing and learning is one of the most powerful concepts to embrace to further yourself personally and professionally. How many times have you decided to change because you are not satisfied with the current results your prospects delivered ... or your revenue or profit goals reached ... and then backed off when the psychological and/or physical discomfort of the unfamiliar set in? Loosening your hold on the certain or the status quo to strive for something better is risky business. It carries the risk of failure.

Risking is the act of letting go - letting go of something you are certain of and reaching out for something you are not sure of, but believe it is better than what you have. In every risk situation there is an unavoidable loss … something that has to be given up in order to move forward. Success depends more on your willingness to risk than being concerned about what happens if you fail.

When you are unhappy with where you are, you should be willing to risk … risk getting out of your comfort zone and risk failure. Only by risking failure are you likely to succeed in anything. Too many people waste their lives thinking their objective is to succeed, when in reality all they are doing is avoiding failure. Further, in their avoidance of failure, they have blocked their deepest creative forces within that can make a life fulfilling, exciting and meaningful.

The learning part of failure is quite obvious. Every failure represents a lesson. Every failure adds another level of wisdom. Consider this: The most successful Business Development professionals have failed more than anyone who is a true failure thought possible. Success and failure are deeply intertwined. As Colin Powell once said, "There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure."

Are you ready to risk failure? Are you prepared to fail your way into success?
How good are you at successfully failing?

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© 2007 Mastering Business Development, Inc. All rights reserved.

Flipping the Switch from Push to Pull: Why People Buy

Just because you have somehing to offer, doesn't mean your customers actually need it. In any industry, strength can be a weakness. Companies strong in creating useful products, programs, services and accompanying solutions also believe that's where their value lies. On the contrary, with this thinking you enter into business relationships with an unconscious liability. You believe just because you have something to offer, your prospects and customers must need it. An that's not necessarily the case. To read the rest of the article, access it here.

So What is Business Development?

MBDⁱ defines Business Development as the process of establishing and enhancing long-term business relationships. All parties involved benefit and profit.

In more detail, Business Development is the behavioral discipline wherein revenues are generated and profit driven to the bottom line. This is accomplished by Business Development Professionals clearly communicating their purpose ahead of their goals. They are consciously placing clients’ needs first. This means, helping clients’ obtain solutions to their problems, whether or not purchased from them.

In one sense, this stance may seem naïve, given the current hyper-competitive business environment. That notion should encourage and validate Business Development Professionals who consciously put principles before profit, but all the while wonder if these two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Time and again, we have experienced that serving others will serve your interests in the end.