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?