MBDi Training

Practice. Drill. Rehearse.

mharper — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:57:47 +0000

“It’s not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it’s what you put into the practice.” … Eric Lindros (professional ice hockey player)

One of the most valuable tools we provide our workshop participants is an introduction to a Client Engagement Process (CEP). This critical process is overlooked in many Business Development systems. The 4 phase CEP that we teach covers the tactical details on how to structure dialogue and interactions with clients or prospects. It is an extremely efficient and effective process for securing validated, high value, human intelligence. Additionally, it offers a method of validating the data, information and knowledge necessary to qualify or disqualify an opportunity early in an engagement and shape revenue opportunities.

Of particular importance is Phase 2, which focuses on the development and refinement of scripted dialogue, particularly questions to be asked during the call. It’s through asking these questions that you validate data, information and knowledge. However, scripting your questions is only part of this phase. Though it’s a critical first step, it’s actually the practicing, drilling and rehearsing of a script that separates the amateur from the professional.

Professionals always invest time upfront to practice, drill and rehearse the call. Amateurs spend the same amount of time after the call trying to understand what went wrong.

One of the greatest fears most people have is public speaking. A wise mentor once explained that being good at public speaking entails primarily two things. First, is the humility to prepare. Second is having the guts to pull it off. The real professional drafts their questions and practices their dialogue as part of their call plan prior to engaging the prospect.

We’re Not Happy Until They’re Not Happy

mharper — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:26:16 +0000

This brilliant insight was offered by one of our attendees during a recent training event and it really makes a strong point about the role of Business Development. People buy, organizations do not! If you can’t put positive stress on your prospect, they may never be motivated enough to resolve their issue.

Understanding how and why people buy is critical for a Business Development Professional. Those who invest in learning behavioral psychology and understanding the basic, psychological motivations that drive people’s actions or behaviors will be at a distinct advantage.

Individuals typically buy to avoid or overcome a negative emotional feeling. Strangely enough, people are more motivated to avoid a negative than to pursue a positive. For individuals, the negative, motivating emotion could be ignorance, fear or aggravation. Getting the prospect to open up, recognize their negative feelings, take ownership of them, and be concerned enough to want to solve the problem requires engaging them in a dialog, gathering intelligence and becoming a confidante.

Helping an individual to realize their frustration and become upset about it (and not you!), takes the art and skill of a true Business Development Professional who can do this in a nurturing manner.

The prospect needs to be aware and unhappy about their situation, and be motivated to do something about it. If you can’t help them become aware and motivated, you don’t have a well-qualified prospect.

The ability to explore a prospect’s unhappy place is the first step to the bank. Without “pain” there is no prospect.

Fishing versus Catching, Hunting versus Bagging.

mharper — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:21:19 +0000

Early American pioneers quickly learned that if you didn’t hunt and fish, you wouldn’t eat. The same is true for Business Development Professionals. Individuals may see themselves as pioneers in their organizations, exploring new markets or searching for new opportunities. However, there are many folks in BD roles who have never learned to be self-sufficient. They’ve been a part of an industry or organization where strong demand exists and market position is so dominant, that business develops itself and order taking is the rule of the day.

Unfortunately this rarely lasts, as markets mature and competition appears. But frequently, the mindset or culture remains. BD Personnel begin to believe that a Job Fairy makes visits on a regular basis, and they wait in eager anticipation for the next deal or project to appear. Many organizations and BD individuals have found themselves in serious financial straits relying on business they didn’t generate.

The hunter or fisher mindset is a learned mentality of the intrepreneurial* Business Development Professional. They’ve learned the thinking, discipline and process of proactively producing business. These professionals learned that to eat, they must know how to hunt and fish, regardless of conditions. However, not every day in the field or on the water will bring success. The same is true for BD. Not every call will produce a prospect or a sale. If it did, we’d call it catching and bagging, not hunting and fishing.

Working hard and smart every day to proactively generate business on your own makes you a better revenue producer. The lessons learned, relationships developed and problems solved make for a day well spent and a career well served.

Be proactive and self-sufficient. Learn to hunt and fish. You’ll learn a lot about yourself … and you might just help the economy too!

*intrepreneurial – Describes the thinking and behavior of an intrepreneur. The intrepreneur takes on the responsibility to run an area or part of an organization like their own enterprise and embraces the responsibility to reach revenue and profit objectives in true partnership with their employer.

You Will Work Harder on Your Goals than You Ever Will on Someone Else’s

mharper — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:30:34 +0000

“In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.” – Author Unknown

This is a great insight, but it makes one large assumption … that we actually have goals set for ourselves. Many of us are involved in the annual company planning season and with it comes the requisite goals and/or quotas. Although we constantly hear that individuals who invest the time to write out their personal and professional goals and plans achieve more of what they desire in their career and life, many of us take a fatalistic attitude toward this exercise and don’t do it for ourselves. This leaves us with no option but to aim for the goals set by others.

We see the best results for both the individual and the company in those cases where the BD professional’s personal goals are aligned with those of the organization. Ultimately you work for yourself and you partner with the organization to achieve mutual goals. If you do not see your professional relationship with your employer in this light, you might be selling yourself short. Consider the consequences of not having goals and plans for yourself and your career, particularly in this uncertain environment.

Ready to get started?

Start with the end in mind (big picture visualization) and work backwards, breaking achievement objectives down into smaller, attainable goals with their related tasks. By taking action, completing and crossing these tasks off your list, you gain control of your future and grow in self-confidence. For life balance, choose areas from many personal categories in addition to your professional goals. Make certain these are the goals you desire to achieve and not other people’s expectations for you. Ensure you remember the SMART acronym (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time to Complete) as you develop your goals.

Is it time to take control of your future? If so, do something different in 2012 and write down your personal and professional goals. Then let others know what they are, so they can assist you and provide accountability for achieving your goals.

Do it for you.

To download our Personal Goal Setting & Planning Exercise template, click here.

Do You See “No” As the End or the Beginning?

mharper — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:59:21 +0000

One of the defining characteristics between amateurs and Business Development professionals is their early pursuit of NOs. BD Professionals have moved beyond fearing rejection and understand that getting a NO is a healthy part of the Business Development process. They also understand the value associated with a NO.

When you reach an impasse in uncovering additional issues or moving a client to a decision point, it’s time to disengage professionally, tactfully and appropriately. This is the time you nurture the client in an appropriate manner asking that they say NO to further discussions. Doing so will benefit everyone.

Once you get the NO you ask yourself, “Should I leave, or should I begin the real interview?” The professional begins where the amateur bails out. It’s as easy as asking, “Now that we’ve come to this point, could you be kind enough to give me a lesson?” By continuing the discussion and asking the right questions, you gain valuable insight on how to refine your dialogue with prospects and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your qualification process.

Be aware that you paid for this lesson with your time commitment and your purpose in trying to help the client. If you’re not smart enough to take the trip to NO and get beyond it to secure the lesson, it’s your loss. There is great benefit in performing Business Development autopsies, discovering where things didn’t work out, getting to NO early and then moving beyond it. More often than not, you may find this is an opportunity to move ahead with the client on a different course.

The ability to move beyond the amateur to the professional depends on the lessons learned after you’ve solicited NOs.

Who You Call On Is A Reflection Of How You See Yourself.

mharper — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:20:39 +0000

In life, you get treated in your roles consistent with your level of thinking. One of the keys to success in Business Development is understanding how your thinking impacts your role behavior. Most of us have been programmed to think in a manner consistent with what other people have established as role expectations. Changing this programmed thinking/role expectation is challenging. The objective is to learn to think like an “interpreneurial” business person. You are challenged to see yourself and think like the CEO of “You, LLC”. You are your best product.

In our Business Development training, we engage in an exercise to help people understand that role performance, in any role in life, is tied to how they have been programmed to see themselves (i.e. self-perception). Similarly, the level or status of the role they are in is quite often formed by how they have seen themselves in previous roles. One of the interesting things we’ve found in our educational and professional development training is that an individual’s level of thinking tends to constrain role advancement.

If you have a tendency not to get to the decision maker, that’s a pretty good sign that you still have some problems with self vs. role in Business Development. Instead of seeing yourself as equal to a high level executive or flag officer, you will find yourself filling a subservient role during the interaction. Another manifestation is to avoid calling at the top level and prefer calling on those in a level you are comfortable with regardless of whether or not they are decision makers.

In Business Development, it is essential that you learn to think on the level of the individual you wish to engage. When you get your thinking on an equal basis with your prospect, you will see yourself on an equal basis with your prospect.

Here are five practical steps to begin overcoming this hurdle:
1) Identify the conceptual or psychological limitations that are holding you back. Figure out why you think the way you do and what is the underlying cause. This is conceptual, psychological self-analysis. It’s not easy or pretty, but it will change your life.
2) Do your homework (Phase I and II of the Client Engagement Process). Fear is best overcome with preparation. If you are prepared and have done your homework, you will present yourself more credibly to the prospect.
3) Define Your Purpose. Do you have a defined goal and purpose in Business Development? If so, are you owning your purpose statement and articulating it to your prospects?
4) Be a decision maker. Decision makers like to deal with other decision makers. Complete a personal and professional goal setting and planning exercise or revisit your own personal and professional goals and plans to see if they’re in alignment.
5) Challenge yourself to take risks. There is no growth without pain. Make sure you are pursuing success more than you are avoiding failure. You’re not growing if you are not psychologically uncomfortable. Remember… no one ever died doing BD; some only wish they had.

Shapers, Fakers and Order-Takers.

mharper — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:43:31 +0000

Do you know what you will get in your new hire?

Few positions have the success of an organization weighing on them like Business Development positions. An extensive investment is often required to onboard a new BD hire. Once a hiring decision is made, an even more substantial time and financial investment is required to allow the individual to develop relationships and begin qualifying and shaping opportunities. This investment may continue for many years. It’s no wonder why hiring teams often feel like they are looking for a diamond in the rough.

Understanding how a BD candidate will perform in the role is critical and often hard to determine. BD personnel will fit into one of the three categories below, whether or not they (or you) realize it. Understanding where your potential new hire fits into these categories is imperative to their success in their BD role, and consequently, your ROI.

Shapers
Early shapers are revenue makers. In the current economy, it is a given that fewer opportunities will be chased by more people. Shapers proactively engage with clients and ethically work to change requirements in their organizations’ best interest. Shaping is not a new concept and has been the focus of great BD people for years. However, very few individuals have taken the time to learn how to shape the opportunity during the early Opportunity Identification and Qualification (OI&Q)i Phase. Shapers are proactive in gathering intelligence early and working with the prospect to shape opportunities.

Fakers
Beware of the fakers. These individuals have great looking resumes complete with glowing accolades. But, begin asking tough questions and you will quickly find that they show a lot of activity, but never “close the deal”. Fakers are often hard to detect until an organization has already invested considerable revenue and time in pursuing opportunities. They know everything about the opportunity, but they’ve had limited substantive interfacing with any prospects. At that point, it becomes increasingly hard to cut the loss. These individuals are good at finding the next “great” opportunity, they “drink their own bathwater”, spin the data, and really believe what they have is valid. What you discover is that they seldom develop any high value human intel that allows for making unbiased, critical pursue/no-pursue decisions.

Order-Takers
Depending on their role, order-takers can either be a great asset or a tremendous liability. In a primary BD role they are a disaster, preferring to stay in the office waiting for the client to call and often busying themselves with administrative tasks to avoid engaging clients. Good order-takers are great when they proactively expand the current projects by harvesting additional revenue. These types of individuals pay the overhead, but in this new environment, they struggle to achieve continued revenue growth.

As you recruit your next BD Professional, make sure you know how to separate the shapers, fakers and order-takers.

© 2011 Mastering Business Development, Inc.

You Must Pick the Role, Set the Goal and Be Willing to Pay the Toll.

mharper — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:06:45 +0000

To thrive in the “new normal” of Business Development, every component of your individual BD process must be both efficient and effective. What may have enabled you to win opportunities in the past may no longer be working. Now is the time to take stock and to do a personal review to ensure your roles and goals are still aligned.

Roles
“Roles are what you do. Self is who you are. In the end, roles are nothing more than hysterical activity on the way to the grave.”

As you evaluate your current role, perform a personal SWOT analysis: what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? Develop a good understanding of whether you are a BD specialist or generalist. Are you just identifying and qualifying opportunities, or are you responsible for all the components of generating the proposal, etc.? Be sure that your current role is aligned not only with your strengths, but also with your goals.

Goals
“Personal and professional. They are different.”

The best people in BD are goal-driven, self-managed professionals. They have both short and long-term personal and professional goals and plans. Without goals and plans, it is very difficult to evaluate your present or future positions. How else can you measure whether or not your current position is assisting you in getting where you want to go in both your personal and professional life? If you don’t have goals, it’s probably a good time to sit down and go through a goal setting and planning exercise. Click here to download the MBDi goal setting and planning form which will provide you with a framework to create your goals and plans.

Tolls
“There is no free lunch. Success in any role in life requires a toll to be paid. Be prepared to pay full price one time.”

Once you have completed the role and goal assessment, and you are convinced that the role is a good fit for both your strengths and future ambitions, then it’s time to put together the implementation plan. Work out what additional skills or resources you need to meet your goals and make the financial or time investment to acquire them. Paying the toll also relates to the on-the-job time investment you make to succeed in the role.

Winning business in this changed environment requires significant adjustment from the way you won business in the past. “If you are in a hole, you need to stop digging and take a look around. Business Development has been an easy role for many over the past decade, but things have changed dramatically over the past 2 years. The days of easy money will not be back anytime soon. Now is the time to ensure you are in the right role, one that is aligned with and will help you achieve your personal goals. Once these are in alignment, then pay the toll once and make every effort to guarantee your personal success.

If You Don’t Know By Bid Day Who Won the Bid… It Probably Isn’t You

mharper — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:48:06 +0000

When responding to bids there is a key point to understand: you are automatically a part of someone else’s process. That may be either the prospect’s process or a competitor’s bid-shaping process. Either way, what you think is an open opportunity is actually a situation where the prospect has already determined their issues, decided they want to address them, allocated some of their budget and launched a decision-making process. In essence, they have self-qualified. They have worked their own process or have been a part of someone else’s bid-shaping process, and you are now responsive, reactive and dependent.

In this situation, you have very little leverage for gathering quality information, much less high-value human intel that affords you an advantage in submitting a bid.

The key to being successful in responding to RFPs is to have an Opportunity Identification and Qualification (OI&Q)ⁱ Process that allows you to engage key individuals early on. You must help uncover their issues, shape their perspective on their situation, and more importantly, shape their vision of the solution. Employing an (OI&Q)ⁱ Process allows you to be integral in defining what will be in a final RFP. If you aren’t engaged early in this process, it’s unlikely that what you receive in the bid documents will articulate well the key issues to which you can respond effectively.

Keep in mind the 60/40 rule: 60% of the work in developing an opportunity is done up-front, before an RFP or a proposal is ever drafted. The purpose of the proposal is to be able to address the specific problems the client understands they have and are motivated to solve. If the proposal is tailored towards the issues which you have helped the client define and become motivated to solve, then you have a decided advantage in the bid situation, regardless of who the competition is.

Seldom are bids won on the scope of the work or the competitiveness of the price. It is the relationship that is developed up-front, the trust and respect of the prospect and their desire to work specifically with you that gives you a definite edge in an RFP situation. If you don’t ensure early on that you are the prospect’s preferred source for a solution, you need to realize that your competition is more likely to secure the business than you are. The bottom line is… if you don’t know by bid day who won the bid, it probably isn’t you.

Don’t Put Your Future in Someone Else’s Hands

mharper — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 15:48:11 +0000

Future revenue growth requires planning, process and hard work. In order to be successful you need to take control of your destiny. Many companies that relied heavily on outside influence for their growth during recent “good times” are now struggling to survive. Two examples of this might be:

1) Responding to RFPs where the customer may never have been engaged and starting their acquisition process at the point of RFP release.

2) Relying on a good proposal to influence the source selection board.

Some companies took a different approach. They focused on working with clients early in their buying process to identify opportunities. As a result, these companies continue to be successful in the new environment. They continue to engage customers early to develop a real understanding of their needs and work with them to define the solution. These companies decided to control their own destiny instead of waiting for the release of a perfect “blue bird” opportunity!

As you confront the “new normal” of business acquisition, you have the power to master your own destiny by proactively engaging customers, identifying their issues and shaping their thinking as it relates to a solution. The alternative is to wait until the RFP is released, write what you believe is a winning proposal and then put your faith in the hands of the source selection committee. If option #2 is your strategy, be warned… if you have not shaped the RFP, your competition probably has!