There has been an across the board shift since the 2008 financial crisis that has made the job of business development in large organizations much different than it was in the early 2000’s. Some of the biggest changes include an increased pressure to do more with less resources, an increased need for collaboration and more competitive intensity from crossover products and services.
Today I want to address business development, or specifically, the art and science of how new relationships are developed to create the most value for customers and the stakeholders who serve them.
What’s Changed
Quick, what sea changes took place in 2006 that changed the world?
The first is LinkedIn, which acquired 5M members that year. Just two years later, LinkedIn had 50M members, and at the time this post was written, that figure has jumped to more than 200M members.
Secondly, Twitter was born and grew to 20M users in 1000 days.
Today, every significant conference in the world pushes content out in real time, and attendees augment this content with their own personal Twitter updates and hashtags. Consider this: when Sully landed in the Hudson River, the first photo published to the world was on Twitter. The takeaway here? If you aren’t using all the tools available to you through these portals, you are desperately underarmed.
In days gone by, sales, business development and account executives would keep hastily drawn org charts in their pockets, made from long hours of hard and time-consuming phone work (dialing for dollars), as well as face-to-face meetings and lunches. These org charts represented prized and coveted proprietary information for account teams who were looking to do business with a firm. Nurturing and guarding these relationships was key, and scarcity of data made it possible.
Now, with a bit of mouse work, you can develop that same org chart in a matter of hours, from the comfort of your office. Not only can you do it, but changes to it are announced to you via online updates at speeds that even HR teams have a hard time keeping up with.
These changes have led to an unprecedented amount of information in the public sphere about private organizations. In fact, thought leaders today are publishing comments and wisdom to the world that just five years ago would have only been heard by just a chosen few.
So, why is this so important for those doing business development?
First, the Research Phase
Two new skills of the modern business development professional are curation and editing. Developing your own information architecture of your target clients and customers is foundational to effective and targeted relationship development. Editing is the skill to sort the wheat from the chaff and puts together the 10 percent that yields 90 percent of the information about the client’s needs, wants and motivation.
My coaching here is to use old school and new school research techniques in unison. To begin, grab a good sized white board and sketch the value chain of product and service delivery. Then, use your laptop to identify key organizations in the value chain both upstream and downstream. The best way to approach this is to begin with the key leaders, then jump onto LinkedIn to develop a sketch of relationships in the firm.
On LinkedIn, find the key marketing shows and editors in the space and pick up the phone. Further fill out the diagram with their coaching of the influencers and participants.
In developing your sketch, use multiple sources of information and be rigorous in sorting. It’s vital that each person “earns their way” onto the board. Also keep in mind that people on the board can be “trumped” as more information is received.
When you have a pretty settled view of the space and key relationships, it’s time for Phase II.
Next, the Approach Phase
The second part of this process is building the relationships themselves. After all, it is one thing to have the data about the who and how, but a very different thing entirely to earn the right to talk to that person in real time, share information with them and become part of their trusted circle. The first step in this process is to begin the process of trust building, and the universal method for this is understanding the issues that the customer is experiencing better than they do themselves and being able to effectively communicate this to them in a non-sleazy way.
Social tools are useful here as well. Carefully crafted pieces of communication, delivered through pathways that the recipient values could lay a platform for discussion long before the first real-time discussion takes place.
Once you have the attention of your potential partner sponsor, it’s time to use your best up close and personal tool kit – solid respect, service and follow through. It’s important to over function in these early stages of the relationship, and be sure to do a temperature check at frequent intervals.
Summary
To sum up, here’s what else has changed:
- New collaboration tools. We have lean processes, open-source business modeling tools and graphics, customer-centric practices and more.
- An increase in data. We have many sources of data that are more open than ever. SEC rules make ongoing publicly traded company information more open, while industry and trade organizations, analyst firms and governments all publish massive amounts of open-source data.
- Increased Transparency: Huge increase in social & organizational transparency.
- Leaner Organizations: Larger organizations have much less staff covering much more ground.
- You: You have the ability to build a strong personal brand, outside of your business affiliation. You can project much more than your name and the company you work for. If I Google your name what do I perceive about you? Does it make sense for me to work with you?
What has not changed:
- The need for homework. You must do the hard work to be able to make a favorable impression at the first meeting with people who don’t really have time to listen to you.
- Courage to reach out to key people.
- Persistence to learn and iterate through the networks to get to the people you need to talk to.
How are you using this data? Perhaps more importantly, how are you filtering it and turning it from overwhelming to useable information? Leave a comment below or drop me a line.
