In SMPS, we know that Business Developers and Marketers are different. I happen to be a Marketer. (While the Marketing Handbook has a more sophisticated definition, the short one is that Marketers develop positioning and Business Developers develop relationships.) As a Marketer, I have relationships, but Business Development has the word "development" in it. By nature, that's proactive.
To date, my firm has had a simple business development strategy: "Do good work for the people who hire you and they will tell their friends."
Except they don't.
For sure, people you serve well will hire you over and over again, but often, they don't even tell the people in their own firms how awesome you are, much less others. Why? Because just like us, they have deadlines.
The primary goal in our marketing plan this year is to help doer-sellers transition into seller-doers. To facilitate that, I've spent the past three months talking with my Business Developer friends about their strategies. This is what they've shared:
1. It isn't who you know. It is who knows you. I've been told far too many times that Idibri is the "best kept secret" in the industry. (Whose fault is that? Well, since I've worked here for 18 years, mine.) All the favorable PR and online promotion in the world isn't as good as getting your team out into people's offices and active at industry events so that you have exposure. All of us have teams under high-pressure deadlines--it is the nature of building projects, so to counteract that I've been told that business development has to be cultivated to become part of company culture. Marketers can play a role by highlighting opportunities for connection, bringing in training for consultants, and supporting the tracking elements making it as easy as possible for their teams to get out and make connections so they become known.
2. Client relationship management (CRM) is a discipline. My eyes used to cross whenever the conversation drifted to CRM tools. After all, there are a lot of tools available. (Cosential, DeltekVision, Salesforce, DynamicsCRM…we happen to use Intuit's QuickBase.) But the common complaint is that the tools are irrelevant if your team doesn't have a culture of tracking the interactions with their network. CRM as a discipline is new for our team. I've learned that people don't track unless they know why it matters, so we've spent a lot of time sharing the why. As a practical measure, we put the interaction widget on the front page of our CRM dashboard so that everyone can see the connections that are happening. The widget comes before all of the reporting on work won and proposals pending. Why? It's a subtle reminder that without active relationships, there is no work.
3. Ask for the referral. In implementing the simple strategy of asking for referrals, we've been blown away by the response. Why? People who like you and believe in your work actually want to help you, but if you don't ask for that help, it will never occur to them. (Again, those pesky deadlines.)
4. You don't have to be able to "work a room" to be a good business developer. Most BD professionals know how to network, yet not all seller-doers have that skillset. The encouraging thing is that they don't have to. Anyone can build a network of relationships and care for them--and that is best done one-on-one which is accessible to introverts and extroverts alike.
Our company has been really successful at maximizing the relationships we have--and quite frankly, we could comfortably rest on that. But in order to grow, we (and by we, I mostly mean me) have to learn new skills to be able to gear shift to the next level. Luckily, SMPS brings together people with a variety of skillsets in a friendly environment that makes it easy to ask for advice.
Many thanks to Lea Yaest of the Carter Group, Blythe Vogt of AEI, Andrew Weinberg of SGH, Tom Hysell of Alliiance and Bonnie Tinsley of Skyrocket Consulting for taking time to share with me your skillset. I don't know how exactly how you business development pros do it, but I'm learning.