Author: tazewelldave

What does it take to build a successful business development team?  There are a lot of right and wrong answers.  Since it’s a team you’re building, a good way to look at it is through a sports lens.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve not found a business situation yet where a sports analogy isn’t apt.

1. Anybody can play this game

If you want to staff up a winning sports team, you wouldn’t just hire anybody off the street, would you?  You want talent.  Overall talent and specific talent.  How do you identify talent?  In sports, they use statistics and tryouts.  But too many businesses hire people who are available (why are they available?) and who they know.  A better way to staff up your BD team is to identify talent not only with strong resumes and solid interviews but also with personality assessments.  Not everyone has overall aptitude for sales and for specific sales jobs (outside sales, inside sales, account management, etc.).

2. If you can play well, you can manage well

What do most companies do when they want to reward rain-making business developers?  They usually they promote them to managers and vice presidents.  Have you experienced that the talents that gave those natural salespeople great results are not necessarily the talents that produce the best business leaders?  BD stars have a natural aptitude for sales.  They often have little empathy for the rest of us and make indifferent mentors and coaches.  It reminds me of that golf lesson when the pro said, “Just swing like this!”

3. Individual efforts are more important than fundamental skills

In business as in sports, the harder you try the worse it can get.  The wins don’t always go to the teams that work the hardest.  They go to the teams that master fundamental skills and play as one.  When was the last time your business development team was trained?  Even pro baseball players go to spring training every year.  In sales training, the new players learn how to play the game and the experienced players relearn what works and share their experiences with others.  Business development should be a team sport.

4. Goal setting is more important than process improvement

It’s essential that business leaders task their business development teams with goals for the quarter and the year.  If you don’t have goals you can’t focus on winning.  But sometimes too much attention is paid to the goals and not enough paid to the processes needed to achieve them.  Want to be number one in your business sector?  Great!  But before you commit your team to it, make sure it’s an achievable goal and then prepare, prepare and prepare.  Assemble your talent, train them, build them into a team and give them the right plays to make.

5. Players are only motivated by the money

And there’s one more very important thing.  You need to motivate your team.  It’s not just about the money, though financial incentives are important in keeping your players from becoming free agents.  Those of us who’ve had the good fortune to play on winning business development teams loved the challenge of competition and the thrill of winning.  When a team comes together with the right talent, the right management, the right preparation, and the right strategy – all directed by inspiring leadership – it’s a joy to be part of.

Now, bust those myths and go out there and win something!

I was barely a teenager when I first learned the power of getting a group’s attention.  My scoutmaster asked me to give a knife and ax demonstration to his wife’s Girl Scout troop.  The scouts were sitting before me on a large bleacher as I was showing the proper way to use a large knife.  In a dramatic gesture that went horribly wrong I sliced open my left hand and blood poured out.  People screamed (and in my recollection several fainted) as I was hurried off to the hospital.  That’s one presentation that audience never forgot, but it didn’t meet the meeting objective and it’s not a great technique to use too often.

I suggest there are four better alternatives to get a business group’s attention:

1. Ask a Question

Many presenters stay in the default mode of transmitting as much information as fast as possible.  Why not slow it down a little and start with a question?  It gets people quickly engaged.  Perhaps you could lead off a meeting with something like “What if you could double your market share in six months?” or “What do these market indicators have in common with your business?”  Let them think a moment.  Then reveal how the answers apply to the information you want to impart. Good questions lead to good answers and good engagement.

2. Tell a Story

Did my opening story get your attention?  We’ve all been captivated by stories since our parents first told them to us.  Stories engage the emotional part of our brains, making a human connection to whatever we’re talking about.  Properly employed, a story that helps your team or your customer identify with a situation keeps your presentation from being another facts and figures dumping ground.  Just telling a joke doesn’t cut it (!)  I was at a presentation recently and the speaker told four good jokes in a row.  We all laughed.  Then, without tying them to his presentation, he launched into a dry monologue.  I only remember the jokes.

3. Show a Picture

Not all of us learn well by listening.  Some of us understand better when we can “see” what the point is.  Perhaps you could show a diagram and ask the audience what it means.  Or you could present a before and after photo.  Or perhaps a roadmap leading to success.  One great picture truly can be better than a thousand words.  We all like pictures, but more and more we all love videos.  A short video can be a knockout opener, but just like a great joke, it can fall flat if not artfully transitioned into the message you want to impart.  Videos not only show what something is but also what it does.

4. Have Them Do Something

And not all of us learn well by either words or by pictures.  We need to be doing something.  One of the most compelling business presentations I ever participated in was by Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic.  He said that in business, as in music, we should be selling extraordinary experiences.  He had us stand on our chairs and sing … and we loved it.  Not many presenters can pull that off, but you could draw on a whiteboard and have the audience participate in its completion.  You could have people engage in a brainstorm list.  You could have them discuss among themselves how best to proceed and then offer the larger group what ideas they came up with.  Everybody’s in the act.

There are a lot of ways you can get your business group’s attention.  What fits your audience, the message, and your personal style?

It was my first customer meeting in my new business development job.  I’d recently retired from the Air Force and now I was in the private sector in a new career.  There were plenty of times in my previous life where I’d hosted office calls with defense contractors, but now I was on the other side of the table in a thirty-minute meeting with a senior Defense Department official.  I had a new suit, a new business card and a new sense of purpose.  But those weren’t enough.  What I also needed were:

1. A Biography

Prior to the meeting I’d spent a lot of time on my talking points and PowerPoint presentation, but not enough time learning about the government official who’d be sitting across from me.  It was a rookie mistake.  That official was more than a block title on an organizational chart.  He was a human being who graciously gave me time out of his busy schedule in hope that he’d meet someone helpful and learn something useful.

I was always comfortable in conversations with new people so I began a little small talk.  At least I avoided another rookie mistake and didn’t launch into the program charts right away.  I wanted to make a personal connection with him, but there didn’t seem to be anything we shared and soon he asked what I had for him.  I gave my pitch and politely left on time, but I felt the meeting could have gone better.  I could have, for a few days later I saw his bio and realized we were at the Naval Postgraduate School at the same time.  His daughter and my son could have played together.  He and I eventually talked about it and that helped us develop a business relationship that benefited both our organizations.  But it should have started that first day.

2. Good Questions

Instead of going into my slides so quickly, I could have asked him some open-ended questions to help me understand what his primary operational needs were.  A good friend of mine, Arlene Johnson who heads the Sinequanon Group in Dallas, once told me that she advises all participants in her business courses to bring three open-ended questions to every client meeting to uncover information which could speed up the buying cycle.  I wish I’d known this for that first meeting.  Questions are powerful.  If you frame them up naturally and logically they can unlock the key to the sale.  If they’re artfully and pleasantly posed, they continue a pleasant conversation and help the buyer get to where they need to be and the place where you can help them.  All you have to do is think about what objectives you want to achieve for the meeting, what specific information is needed, and how a request for that information could be framed in a friendly question.

3. Pen and Paper

Back to that first meeting.  When the government official began to talk I wanted to write the information down.  But I hadn’t brought anything with me to do that.  It felt awkward to ask him for a piece of paper and something to write with, so I didn’t.  I just sat there distracted and missed a lot of key elements.  I tried to summarize back to him some of the data and that helped me remember bits and pieces later as I sat in my car, but it would have been far better for me to be able to ask him if it was okay to take notes and then write succinct bullet points.  That situation never happened again.  I’ve always carried a pen and notebook with me and even if I can’t find the notes later, the action of writing them down helps me remember.

So, do what I didn’t do.  Add biographical information, good questions, and pen and paper to your pre-meeting checklist and you’ll make every meeting moment count.

Yes, I’m entering the dangerous waters of the Hunter-Farmer discussion related to sales and business development.  To be honest with you, I’ve never really liked the two names.  I thought about using Race Horse and Plow Horse, but a colleague cautioned that no one wants to be called a plow horse.  That’s a pity because any economist will tell you that plow horses added more economic value to civilizations than race horses ever will.

You may be aware that Thom Hartmann, a psychotherapist, first introduced the Hunter and Farmer personas in relation to ADHS.  Attention deficit could be residual behavior left over from when hunter-gatherers became farmers.  Hunters are intensely tasked focused, think in short terms, are creatively impulsive, and quickly move on to the next targets.  Farmers, on the other hand, are more strategic in their tasks, think in seasonal terms, use routines for efficiency, and stay the course.  These terms were then adapted to describe the two basic sales personas: those who go out and hunt for customers and those who cultivate customers. 

Always looking for new ways to explain what we do, observers of the craft of sales have tried to reframe and upgrade Hunters and Farmers into terms like Builders and Operators.  Some have added surrounding personas such as Pioneers (business developers prior to opportunities), Skinners (negotiators and implementers), Shepherds (account managers), and even Warriors – those who venture out into the white space of new capabilities and new customers. 

And there are those who say the Hunter and Farmer personas are meaningless in the modern sales landscape.  I think there are no good substitutes for the two terms and they still have value in sorting out sales forces.  As a sales trainer for Asher Strategies, I work with a lot of small companies having sales challenges.  Their scenarios are pretty much the same.  A bright and driven CEO turns a technology into a business and gains traction in a B2B or B2G market.  The company thrives, grows and then hits a sales plateau.  The CEO no longer has the time or skills to be the chief sales officer.  Existing staff are repurposed to sales positions and new salespeople are hired.  And then … crickets.  No sales bump.

There are a number of issues associated with this.  The repurposed staff and new hires may not have had sales training.  CEOs wouldn’t hire someone to do engineering without an engineering degree, yet they think nothing of hiring someone for sales with any sales training.  That’s one problem.  The other is that there’s no getting around the fact that we are born with differences in our capabilities and preferences.  Some of us are naturally better at Hunting and some at Farming.  I’ve seen CEOs try to make Hunters into Farmers and Farmers into Hunters with disastrous results.  

If you want to grow new business, you need to identify and hire Hunters.  Likewise, if you want to maintain customers and extend business with them, you need to hire Farmers.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to make the right hiring choices by only resumes and interviews.  I know a CEO who complained about hiring a business developer, only to have to let that person go a year later.  Not enough new business generated, even though that salesperson had solid technical expertise and a vast network of potential clients.  I asked the CEO if that salesperson had natural sales talent.  The CEO responded, “How would I know?”  The answer to that question is to use one of a number of high-quality sales personality assessments.  I recommend the Advanced Personality Questionnaire (APQ) from Asher Strategies.

To be sure, both Hunters and Farmers are needed to keep businesses healthy.  It’s not either/or – it’s both/and.  In companies with large resources, you should hire both Hunters and Farmers and get them in the right positions.  Small companies may need to find salespeople who have natural aptitude for both positions: Hunter-Farmers.  They’re not unicorns.  They’re out there.  Utility infielders.  Team players.  Hunters who can go out and bring contracts back and then become Farmers who can up and cross-sell.

Until someone comes up with really good substitute names for Hunter and Farmer, they’ll have to do.  And that’s because they really are necessary to make correct sales placement decisions in order to grow your business.  Not all sales are the same.  Neither are all salespeople.

In any non-B2C sale where your potential customers have customers of their own, think about what you can do that will bring more sales for them in turn.  I’m forever amazed at the alchemy of value generation.  When sellers and buyers get together there is economic growth.  But when sellers also provide the means for buyers to sell more, there is exponential economic growth.  Economic indicators go up and so does your topline.  It’s good for everyone, except your competitors.

There are many approaches to find out how and to whom your prospective customers sell their wares.  You can research their companies, organizations, and business cultures  You can examine their products and solutions.  You can survey the business landscapes they are competing in.  And you can take a look at their major competitors to see how they operate.  These are all good for gathering useful data but to really help your customers sell you need to pay attention to their customers.

I learned this at an early age, although I didn’t realize it at the time.  My Dad, George, was a paint salesman.  His territory was mostly North Texas – from our home in Fort Worth up to the Red River and the Oklahoma border.  It was a time before big box stores, when paint, hardware, and floor covering were sold in small stores in small strip malls.  Think of the film “The Last Picture Show.”

On school holidays and Saturdays, Dad would often take me along on sales calls.  This served many purposes.  He traveled a lot and it meant he could spend some quality time with me.  And while I was with him I wasn’t breaking stuff in the house.  

During those trips, I witnessed a great salesman and his techniques.  Dad would enter a prospect’s store, introduce himself to the manager or owner and make some pleasant small talk.  When the conversation died down, Dad would ask if it would be okay if he just watched things for a while and looked over the inventory.  They always said yes.  He’d go over to the paint cans on the shelves and run his finger over their tops to see which lines were empty and which had dust.  He’d look at the brush rack to see which brushes were moving and which were not. 

But most of all, Dad would listen to customer conversations.  What did the customers think they wanted?  How did the sellers respond?  What did the customers buy?  What did they want that the sellers didn’t have?  

After a few hours, Dad had a good idea of the sellers’ customers unmet needs and he zeroed in on those.  He and the manager or owner would go next door to the Dairy Queen (there was always a Dairy Queen nearby) to talk it over.  It wasn’t a hard pitch to make because they knew that Dad was totally focused on increasing sales for their stores.

I didn’t fully appreciate Dad’s sales artistry until I retired from my military career and got a business development (sales, really) job.  In his last years, Dad became my sales coach and I began to understand what I had witnessed so many years before.  It wasn’t paint he was selling.  It was relationships where the customer’s success came before his own.