“Life is a line which never goes straight”, and so is a Business Development job… Some will say, it is all about sales and some say, it is the partnership that matters. Actually, it is creating a long term value for a company while keeping the customers, markets and relationships as stakeholders. In simple words, it is all about identifying potential growth opportunities at the right time and taking steps to ensure that they are addressed in the correct manner.
Precisely that is the very reason that a number of other professions having more varied job descriptions than this is very few, and this is what that makes the prospect more challenging and exciting. Every day is a new day to meet new people and go through new situations, and the ratio of success is going to be derived on how well you concentrate on below points:
Listen:
Be an extremely good listener. If you are not, work very hard and better get yourself adept at it. Else prospects may not turn out to be very positive for you. Try and talk as less as you possibly can as this is inversely proportional to your listening. This will help you assess the nature of the issues in a better way which invariably, leads to a better solution.
Be Flexible:
It’s all about meeting new people and every day brings a new challenge with it which needs to be catered. So you have to be flexible enough to understand the job in hand and adapt accordingly. This will enable you to get more engaged, thus going much more into details and come up victorious.
Prioritize:
As per Stephen R Covey, “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” Going for it in a haphazard manner will let you do the immediate task, however, the later never comes. Make a “Things to do” list while staring from your highest priority and gradually going down to the lowest.
Be Organized:
Defining your priorities is about being organized, but this is not the only thing there and you need to be clear of this. Approaching things in a disorganized way will make the whole exercise boring and unfruitful and will put you off it. Prepare for your meetings, take notes, be punctual and centralize.
Balance out Quantity & Quality:
Don’t try and build up on just a value proposition, rather do your best to define and build up the right balance between both. This will let you take the benefit of the whole “Combination”, rather than single entities which increase the likelihood of failure.
Nurture your Negotiation Skills:
More often than not, business development is directed towards customer sales & service. Therefore, it is imperative to master your negotiation skills. After all, it is all about picking the best out of “Your Leverage” & “Their Leverage” and if you pass on that right feeling to your opposite about how important they actually are, that will put you in business straight away. Don’t look at it just in perspective of winning or losing, it will detrack you.
Differentiate between Business Development & Sales:
Most of the people put the concepts of business development and sales under the same umbrella, so they remain under the impression of the common dynamics for both which is untrue. Sales is only about selling while business development is a much broader in perspective covering things like supply chain, distributions, partnerships, revenue generation and lot more. So what implies on effective selling might not be a part & parcel of this. Therefore, try and understand the difference lying in between.
In a nutshell, a successful business developer is required to analyze the potential growth opportunities (in every department) and then extend complete support to ensure well defined implementation in order to achieve the objectives. Therefore, he or she has to be a complete package of all the core competencies and skills of management. Consequently, keeping the basics correct and knowing overall objectives is of utmost importance for the successful accomplishment of assigned tasks. This in turn, contributes to overall brand awareness, recognition and value thus leading to the creation of new opportunities to count on to.
