Business Development = Employee Development

To succeed in your Business Development Goals, involve and develop your employees systematically.

Do you have an active Business Development department? If yes, what does it do? Who is part of it? How many people are involved? A small party who gets to do all the fun?

If you ask me, there is no other Business Development but the one that involves all employees and that’s why I say Business Development = Employee Development. Or should I say, the secret sauce to a successful business development is involving all your employees and developing them consistently, continuously.

How is it done? Well, there are a few components that need to be in place:

• employee-driven culture
• communication & dialogue
• transparent tools

It all starts with acknowledging that your employees are your companies most valuable source and most of them are hungry for continuous development. They are also working on and with processes and functionalities directly or indirectly linked to your customer and therefore, there’s a lot of information and knowledge that can be utilized more systematically. Acknowledging this and involving the employees and their knowledge in the development work is already a big part of the employee-driven culture.

Business development is closely linked to the company’s strategy, mission and/or values. It gives the direction, the frame, the goal for why we come to work every day, why we want to perform and develop. Succeeding in all of the above requires clear communication and also strong dialogue.

A Team Lead once told me that he had to repeat the strategy to his teammates 15–20 times before they understood it.

Involving dialogue will get you there a bit faster and with better results. Explaining the strategy and asking how the employee plans to contribute to it is the best way to start. When you discuss how that one employee’s contribution, development and learnings effects the bigger picture, the success rate is close to 100%.

If you have read any of my blogs, you know that I don’t have any faith in driving results when the plan is in a static form (Word, Google Sheets or traditional HR -systems) without any visual plans nor reminders.

To succeed in your business development, you need tools that support it. The more transparent, the better. When those business development -plans are transparent to the whole organization and also how each and every employee contributes to them, you can’t go wrong.

Talbit is an excellent tool for this because of it’s employee-driven approach, transparency and concreteness.

The tool is designed from the perspective that employees are the most active users. Once the strategic objectives are set, broken down into team objectives, each employee builds a personal development plan with goals linking to the team and company objectives and those goals broken down into actionable, concrete and measurable tasks. Talbit sends reminders so those upcoming tasks will not be forgotten.

And Talbit is transparent. You can check any colleague’s development path and see how (s)he contributes to the company strategy and what are the steps need to reach those goals.

Those goals include learning new skills and knowledge and putting them into practice in Customer projects, generating new sales by contacting new, potential customers and turning them into leads, and building a better organization by using the untapped potential and thus creating more purpose and an employee driven culture.

Kaisa Savola
Founder & CEO of Talbit
kaisa.savola@talbit.fi
https://twitter.com/kaisa_savola

Help your people excel and grow.

Talbit is a visual goal setting and progress planning tool for companies seeking growth through the development of employees.

Use it to help your employees develop their skills and perform better autonomously, aligned with company strategy and objectives.

Boost your team’s motivation by making teamwork transparent and with ongoing feedback. Follow the progress from Talbit dashboard.

Read more about Talbit at: www.talbit.fi