Sales & Business Development: Give your employees a break!
When it comes to sales and business development — they don’t know what they don’t know.
During some of our recent work with professional services clients, it has come to our attention that it’s very easy to get frustrated when people don’t hit the pavement (so to speak) with their business development goals, or get on the phone and make those calls.
In the early days of my career, I too had managers get frustrated with me for not doing the BD thing to their expectations. I wanted to excel in the area of work and organisational psychology — but I’d never have any training or education around sales, or project management. These were two of the biggest components of my work as a consultant.
Over time, I watched and learned from others, picking up some of the good habits, as well as some of the bad ones. Part of my personality and style came through, which helped in some instances, but hindered in other areas. In the end, it was my own psychology and mindset that inhibited my progress, in conjunction with the lack of skills.
From the wealth of my past experiences, here are some areas managers and leaders can capitalise on to foster the BD potential of their teams:
1. Tailored Approach: Work with people to understand their personality, style and even learning abilities to see what aspects of sales and business development they are going to be best suited to. Some believe that sales should be done a certain way. There are people making a fortune out of public speaking, a fortune out of networking, a fortune out of one client or even a fortune sitting behind a computer and not leaving their homes. You might have picked up from our previous articles that we don’t advocate for the cookie cutter approach!
2. Support System: Have a broad suite of support offerings for your people. Face-to-face mentoring is often the most helpful. It gives people an opportunity to discuss the challenges they are facing with business development, and you can work through these challenges with them, understanding that sometimes you don’t have the answers either.
3. Review, Review, Review: Continue to capture material that helps the BD process of your team. Just recently, I’ve put together a 50-question worksheet that could be used when meeting people for the first time. It will not only be helpful for those who work with me, but it was also helpful for me to reflect on how I go about those meetings. Maybe there are things that I do that work well; maybe there are things that stall progress in a conversation — or maybe I’m missing that piece of gold.
4. Group Dynamics: Understand the composition of your team. If you are a sole operator, you might need to be a jack-of-all-trades, with some outsourced help on the side. If you have a team, then look within the team. Even your administrators, who you don’t usually ask to do any business development, can often provide some help with the process.
5. Change Attitudes for BD: Come to realise that a lot of people still do believe that sales and business development is not part of their role. We have people from all types of professional and technical services coming to the realisation that they can actually do BD. But this is not always easy, and takes some time, to help them understand how they can channel their BD potential into the right areas that will lead to the right results. Training wont fix this up front. Good, facilitated discussion that challenges thinking around what sales is, will go a long way to working through this.
