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Business Development for Technical Professionals? What’s up with that?

October 27, 2011 By 2 Comments

Do you even know what business development is? Don’t knock it until you understand it. And I’m addressing sales professionals as well, who perceive the business development process as synonymous with the sales cycle. It isn’t.

Business development involves understanding your current and potential markets, the customers within these markets, and developing products and deliverables to meet their needs. Business development is about how well you know your customers, their mindset, and context in which they make decisions. The sales cycle occurs somewhere in the middle, nearing the end, of the business development process. And it doesn’t happen unless you’ve developed a business case for a solution.

Business development takes time and a lot of data. Some qualitative. Some quantitative. Some technical. Some non-technical. It takes dialogue, using those not-so-soft skills, to establish the context for the need for solution placement. It takes dialogue to establish the historical and cultural context which generated the problem for which your client is seeking a solution. It takes understanding and appreciation of the people involved in the equation. Timing is all-important as well. And timing may not be so much a focus on your ability to design and deliver the solution as much as it involves the time it takes for your customers and prospects to make that all-important decision to do business with you.

So where do you fit into this equation? Are you an order-taker anxious to rush off to the lab or cubicle and “fix” things and design a solution that appears to fit your client’s needs? Are you an order-taker who is anxious to rush the sale so you can fulfill your quarterly quota? After all, selling them anything is better than selling them nothing. Yeah, right, you guess. Are you an implementer with a bit more patience to listen to customers, and a bit more technical acumen to gather data and establish the background for why your client or prospect has that need? Will your patience wear thin once you drag your prospect’s feet over the coals one more time, get them to admit that pain point, so you can pounce all over them with your solution which you feel is so very critical for them to place? (Hint: you are a more patient version of the order-taker and what you feel is important really is not that important to your customer).

Do you enjoy the collaborative potential of the relationship you are building with your clients and prospects? Are you on the same page? Do you easily communicate both technically and non-technically? Do your conversations uncover larger contexts in which longer term solutions need to be created? Are there flickers of innovative thinking involved? Are you fascinated by these conversations, learning as much from your clients and prospects as they, in turn, receive from their perceived value in doing business with you?

Regardless of whether you are a technical or non-technical professional, it’s all about your ability to participate in all aspects of the business development cycle. There is a lot of data and analysis that goes into the business development cycle. Are you comfortable researching, reading and interpreting data? Are you confident in presenting your findings and facilitating round table discussion?

News flash: no one comes out of engineering or business school with the full package. Somewhere along the line individuals decide to stop waiting for someone to throw them a life line. They fine tune their expertise, cross train and self-direct their careers. Business development for technical professionals. Somehow, this is not an illogical or counterintuitive concept for me. Who better to be the stewards of a new sales paradigm than the folks best able to gather and interpret the data, deliver their findings in an objective manner and innovate?

Think about it. Did I just describe you?

 

Filed Under: Professional Development & Social Selling, Sales & Engineering Collaboration Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Lessons Learned from Spinner Dolphins

October 17, 2011 By 2 Comments

I was in Maui last week. Look, someone had to go and I had my hand up first. Anyway, long story and I just completed the manuscript for my book and off to the publishers. I had to regenerate grey cells. And when one blogs, you obtain your inspiration from, well, anything. Basically your surroundings, dinner conversations, even going up and down grocery store aisles. (We won’t discuss the type of inspiration one obtains when driving in heavy traffic).

I snorkel and swim. Good thing to like to do when in Maui, let alone anywhere. I had the opportunity of snorkeling with the Pacific Whale Foundation eco-tour for smaller groups (which I highly recommend). We went to Molokini Crater, which is one of the best places in Hawaii (let alone anywhere) to go and offers incredibly diverse underwater ecology.

On the way to La Perouse Bay, we encountered about 200 spinner dolphins. Which is unusual. First of all, these wonderful creatures are nocturnal. So seeing a large and energetic group during the day was unexpected. And yes, they spin. They leap out of the water and can rotate as many as 6-8 times before hitting the surface again. Quite a show put on by the adolescents and teenaged spinner dolphins, who were not content to remain with the rest of the group. Show-offs!

What was really unusual, as our on-board ecologists told us, was that about 5 distinct groups of the spinners had come together and were now traveling as one.  These amazing creatures realized that occasional collaboration was a great evolutionary strategy. By forming larger groups, the spinner dolphins created a degree of protection from outside predators, like sharks and whales. There were more eyes and echo location to signal danger. Larger groups also offered the opportunity for hybridization of the gene pool. In other words, by breeding with individuals outside of their normal group, the dolphins potentially were introducing new genes into the group which might infer greater resistance and resilience to parasites, barnacles and remoras as well as the microscopic poachers found within these parasites and symbiots.

And there was something else going on. There was at least one other species of dolphin, the spotted dolphin, observed traveling with this large group of spinner dolphins. What was up with that? Inter-species collaboration for starters. Collaboration of a far greater kind, most certainly.

Which got me to thinking about how this rather large group of spinner dolphins had arrived at the concept of collaboration for survival, perhaps in response to changing ecological conditions. I doubt that they reached consensus or hashed it out at Monday morning meetings (you, know, a dolphin version of “OK, who wants to stick out their neck first? I’m into my job security.”).

I wonder who the first dolphin was who made the overture to the second group of spinners to come together. Frankly, I think a whole bunch of groups spontaneously arrived at the same conclusion. Just because it felt, biologically and ecologically, like the right thing to do.

I think it just happened because it had to happen. Talk about sink or swim.

So how many groups of individuals do you have swimming around your company who might benefit from coming together to collaborate for competitive advantage?

There is something to be said, after all, for the value of bringing together diverse perspectives for the benefit of hybridized product development which might allow your company to develop new markets and audiences. And you can’t obtain this perspective if everyone has a siloed mindset and a my-department vs. your-department competitive attitude. You know, that technical professionals vs. non-technical professionals thing. Then there is the competitive advantage created by collaboration with those companies and individuals whom you consider to be your competitors. Sort of like that spotted dolphin. Talk about broader competitive advantage.

Are you one of those individuals who would like to leap out of the water and spin around a few times to shake things up a bit? What is holding you back? Are there departments in your organization with whom you could collaborate, to positively influence  competitive outcomes? Perhaps you can see them swimming just beyond the horizon of the walls of your cubicle. I bet they look just like you, not too intimidating. Are they looking back at you when you take a peek over that wall to get a glimpse of them jumping out of the waters in which they are swimming?

So what are you waiting for? Don’t even start to second-guess yourself about the drawbacks of collaborating. I don’t think the spinner dolphins gave it a another thought.

And they looked like they were not only surviving, but thriving.

Filed Under: Entrepreneurs and StartUps, Sales, Pitching & Business Development Tagged With: , , , , ,

Judging your client’s book cover and not listing to what they are saying?

October 4, 2011 By 2 Comments

I’m in South Beach for some meetings. Let me tell you, it is an eye-boggling cornucopia of glorious humanity. Sights, sounds, smells. I love to watch people. I guess it is the anthropologist training. And, like you, I sometimes script a scenario about who these people that I am watching “are” and what their story is about.  I’m judging what I assume their book is, by the cover they present to the world on a given day.

It’s really pure fantasy when it boils right down to it.  But it’s fun as long as you realize it isn’t real.

Sort of like when you are talking with engineering peers, prospective customers and current clients.

I was working with a team yesterday, facilitating their decision making process on which of their vendors’ solutions they were going to place. I only asked one initial set of questions (which is basically the way I work). The rest of the conversation was self-propelled by their asking each other productive questions. The question I asked was: “Are your vendors proposing solutions for who you are today, as opposed to who they are used to working with historically and who they think you are? Are they listening to what you are telling them about your current needs and the issues on the table?” In other words, are they judging your book by its external cover? And is that dust jacket an old one?

As consultants, vendors and suppliers, most of us are very, very good at what we do. And all of us are working within our own status-quo or the way things are.  When we have discussions with prospective or current clients, we can’t help ourselves. We have done our homework, assess what we feel their situation is going to “be” and we create our own biases: which of our solutions would be perfect to solve their problem. In essence, we drink our own Kool-Aid and are convinced going into meetings that we know where our discussions with our customers are going to go. And we will be waiting for them when they get there: with our solution.

Which is where our fantasy prevents us from really being of value to our customers.

We don’t listen to what they are saying. Really listen. In an unbiased manner which has nothing to do with placing our solution or solving their problem. We don’t listen to them, simply. We don’t glean the real heart of the matter because, at the end of the day, it is all about placing our solution. So we have “sold” ourselves before we even sit down with our clients. Who do not want to be sold, by the way, on anyone’s solution. They want someone to listen, ask a provocative question here and there, and let them take their thoughts in the direction they need to go. It’s more of a collaboration than a sales conversation.

How many of you are confident enough in your ability as vendors to let your customers loose to come to their own conclusions on which solution to place? Because that is what your customers are going to do, anyway. They do not want you to guide them, manipulate them, dangle carrots in front of their faces, or appear self serving in any way. Which is counter-intuitive to how the sales process normally is scripted.

When you think about it, you do not work for your clients or with them, either. You “see” them, via phone, email, computer screen or perhaps in person, infrequently. Yes, you “stay in touch” with them, keeping you and your company’s name in front of their faces so that they won’t “forget’ about you.

Don’t worry. They don’t forget about you if you have a valid offering. What you are missing out on, however, is the context of their decision making. And if you are not listening to what your customers are saying to you, as frequently or infrequently as that may be, your solution may be misdirected towards a historical context which no longer exists. Depending on the length of the business development cycle, and the amount of funding involved, your clients may be in a completely different decision making space than when you first started discussions with them. Talk about ready-fire-aim. You bad.

I’ve always found that the best way for clients to place a solution is for them to arrive at that conclusion, on their own, based on my asking great questions rather than constantly substantiating my solution. And that goes for the times I become part of my clients’ business development teams, as well.

You may feel you can read your clients like a book. Just make sure you are actually reading their content, thoroughly, before you make superficial assumptions on what may have been, but no longer is.

 

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