Pillars — Global Connect Group

THE NINE PILLARS OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT COLLABORATION

A FRAMEWORK FOR LEVERAGING THE CONNECTIONS, TALENT,
AND EXPERTISE YOU HAVE UNDER YOUR
ORGANIZATION’S ROOF TO ENERGIZE
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT.

Who owns business growth at your organization? The principals? The sales team? A business development head? Whoever it is, chances are a select few among your team are focused on generating business opportunities while the rest focus only on delivery.

No doubt, the sales engine you have built is high-performing. Many sales managers would say, “We know what we’re doing. We have target- and ranked-prospect lists, CRM, reporting, and our marketing is top notch.”

Yet, if there were tools available to create additional opportunities or get a leg up on the competition, wouldn’t you use them? What if they already existed in your organization, with little incremental cost to use them?

The power lies in organizational collaboration.

STOP THINKING ABOUT BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT IN SILOS

Too many organizations today operate business development as a stand-alone function. “I don’t want people talking to my clients,” a sales rep may say. “It’s a complex sale, and no one can sell it quite like I do,” says the principal of a small business. Yet, no matter how high-performing these silos become, they fail to tap into the relationships, knowledge, and influence that their entire organization can provide.

For example, a Fortune 1000 IT services vendor was struggling to gain insight into a key account. An important contract was up for renewal, but the competition was gaining ground. The client had gone silent. As staff members discussed the issue, they realized the vendor’s head of operations had a personal relationship with the client’s head of IT. The head of operations engaged and identified service issues that could have cost the vendor millions in lost business.

Sound familiar? Even in today’s uber-competitive climate, where businesses seek new data, strategies, methodologies, and tools to gain even the slightest advantage, we fail to tap into the power of our own organizations. As a result, we miss the opportunity to leverage our most important relationships—our employees, strategic partners, business colleagues, and clients—to help grow our business

THE NINE PILLARS OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT COLLABORATION™

Most employees—especially those who are in some part compensated for business performance—will play an active role in business growth if asked. But after decades of helping businesses grow, we’ve learned, first, that most won’t ask and, second, most don’t know how to mobilize their employees.

The Nine Pillars of Business Development Collaboration is a methodology and set of tools that help organizations collaborate as a group, grow their networks and communities of influence, and drive additional business development growth.

Each pillar is designed to support this mission. Embracing just one can help you excavate more data to support new prospect introductions and, ultimately, more new client relationships. Embracing all nine will transform your organization into a powerful business development machine.

1. Business Development:

Embrace the idea that business development (the creation of long-term value) is an organizational mission, not an individual or functional one. Decide, as an organization, that you will empower your employees, strategic partners, and business colleagues by leveraging their combined networks of influence to grow your business and your organization. Break down silos, create systems, and address personnel or other obstacles that stand in the way.

2. Networks of Influence (NOI):

Popular business social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, offer the powerful potential to understand the relationships between an organization’s employees and its prospects.

For example, a mid-sized fintech company penetrated a major U.S. retailer after its head of business development noticed a midlevel employee engaging directly on Twitter with the prospect’s SVP of innovation, whom she had met at a conference. Effective NOI analysis can enable a company to request warm, trusted introductions into prospects.

Developing actionable and repeatable NOI tools will save time and generate more calls, meetings, presentations, proposals, and closes.

3. Community of Influence (COI):

Face-to-face interaction remains crucial to business development success. However, the internet and mobility have eliminated prospects’ need for such communication in many stages of the sales process. Thus, our reliance on communities, such as nonprofits, charities, and associations, is more important to bringing people closer together than ever before.

In fact, we see many examples of lasting business relationships built between individuals who serve together in some form of community. Understanding and cultivating your organization’s COI (e.g., by encouraging volunteerism and board leadership) will increase both influence and new business opportunities over time.

4. Prospect Relationship Maps (PRMs):

Leveraging relationship-building activities such as NOI and COI will increase the potential entry points into a number of prospect organizations. Developing a formal prospect relationship mapping (PRM) process for your prospects is a powerful account-based strategy.

Use PRMs as a business development management tool while you pursue prospect companies, their employees, websites, social media profiles, work history, community engagement, and more. Look at PRMs as a road map for continuing your business development into your targeted prospects.

5. Event Engagement Influence (EEI):

If we agree that networks and communities of influence are vital to connecting meaningful relationships, then understanding how events are drivers for these face-to-face connections is important. Would you ever go into a big game without a strategy or playbook? Of course not.

Pre-event, at-the-event and post-event action plans should be foundational to your event strategy. Make the effort to understand the community leadership of the people and organizations that will be at these events. Understand that what you do after the event is the most important aspect of gaining a return on your event engagement—now that everyone has something in common.

6. Social Media Best Practices:

Despite the ubiquity of social media, and the valuable data it can provide, few organizations have a clear strategy. But social media and business development are both about relationships. Identifying and cultivating areas of group social influence can create a powerful network effect.

For example, a Fortune 1000 technology company reversed its conservative social media policies and began training employees to use their social channels for personal and business benefit. As a result, the organization created an efficient and highly effective marketing channel and increased its reputation for thought leadership in several important areas.

7. Strategic Advisory:

The benefits of consultative selling are well documented. Your prospects have several challenges that can benefit from strategic advisory. You have several subject matter experts, data, and intellectual property at all levels of your organization. Developing a strategy for mining and delivering this expertise (in the form of an advisory board, strategic partner relationship, digital content, and marketing) adds value to your prospects on an ongoing basis.

Delivering this selflessly over time will result in a more important role with prospects and clients, better access to decision makers, and reciprocal data and intelligence to support your business.

8. Vertical and Horizontal Sectors:

Every business has vertical and horizontal perspectives, just as every company has clients who are positioned in an industry. As a provider, having an industry perspective with your clients is critical to business development.

Consider that your prospect list has similar industry positions to those of your clients. Leveraging your clients’ area of interest with your prospects makes good business development sense. Developing perspectives, whether your clients are in a vertical or horizontal position, will increase your relevance with them and open new prospect doors.

9. Globally Aware:

Every business that has a website is global. Certainly, if you have clients, many will have a global pursuit, whether they are importing or exporting goods and services or both. Having a global perspective should be foundational to your company culture. So leveraging your network and community of international influence makes good business sense now and in the future

Applying the Nine Pillars

Today’s always-on, uber-connected world forces us who think about business growth every day to acknowledge that business development, like so many other things, is no longer best managed in a silo. Each of our employees, colleagues, and partners has access to the same expertise, tools, and relationships that we do. And, frankly, some are much better at it than others. The Nine Pillars of Business Development Collaboration provide an actionable road map for taking advantage of this phenomenon.

Case Studies

The pillars are much more than simple conjecture. They are time-tested strategies developed over decades of real-world business development success. And a number of businesses small and large, today, are successfully implementing them.

Read article in The Jabian Journal