Triple A Framework

Avoiding Chaos: Unlock the Power of Systems

By Tom on August 18, 2023

Today, organizations face the constant challenge of achieving sustainable growth while staying ahead of the competition. This necessitates the implementation of robust systems and processes that streamline business development efforts. Focusing on developing a customer base, qualifying leads, and pursuing opportunities consistently, companies maximize their potential for success. I call this process the Systematic Sales Path and it comprises:

Systematic development of your customer base
Consistent qualification of leads
Systematic pursuit of opportunities

In this post, we explore the importance of systems and processes in each of these crucial areas.

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Developing a customer base

Building a strong customer base is the foundation for long-term sustainable growth. Effective systems and processes enable businesses to identify, target, and engage with potential customers efficiently. Here’s how:
Market Research: Implementing systems for market research allows businesses to gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and buying behaviors. This knowledge empowers organizations to tailor their products or services to meet specific customer demands.

Lead Generation: By developing lead generation systems and processes, businesses can systematically attract potential customers and nurture relationships with them. This may include strategies such as content marketing, social media engagement, and networking.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A well-implemented CRM system enables businesses to organize customer data, track interactions, and provide personalized experiences. This strengthens customer relationships, increases customer satisfaction, and drives repeat business. A simple way to do this is to develop a Tactical Action Plan, a simple spreadsheet that keeps you on track.

Consistent lead qualification

Stop chasing the latest shiny opportunity! Not all leads are created equal, and businesses must focus their efforts on pursuing the most promising opportunities. Implementing systems and processes for lead qualification helps ensure that valuable resources are allocated wisely. Consider the following:
Lead Scoring: A lead scoring system allows businesses to assign values to leads based on factors such as demographics, engagement level, and buying intent. This helps prioritize leads and allocate resources to those with the highest potential for conversion.

Qualification Criteria: Establishing clear qualification criteria ensures that the sales team pursues leads that align with the organization’s ideal customer profile. This prevents wasted efforts on leads that are unlikely to convert into valuable customers. You can also embed your values into this system by making sure that opportunities align with your purpose.

Marketing Alignment: Effective systems and processes foster collaboration between the business development and marketing teams. This collaboration ensures that leads are effectively nurtured throughout the buyer’s journey, increasing the chances of successful conversions.

Systematic pursuit

Once qualified leads are identified, pursuing opportunities in a structured manner is crucial for closing deals and driving revenue growth. Systems and processes help streamline the business development process and optimize outcomes. Consider the following strategies:
Pipeline Management: Implementing a well-defined sales pipeline with clear stages enables businesses to track opportunities and forecast revenue accurately. This allows for efficient resource allocation and better decision-making.

Team Enablement: Developing systems and processes for sales enablement equips the team with the necessary tools, resources, and training to effectively engage with potential customers. This includes providing relevant product knowledge, and ongoing professional development.

Performance Metrics: Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking them through data-driven systems helps identify areas for improvement and optimize sales strategies. This data-driven approach allows businesses to make informed decisions and continuously refine their sales processes.

Final thoughts

Systems and processes are the backbone of sustainable growth. Focusing on developing a customer base, qualifying leads, and pursuing opportunities strategically, organizations can maximize their potential for growth. Implementing these systems ensures that resources are utilized efficiently, BD teams empowered, and revenue targets achieved. Embracing the power of systems and processes is key to getting your business development soaring.

Sustainable growth

If you want to upskill your work winning check out my flagship course Business Development Academy. This leads you through the business development process step by step. Giving you the skills, system and processes to be more purposeful in the market place. To learn more click the button below.

Business Development Academy

Business Development priorities

Are looking to begin your Business Development journey but are not quite sure where to start? Download my guide to scaling your revenues in 10 days. This gives you 10 days of achievable action to set you on the right path.

For a solid definition of business development you can check out my take in this post here.

For a simple yet comprehensive framework to base your business development activity around I recommend checking out my new book Business Development Begins Here. It is available to order on Amazon. Visit the link to grab your copy now.

Why Business Development is the Lifeblood of Technical Consultants

By Tom on July 28, 2023

Regardless of your niche, consulting is an industry that is built on relationships. Technical consultants are hired for their specialist expertise, ability to solve complex problems, and their understanding of the industry they work in. However, these carefully honed skills are irrelevant if you can’t find clients to work with. Ultimately, this is where business development comes in. In this post, we’ll explore why business development is the lifeblood of technical consultants and provide tips on improving your business development skills.

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Why the lifeblood of consulting

There are lots of reasons why business development should be practiced by technical consultants. Firstly, when done right it lets you work on the types of projects that you enjoy. You can build your business around your particular strengths and skillset. Over time this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where you pursue and win the projects you like and begin to gain a reputation as the go to person for those particular problems.

This leads neatly to the second reason: forming an industry wide reputation. Purposeful business development means more than just pursuing customers. Developing relationships with industry influencers and stakeholders is key. Attending industry-wide events, networking with peers while keeping across trends and news are crucial tasks. Combining these gets you known in your industry, which is important when customers are seeking your skillset.

Ultimately it comes down to having control of your own destiny. Pursuing what you want and making your mark on your industry is nearly impossible if you aren’t practicing purposeful business development.

The following gives some tip on how to get a bit more purposeful with your work winning.

Assess: Understanding your niche

Understanding your niche is one of the most important aspects of business development. As a consultant, knowing what industry you work in, what services you provide and to whom is everything. This seems obvious, but many consultants make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone. This approach works in the short term, but over the long term, leads to burnout and a lack of focus.

Assessing your niche starts by asking some questions. What are your core competencies? Where does your experience lie? Which clients do you want to work with? Who else plays in this space? Once you have a good understanding of your niche, you can start to develop a focused business development strategy.

Aim: Where can you help the most

Having assessed your niche, you need to determine what projects you can help your customers with the most. This requires a deep understanding of the issues your customers’ face. Articulating how you can help them and what value you bring to the table should become second nature.

At the same time, you need to consider where your reputation lies or what you want to be known for. Are you an expert in a particular area? Do you have experience working with a specific type of customer? By focusing on your strengths, you can build a reputation as an expert in your field, which, in turn will make it easier to attract new clients.

Once you know the types of projects and the reputation you want to foster you can plan which customers and industry stakeholders you should be meeting. This information will form the core of your business development plan.

man wearing white long sleeved shirt holding black pen — Meeting customers is the best way to understand them

Action: Use meetings to explore customer needs

Finally, it’s time to take action. Using face to face meetings to explore your customer needs is where you can add real value. Having a proper conversation lets you understand your customers’ needs more deeply. Two-way discussion of issues may give them solutions that they may not have considered.

Additionally face to face conversations helps build rapport and trust creating the beginnings of a long-term business relationship.

Final thoughts

I hope you’ll agree, business development is the lifeblood of technical consultants. It enables you to find new clients, build relationships, and grow your business. By assessing your niche, aiming your efforts, and taking action to explore your customers’ needs, you can develop a successful business development strategy that will help you thrive as a consultant.

If you’re a technical consultant, what are you waiting for? Make your first business development move today!

Technical consultants

If you want to upskill your work winning check out my flagship course Business Development Academy. Set over 4 modules and 10 videos this course leads you through the business development process step by step. Giving you the skills, system and processes to be more purposeful in the market place. To learn more click the button below.

Business Development Academy

Meet your customers.

Are looking to begin your Business Development journey but are not quite sure where to start? Download my quick start guide to business development. This gives a series of simple activities to quickly set you on the right path.

For a definition of business development you can check out my take in this post here.

If you are getting value out of my weekly free content I’d ask that you consider buying my new book. It’s a simple yet comprehensive framework to base your business development activity around and full of practical application to get you started now. It is available to order on Amazon now.

The Secrets of Immediate Action Work Winning

By Tom on March 10, 2023

One of the hardest parts of practicing purposeful business development is starting. So how can you start? I was asked to present on this topic at my local toastmasters group and thought it would be worth sharing my presentation here. Exploring the secrets to getting started with your business development, you’ll find it isn’t as difficult as you might think.

Using the Triple A Framework

I write about the Triple A Framework extensively in my book Business Development Begins Here. In summary it comprises Assessing your company, sales ecosystem and your place within it. Aiming your future effort in line with your company purpose. Taking daily Action to further your company purpose.

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Immediate Action Work Winning

Importantly, in getting started speed is of the essence and we will be looking at the Assess and Action phases only.

Assessing Your Customer

In an effort to hit the ground running I recommend assessing your customers first. Why? Arguably a business doesn’t exist if it has no customers. Therefore, I suggest they are the most important part of any business and should be treated as such.

Firstly, determine a profile of your ideal customer. I go through this process in more detail in this related post. Writing down the top 8-10 attributes of your ideal customer helps with this definition.

Plotting your attributes and your ideal customer profile into a matrix like the one below lets you begin benchmarking your customer base.

Input your top 10-20 existing, prospective and strategic customers and benchmark them against your ideal customer. Finally, using a simple red/green color code shows you which customers to prioritize.

Meeting Your Existing Customers

The second action is deceivingly simple. Go out and meet your existing customers in order of priority. There are a few reasons for this:

They know you already and are more likely to meet
Great source of feedback on your service (both good and bad)
Potential to get some great product/service stories to use in future conversations
Opportunity to get some early wins

Setting the meeting agenda around getting feedback and keeping a curious mindset keeps the meeting out of sales territory, making it more relaxed for both parties.

The Challenge

If you are serious about getting your business development started I have the challenge for you.

Over the next two weeks commit to meeting one existing customer every day. Ask them for feedback and learn how they do business. No sales. Make each meeting a learning conversation.

Do this and I can guarantee you will get a fantastic wealth of information about your product/service and will open up new sources of opportunities.

Immediate Action Work Winning

Are you looking to begin your Business Development journey but are not quite sure where to start? Download my quick start guide to business development. This gives a series of simple activities to quickly set you on the right path.

For a definition of business development you can check out my take in this post here.

If you want a more proactive and personal approach to your business development I am available to help. Through face to face video calls I’ll set you on the right path and keep you accountable to future activity. I currently have space on my 1on1 personalized coaching program and my flagship course. I’m also available to coach your team in the practice of purposeful business development. To learn more click the button below.

Business Development Coaching

Five Ways to Quickly Improve Your Business Development

By Tom on February 24, 2023

Entering a role where you must quickly improve your business development needs a particular approach. If the time you would usually spend assessing your market and planning your approach isn’t available don’t despair. You can still quickly improve your business development and implement a long term system at the same time. First, try negotiating some time with the leadership to allow for a proper assessment of the situation. If this is not possible, here are a few suggested actions to help you hit the ground running.

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Improve your business development

Undertaking the following five activities as a priority, while working through the triple A framework in parallel let’s you make ground fast. Implementing an adaptive feedback loop is crucial here. Information gleaned from customer discussions must be fed back into the assessing and planning loop. Future actions can then be adapted accordingly.

Think of it as a repeatable cycle. Talk to customers-learn-feedback-adjust. Repeat.

1. Develop the profile of your ideal customer

Before you do anything create a profile for your ideal customer. What are the attributes that are most important to you. Asking a series of questions like the following will help create your profile:

Which industry does the company operate within?
What size staff and annual turnover do they have?
What work do they focus on?
Are there specific products or services they need to be successful?
What sort of people work there?
Where are they located?
How much will they spend on your product or service?
Who are the decision makers around implementing your products or services?
Who controls their budgets?

Generating this profile gives you a good indication of which customers to pursue first. Taking the opportunity to adjust this following customer and stakeholder discussions is a good way to keep the profile on point.

If you are not sure where to start: “Mine the Gold you Have” and begin by profiling your current number one customer.

Generating a customer matrix lets you weigh up (prioritize) your customers

2. Create a Customer Matrix

Following the creation of your ideal customer profile sketch out a rough customer matrix. Include your top current customers and a handful of priority targets, all with a burning need for your company offering. Rate each customer against the attributes of the ideal customer profile to generate a matrix. Viewing the matrix gives clear priorities for contact and pursuit.

For more information on the creation of a customer matrix visit my post on the subject here.

3. Implement a preliminary tactical action plan

Now you have a clear understanding of your initial priorities it’s time to convert to immediate action. Identify key personnel within each priority customer, and feed them into a simple tactical action plan. Assigning each entry a due date, action and contact person to start with.

Then start making contact, email, phone, meet up. Get out into the market.

4. Meet existing customers to ask for feedback on past performance

Using the actions from your preliminary tactical action plan is a great way to quickly improve your business development. However, your number one priority is to meet your top existing customers. Email them straight away asking if you can meet and get some feedback. Getting honest feedback on why they buy from you, what works, and what doesn’t should be an immediate priority. Of course, make sure to loop this information back into the assess phase of the triple A framework and to the relevant internal stakeholders within your business.

Maintain discipline around the systematic sales path

5. Implement the systematic sales path

Start as you mean to continue and align your activity to the “Systematic Sales Path”. Discipline around this now will make things much easier as you become busier. It allows each lead and opportunity to have the best chance of success and prevents any being missed. In addition be disciplined in keeping the tactical action plan updated and live.

My Live Revenue Growth Workshop Goes Live: 9th March

Constantly Adapt to Win

Finally accept the fact that you are going to have to continually adapt and refine your tactical action plan, at least in the beginning. As you work through the triple A framework (in parallel with your immediate actions), keep your findings and output from both the framework and your meetings feeding into your assessment, planning and future action.

While the above actions let you hit the ground running, make sure to spend time on the assessing your company and sales ecosystem and aiming your future effort in line with the triple A framework stages to keep up with long-term direction and focus. Combining the short term immediate actions with the longer term work will really set you up for future success.

If you do find yourself dropped into a position where immediate business development success is crucial consider using the above to really start making impact.

Business Development Success

For a definition of business development you can check out my take in this post here.

If you want a more proactive and personal approach to your business development I am available to help. Through face to face video calls I’ll set you on the right path and keep you accountable to future activity. I currently have space on my 1on1 personalized coaching and advisory program. To learn more click the button below.

Revenue Growth Coaching

My Adventures in Business: Looking Back at 2022

By Tom on December 30, 2022

Can you believe I’ve been writing this blog for over a year now. With 2023 fast approaching I thought it worthwhile to do a short retrospective around tomwatkin.com and the journey so far.

Get consistent with your business development: Get Your Guide

Work winning doesn’t require sales.

It’s been an eventful year with the successful launch of my book and increasing engagement with my blog and other content. I’ve engaged a small number of coaching clients who I am helping grow their revenues in a systematic way. I’ve also talked about my book and business development to a number of companies and organizations. Additionally, I’ve made some great connections with business authors and business development thinkers across the globe.

It’s been a fun year and the tomwatkin.com ecosystem is beginning to pull together.

Celebrating the launch of my book with a work winning workshop for Tetra Tech was a highlight!

Most Popular Blog Posts

In 2021 I set myself the goal of posting to my blog on a weekly cadence and I’ve managed to meet my target. As well as providing well received content, posting weekly has helped me improve in craft of writing. My three most popular posts are listed below.

What is Business Development? Sales or Not Sales? A common question that people want to know the answer to.

Never Hire a Salesperson to Grow Your Business Really split the readership with many agreeing with me. While those identifying strongly with sales were vehemently disagreeing.

9 Winning Elements of a Business Development Action Plan Defined the key elements of a practical tactical action plan.

What Adventures in Store for 2023

I’ve got some great plans for the coming year including a number of speaking engagements. I’ll also be launching my inaugural online course tentatively titled Business Development Begins Right Here: fundamentals of consistent repeatable revenue growth. More on this in the coming weeks.

I’m also in talks with a number of companies around providing business development training to their leadership teams and rising stars.

I’ll still be posting weekly content and giving away free work winning resources. I’m also planning to take on a couple more coaching clients so drop me a message if you’re interested.

A busy 2022 and it’s looking to be an even more productive 2023 cant wait to see what adventures in business are in store. What are you looking forward to this coming year?

Start Your Business Development Journey

If you are looking to get your business development processes squared away, download my free guide to scaling your revenues in only ten days. This gives you the immediate actions needed to create a system around your work winning, turning it into repeatable action and results.

Three Secrets the A-Team Taught Me About Business Development Planning

By Tom on December 16, 2022

A bit of a fun post this week on the lead up to Christmas and a big nostalgia trip for me too. The hit 80’s TV show the A-Team and business development planning, how does that fit? Let me explain.

As a child of the 80’s I was a mad fan of the A-Team. The action, chases, and do-good adventures were a real thrill. I couldn’t wait to see the next crazy instalment of Hannibal, BA, Face and Murdoch’s escapades. Recently I went on a massive nostalgia trip and treated myself to a couple of boxed sets. Sitting down with my kids I was a little worried that the series may not have aged well. I needn’t have worried, this team of well intentioned mercenaries still delivered the goods. My kids and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

For those of you who don’t know the shows premise let me explain. The A-team were a crack commando squad framed for a crime they didn’t commit. They now work as guns-for-hire in the Los Angeles underground, protecting the downtrodden. The writers knmew what they were doing and the episodes generally followed a similar formula:

Bad guys bullying someone
A-Team hired in an unconventional way
Hannibal (the leader) makes a plan
The plan is ruined and the team suffer a setback
The bad guys get their butts kicked
Hannibal claims that it was his plan all along.

The A-Team racing to foil some bad guys!

How does this tie in with business development? Planning! Funnily enough the A-Team planning cycle mirrors that of my business development triple A framework: assess, aim & action.

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“I Have a Plan”

Once the A-Team are hired they go about assessing their situation. Exploring the neighborhood and the stakeholders that live in it is a crucial part of the process. Additionally their customers problem is investigated in more detail. Finally on of the team will scope out the competition and report back.

This neatly mirrors business development. You must assess the market, stakeholders, customers and competitors before you can proceed with planning your future effort.

Once Hannibal has a handle on all these things he lights his cigar and states, “I can feel a plan coming on”.

One thing the A-Team did well was complete the assess phase quickly. Of course this is television and laboring over this could get boring fast. But there is a grain of truth here. Getting bogged down in over-planning can lead to inaction and a lot of work with limited return.

Instead you need to test your plan quickly by going out into the market, talking to stakeholders and customers and learning from them. You will get much more value out these conversations than sitting in front of the computer planning.

This is what the A-Team do next.

Importance of Feedback

Hannibal inevitably leads the team into their first foray against the enemy. Resulting in everything going wrong. The bad guys seemingly get the upper hand. With a dispirited team on hand Hannibal smiles secretively and acts as if everything is going just the way he wanted.

What has Hannibal actually done. He’s used the triple A framework by assessing his situation, aiming his effort (making a plan) and taking action (testing his plan). The feedback gleaned from taking action allows for adjustment and follow up.

This approach works well in the business development setting too. Taking action by talking to existing and prospective customers and testing your assumptions on how they operate. Asking questions and listening to the answers prepares you to pivot. Remember:

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”.

You must listen, adapt and act on the feedback you receive.

Business development planning done right!

“I Love it When a Plan Comes Together”

Back to the A-Team. Based on the knowledge gained from their earlier encounters the team enact their final plan, usually with some crazy innovation built from left over scrap. The bad guys are soundly beaten and good prevails. Hannibal then proclaims “I Love it When a Plan Comes Together!”

Listening to the feedback gleaned from client meetings and market intelligence is good. Making meaningful change based on the information is better. Most importantly taking what you’ve learned and making small adjustments to your plan will keep you relevant and current with your customers.

Next Action

When you are thinking about your business development planning remember the A-Team. Assess your situation, aim your effort through a preliminary plan and take action. Feeding back information learned while taking action is critical. Consequently looping this back into the assess and aim phases allows you to adjust as needed. This will keep you relevant with your customer base and makes sure that you don’t get disrupted by changes in the market. Remember if you’re stuck, ask yourself:

What would the A-Team do?

Business development planning

Are looking to begin your Business Development journey but are not quite sure where to start? Download my business development guide below. This gives a list of actions and activities to set you on the right path.

For a comprehensive and practical framework to base your business development activity around I recommend checking out my new book Business Development Begins Here. It is available to order on Amazon. Visit the link to reserve your copy now.

Coaching

How to Host Effective Customer Meetings

By Tom on November 18, 2022

Hosting effective customer meetings is perhaps the most important part of the business development skillset. Unfortunately many professionals are put off as they think they need to be salesy. I’m going to show you that this is most definitely not the case.

I remember going to my first customer meeting. I was so nervous. While I had met customers as part of project discussions this was the first one focused on business development. As a hydrogeologist I had identified this particular mining company as having serious water issues and found their Study Manager through a work colleague. One shaky email later I found myself walking down the Perth terrace for a coffee meeting.

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I’d done my research and thought I knew what issues the customer were facing. Additionally, I was confident in the service that my team provided. I was also genuinely interested in the project and how my contact was progressing it.

As a bit of an introvert I was still very on edge at meeting a new person for the first time. What would they think of me, would I make sense, would they take me seriously? Additionally I admit I was feeling a little uncomfortable with the idea of selling.

Despite these fears, my genuine curiosity helped break the ice, I asked questions and listened to the answers. We explored their dewatering issues together. I didn’t try to sell anything. Instead I sought to understand and by doing so the sale emerged. I remember thinking that this was fun. It didn’t feel like selling. In fact I was actually enjoying myself.

This conversation turned into a small project that ended up growing and growing. We provided amazing service and I had an epiphany. Business Development is fun and I want to do more!

Below I discuss three ways to get the most out of your customer meetings and even make them an enjoyable experience for both parties.

Go to Customer Meetings with a Curious Mindset

Approaching customer meetings with curiosity is a great way to get out of the salesy headspace. The theme of what am I going to sell turns into what can I learn about this person and how can I help them. Thinking that you know your customers problems better than them smacks of arrogance and is a mistake. Instead aim to understand their issues and perspective. That way you can help solve their problems with empathy and deeper knowledge.

Have Effective Customer Meetings by Asking Lots of Questions

Before each meeting you should do your research on the customers business. Not to wow them with how much you know but rather to equip you with relevant and thoughtful questions. Use your knowledge to dig into their issues and explore why things are happening the way they are.

For example when I was a hydrogeologist I would have a rough idea of the water infrastructure, geological conditions and water regime that our customer was operating with. As such I wasn’t responding to their issues cold and could help provide insight into their situation.

Most of the talking that you do in effective customer meetings should be question based. What issues are you facing now? Where are the gaps in your support? Why is this an issue? What would life look like if this issue was solved?

The last question is really critical. Placing your customer in a world where their issue is no longer a factor is gold. Ask questions to get them to paint a picture of how solving their issue will impact them personally. Doing this gets them more invested in actioning a solution.

Make Listening a Priority

Asking questions is a waste of time if you don’t listen to the answers. Practice active listening and really listen to what your customer is saying. And not saying. Take your time to understand and follow up with careful questions to draw out more. Be empathetic and show understanding.

This is not the time to rave on about how great your product or service is. Instead use your listening to give real world examples of how similar problems have been solved. Discuss ways you can help their specific issue. Talking about your wider services at this stage is a waste of time.

If you cant help be honest about it.

Make listening to your customers a priority

Further Action

Start thinking about how you approach your business development meetings and how you can turn them into effective customer meetings. Commit to approaching them with a curiosity mindset, armed with questions and an intent to listen. This will allow you to get a deeper understanding of your customers issues, give you an opportunity to help them solve them and foster a greater feeling of trust.

I challenge you to give it a go.

My book Business Development Begins Here is a comprehensive manual that guides you through the process from assessment to action is on sale now. You can order from Amazon by clicking the pic below.

If you are looking to get your business development processes squared away, download my guide to scaling your work winning in only ten days. This gives you the immediate actions needed to create consistency around your work winning without becoming salesy.

If you want a more proactive and personal approach to your business development I am available to help. I’ll set you on the right path and keep you accountable to future activity. I’m currently have space on my 1on1 coaching program. To learn more click the button below.

Business Development Coaching

Three Ways to Thread Business Purpose Through Your Work Winning

By Tom on November 4, 2022

Unfortunately forgetting business purpose is all too common when people talk about work winning. Usually the focus is on customers, opportunities and process. However, purpose is the thread that ties all three Assess, Aim and Action stages together. It keeps your efforts centered on the activities that align with and champion your organizations reason for being. Keeping it front of mind allows for purposeful growth that keeps your company thriving.

Below I discuss three ways to maintain purpose throughout your business development cycle.

Maintain business purpose throughout all three stages of the triple A framework

Purpose in the Assess Stage

The Assess stage of the triple A framework is all about finding your companies place within the Sales Ecosystem. While this includes external factors like competitors, market and customers, it also focuses on the internals of your organisation. Defining your company’s purpose is arguably the most important part of this internal focus. As you can see from the hierarchy detailed below your purpose dictates your objectives which directs everything else down to the customers you approach and do business with.

Everything stems from your objectives and purpose

To develop this clarity sit down with the leadership team, and get answers to the following:

What are the key aspirations of our organisation?
How are we different from the competition?
What market do we play in now?
Which markets do we want to play in for the future?
What do we want to look like in three years’ time?
Where does our business development effort fit into the above?

Answering these honestly will allow the purpose to shine through. Define it as succinctly as you can and write it down. Don’t worry too much about the actual words. The intent is much more important than grammar. This will guide all your daily business development activities moving forward.

If you are struggling to understand or define your business purpose a good place to start is Find Your Why by Simon Sinek. Check out his video here.

You must consider business purpose when *Aiming* your effort

Purpose in the Aim Stage

Defining your purpose is only one part of the Assess stage. Other aspects of your market, competitors, industry and customers have also been evaluated. Aiming all this information into a series of plans will inform your future activity for the coming months.

Checking the objectives contained within these plans against your purpose should be a regular exercise. For example are the customers and market segments furthering the overall organisational vision? If they aren’t you will need to understand why and make some changes.

I’ve fallen foul to this in the past whilst working for a multinational instrumentation company. I had aimed much of my effort into tackling the mining effort here in Australia. However, the company purpose was actually focussed on the oil and gas industry where the product really shined. This misunderstanding on my part meant that despite putting in lots of effort and activity, support from head office for mining trials was limited at best. Aligning my planning and activity with the company purpose and vision would have yielded much better results.

And……Action. Maintain purpose through all your BD activities.

Purpose in the Action Stage

The Action stage revolves around your daily activity developing customer relationships, creating leads and closing opportunities. Again, your company purpose plays an important role here. The customers you meet, the leads you qualify and the opportunities you pursue should all be furthering this vision.

Activities running against the purpose should be pretty obvious by now. As such they should be avoided or politely declined. If something is running close to the line and you’re not sure take time to investigate it a little more closely. Ask yourself if this activity will be taking time away from something that will be furthering your business purpose.

What’s Next

I believe that company purpose and vision should be threaded through all your business development activity. My challenge to you is to take a serious look at your organisation and what it’s long term vision and purpose is. If it isn’t clear, ask the leadership. Do a quick audit of your BD activity and ask yourself honestly; does it align?

As always I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Feel free to drop a comment below or touch base through the usual channels.

I’ve also written Business Development Begins Here a comprehensive manual that guides you through the process from assessment through to action. You can order from Amazon by clicking the pic below.

If you want a more proactive and personal approach to your business development I am available to help. I’ll set you on the right path and keep you accountable for future activity. I’m currently have a space on my 1on1 coaching program. To learn more click the button below.

Business Development Coaching

Key Elements to include in a Business Development Operational Plan

By Tom on September 16, 2022

Once your strategic plan is in place you a business development operational plan has to be written. This gets more granular around the goals and priorities of the business development effort. Timescale should be no longer than 12 months. Ideally the information should fit within a single page. Taking the company-wide strategy and applying it to the particular markets within your sphere of responsibility.

At a minimum, it should detail revenue targets, quoting targets, key industries, and actions. Details of a measurable KPI should accompany each action.

Business Development Plan Framework

A model framework is presented below to be adapted for your particular circumstances.

Mission—adapts the company mission to apply to your region and areas of responsibility.
Targets—details the targets for revenue, volume of quoting, and number of business development meetings and calls.
Customer Experience—defines how you want the customer to engage with and experience your offering. This shapes both how you approach customers and your internal delivery teams.
Marketing—highlights those marketing tools planned for the coming year. Details social media plans, specific events, and launches, etc.
Existing Market Segments—details the key goals, targets, and actions for this segment of your customer base.
New market segments—longer-term goals and actions that are unlikely to yield immediate results but tie in with the growth aspirations of the company.
Projects—defines projects specific to your team for the coming year. Includes development of the company website, marketing materials, or project references.
Collaboration—features internal stakeholder alliances to enable smooth collaboration in any joint actions needed.

Example Plan

Google holds many examples of sales strategies. A simple search will give you plenty of choice. However, I developed an example intended to be simple and succinct (see below). Capturing enough detail to be relevant, it defines the priorities clearly. Adapt this to your own specific set of circumstances.

Remember to make all KPIs SMART. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

Example operational business development plan

Action Your Business Development Plan

Commit to building your annual operational plan. This will help guide your activity in line with your company purpose. completing this exercise gets yous thinking more strategically about the activity you need to undertake. Who are your key customers and where is your growth going to come from this year? Give it some real thought and include in the plan.

If you need help, spaces are available on my personalised coaching program. This one on one service will let us do a deep dive on you business development planning, market assessment and daily activity. I’ll help keep you focused and accountable.

If you are starting your business development journey and would like to understand the different stages and activities needed for success download my free BD checklist resource below. You can use this on its own or in conjunction with my new book Business Development Begins Here.

For a simple framework to base your business development activity around I recommend checking out my new book Business Development Begins Here. You can Pre-Order on Amazon by clicking the pic below.

If you want a more proactive and personal approach to your business development I am available to help. Through face to face video calls I’ll set you on the right path and keep you accountable to future activity. I currently have space on my 13-week 1on1 personalized coaching program. To learn more click the button below.

Business Development Coaching

The Only Three Business Development Plans You Need

By Tom on August 12, 2022

Business development plans are essential to start making impact with your work winning effort. Completing an assessment of your sales ecosystem, it is easy to start doing everything at once. But, your enthusiasm will only get you so far. A systematic approach is essential if you want to start getting repeatable results. To achieve a systematic approach you must carefully aim your effort.

Aiming Your Effort

Your strategic intent and sales ecosystem assessment provide an excellent foundation. Therefore, use these to form your action-oriented business development plans.

Sitting at a desk waiting for the customer to call is not business development. It requires daily effort. Get into the market, talk to customers, and feedback your findings to the company leadership.

Daily marketing activity fills the sales funnel. This requires daily action, to turn leads into opportunities and sales. It never stops—the cycle needs continuous effort. Activity must always be working toward the goals of the business.

To sum up, that is a lot to stay on top of. In an ever-changing day where customers, opportunities, and leads are all competing for your time, there must be a system. A plan is required that outlines this system of action. This allows you to approach your customer base in line with your goals. Additionally, it prevents customers and opportunities being forgotten. The following section summarizes the three plans that will focus your activity in the right direction.

Introducing the Three Plans

Strategic Plan—contains the overarching goals and intent of the company as well as the core growth areas. Usually has a 3-5 year time span. Only one of these plans will exist at a time.

Operational Plan—covers the goals and focus areas of the business development function for the coming year. Likely forms part of a broader business unit plan. A separate operational plan should be in place for each area of operation. For example, business development managers in Florida and Alaska will be following the same strategic plan. However, each has a separate operational plan capturing local differences in the industry and market.

Tactical Action Plan—this daily use plan executes on the operational plan, identifying daily actions for the business developer.

Your Business Development Plans

It is not necessarily the role of the business developer to create all three plans. This will depend on the company size and structure. As an entrepreneur or small business owner all three will definitely fall into your work flow. Whilst, a BDM in a large organisation will likely have responsibility for the operational and tactical plans. At a bare minimum, you must have input into the operational plan and ownership of the tactical action plan.

Take care when developing these plans, as they ultimately shape the growth of your business. Use the data collated in the assess stage to aim your efforts in a direction based on evidence and opportunity, not gut feel.

Get a bullseye with your business development plans

Over the coming weeks I’ll unpack the three plans in more detail giving tips on how to implement for your own use.

Sign up below to get access to my free business development resources. This includes my LinkedIn Mastery Roadmap and BD Checklist. These will keep you focused on the important things letting you be more effective with your time and effort.

If you need help with your business development planning, spaces are available on my personalised coaching program. This a one on one service will let us do a deep dive into your business development planning, market assessment and daily activity. I’ll personally keep you focused and accountable.

As always I’d love to hear what you think. Leave a comment or reach out on LinkedIn.

Simple LinkedIn Marketing in Three Easy Stages (Part 2)

By Tom on July 15, 2022

In my last post we looked at the Three Ps of LinkedIn marketing and discussed ways to get your Profile in to shape. This week we will look at the second P: Propagate. That is developing a network of connections who are interest in the services you offer.

Three Degrees of LinkedIn

Now that your profile really highlights your offering and can act as an interesting landing page, it is time to start making relevant connections. LinkedIn has three degrees of connection shown in the figure below.

These are described as follows:

First-degree connection: Contacts that have connected to you. You either know these people directly or have something in common. Preferably industry and geography.

Second degree connection: Contacts who are connected to your first degree connections. Generally, you don’t know these people, though you will have acquaintances in common.

Third degree connection: Contacts outside of your immediate network. To connect with them you will need to broaden the reach of your second degree connections.

LinkedIn connections must be relevant — Make sure your LinkedIn connections are relevant

Not All Connections Are Equal

For your LinkedIn marketing to be relevant do not fall into the trap of connecting to everyone. This is completely counterproductive and will significantly dilute your efforts. Connections need to be hyper focused on individuals who are relevant, who may have an interest in, or a need for, your offering. To clarify, they should be potential customers or stakeholders.

Revisit the work done on your ideal customer, and look at the key customers in your operational plan. Within this group, which roles have the most interest and influence around your company offering? Once this is established, a simple LinkedIn search will yield gold. For example, principal water engineer, Washington, would generate a list of principal level water engineers in the Washington area. I have found that the more specific the search criteria is, the more useful the results will be.

Use the filters to refine you search by region, company or industry. Within minutes you will have a list of relevant contacts. Then simply click connect.

Building your network is key to leveraging the power of the LinkedIn platform. Committing to connect with thirty relevant second degree connections every day will expand your network dramatically.

What’s Next

The third post in the series will explore the third P of LinkedIn: Promote. I’m always keen to hear your thoughts. Tell me how you use LinkedIn to successfully market your company.

Download my business development LinkedIn Mastery worksheet and other free resources from the link below.

Three Secrets of a Killer Sales Process

By Tom on July 8, 2022

In order to keep your business development humming along you must have a solid sales process in place. A good sales process is not complicated. Rather simplicity is key here. I call this the Sales Path. It comprises all activity that fills the sales funnel (marketing, lead generation etc) through to winning and delivering the sale. In this post I’m going to explore the three secrets of a Killer Sales Process.

Development

Qualification

Pursuit

Secret 1: Development

The first stage includes a cycle of activities around the development of relationships within your target customer base. Your Tactical Action Plan or CRM will direct this activity. Particularly around who to reach out to and at which cadence. Coffee meetings, networking events and feedback phone calls all play a part. As do your other marketing efforts generating and developing leads.

The secret here is consistency. You must be in regular contact with both your existing and future customers. Let them know what you are doing. Ask them about their problems, listen to their answers and work out how to serve them best. This needs to be done again and again. You can’t stop. Ever.

If you don’t get consistent on the development stage customers wont remember to ask you to solve their problems.

Secret 2: Qualification

During the continual cycle of the development stage leads will show interest in your offering. However, Not all leads are created equal. This is where the qualification comes in. Having an efficient way to determine whether a lead can be considered worthy of pursuit is crucial. This focuses your effort is spent on real opportunities with potential to yield revenue.

The secret here is consistency! Having a strict set of qualification rules and following them for every lead is essential. If you don’t have consistency here you might as well chase every shiny opportunity that crosses your desk. You’ll be busy. But, you won’t make money.

Secret 3: Pursuit

The third stage, pursuit, contains the series of actions to follow once you have qualified a lead. Each action is designed to engage with the customer, learn what they really need, and respond appropriately.

The secret here is . . . you guessed it: CONSISTENCY! Each opportunity that travels down the sale path must be treated the same way. By having the discipline to follow the process you will give each opportunity the highest chance of success.

One More Secret: Consistency is Key

One point to bear in mind is that the sales process for your business should be the same regardless of the sales cycle time. Long and short sales cycles, should be following the same process. This ensures consistency in the way customers are treated. Consistency in qualifying which leads to pursue further, and consistency in pursuing opportunities. This all funnels into spending your time on activities that have the strongest chance of bringing revenue into your business.

Final Words

I realise that this post provides a broad overview of the killer sales path. I really want to put it into context for you before doing a deeper dive into each of the three sections. Later posts will lead you through each process and give you the tools to implement these in your own business.

My new book Business Development Begins Here has more on the Systematic Sales Path and puts it into the wider business development context. Check it out here.

As always I’m keen to hear your stories. Touch base and let me know how you’ve had success using a systematic sales path.

Simple LinkedIn Marketing in Three Easy Stages (Part 1)

By Tom on July 1, 2022

Looking back at the Sales Funnel, the first stage in creating a pipeline of opportunities is filling the funnel with leads. A key component of keeping it full is through systematic marketing. Where the GDBD can have real impact and complete control of their activity, is by leveraging the power of social media, and in particular, LinkedIn.

Although LinkedIn originally began as a tool for recruiters, it has firmly established itself as the social platform for business. As such it lends itself as the perfect tool to initiate business-to-business marketing. Marketing, NOT selling. I cannot emphasize this enough. The platform is there to grow and nurture a network of business connections, and the quickest way to lose these connections is to directly sell to them.

Utilizing LinkedIn systematically, day-to-day, is an excellent way to generate brand awareness, develop leads and position both the brand and the business developer as subject matter experts in their niche. Taking ten minutes a day on the platform and spending an hour crafting two posts a week, can begin to generate results relatively quickly.

There are many courses and experts pushing their LinkedIn expertise and charging a lot of money for the privilege. However, starting with the platform is not that difficult. Over the next three posts, I highlight a simple daily system that you can follow.

Your LinkedIN Mission

Before we start developing your LinkedIn system we need to consider what the aim of the campaign is going to be. In my opinion the overall objective should be:

Provide a steady source of leads to the top of the Sales Funnel.

This translates as the marketing effort adding opportunities and revenue into your sales pathway. The specific mission that supports the objective can be broken down into three tasks:

Position the Business Developer and Company as a subject matter experts within the niche surrounding their offering.
Generate regular touch points for the Company brand, building recognition over time.
Develop a network of connections who are interested in your company offering.

The Three Ps of LinkedIn Marketing

The actions required to achieve this mission tasks can be divided into 3 Ps:

Profile – create a great first impression for yourself and your company
Propagate – develop a network of connections who are interested in your offering
Promote – generate touch points and value-based content to produce interest, brand awareness and trust in your offering.

Profile is discussed further below. The second and third Ps will be examined in later posts.

Profile

If you have a quick scan through the LinkedIn profiles of your connections, it is obvious that most people have structured their profiles like an online resume. Seeing as LinkedIn was originally designed as a tool for recruiters this makes sense. However, the profile of a GDBD should focus on your offering.

Think of your profile as your customers’ first impression of your company and the opportunity to highlight the unique aspects about what your offering comprises. When redesigning your profile, use the following four points to guide you.

Stand out and be compelling. Highlight your company offering in your headline and make sure your photograph conveys professionalism.

Add detail around your company offering. In your ABOUT section make sure the reader can understand the key ways that you can help them, following a quick scan of your profile.

Use key words throughout your profile. Think of these as words that potential customers would type into Google if they were looking for your offering. For example, if your niche was flood modelling, you would include words and phrases like, flood modelling, flooding, flood specialist, flood mapping etc. Mention these a number of times throughout your profile.

Make it easy for the connection. The aim of using LinkedIn is to get a steady stream of leads entering the Sales Funnel. So, make it easy for interested connections to learn more. Put your contact details in the about section, phone number and email address and add a link to the relevant pages of your company website.

Further Action

Take time to look through your profile and adjust it to reflect what you offer your customers. Stop thinking of it as a resume. In part 2 we will look at systematic ways to use LinkedIn to assist your business development efforts.

Download my LinkedIn Mastery worksheet and other resources from the link below.

Let me know how do you set up LinkedIN to support your business development efforts?

Get the Edge With a Competitor Matrix

By Tom on June 17, 2022

Unfortunately, playing in a blue ocean market where your offering is the only option for your customers is extremely rare. There are always going to be other companies vying for your customers’ money.

It is important to understand where, how and why these competitors do business. Identify their strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to your own. Using a simple Competitor Matrix allows you to quickly assess your opposition and recognize where your advantages and disadvantages might lie.

Ask the Right Questions

A quick scan of your competitors should answer the following questions:

What is their main offering and how does it differ from yours?
Why are they in business? Are they focused on shareholder return or social legacy?
What is their business and pricing model?
Is the competitor winning more business, hiring and growing? What growth trajectory are they on? Are they a multinational with enormous reserves or a tiny start-up scratching for resources?
What does their team look like? Many staff across multiple disciplines, or a small number of highly specialized personnel? Do they have business development staff active in the market?
Who are their key customers, and how loyal are they?
How do they attract and retain customers? Do they have a proactive sales team hunting new customers? Are they marketing aggressively through social media or other channels?
Do they hold significant market share?
What is unique about their offering and how is this different to your unique selling points?
Which points of difference between the two companies can you successfully compete on?

Compile Your Competitor Matrix

The answers will provide enough information to start assessing your competition. A quick way to do this is through the creation of a simple Competitor Matrix. Generate a series of attributes based on the most important questions above. Next, populate the categories for your organization and each of your competitors.

Using a traffic light system to denote strength and weakness when compared to your company, allows you to quickly visualize differences. For instance, RED signifies areas where they exceed your offering, while GREEN indicates areas where their offering is weaker. An example Competitor Matrix for a water consultancy is provided below.

	Your Company	Competitor 1	Competitor 2
Product/Service	Water Consultant	Enviro Consultant	Water Consultant
Business Model	Specialized – mine dewatering, high fee	Quick, cheap, minimal reporting	Specialized Modelling, high fee
Financial Resources	Medium	High	Low, one-man band
Market Share	20%	30%	5%
Growth	Strong	Strong	No Growth
Marketing Strategies	Word of Mouth	Aggressive social media, event sponsors, networking	Word of mouth
Strengths	Mining skillset Quality of outcomes	Fast reporting Low Prices	Water modelling leader
Weaknesses	…	Quality of reporting	…
Business Model	…	…	…

Example Competitor Matrix

Use Your Findings

Once completed, the Competitor Matrix will provide a broad indication of the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to your company. This allows competitive messaging to be formed for marketing, and it will also inform any conversations in which customers bring up competitors offerings.

The example Competitor Matrix above, while incomplete, gives insight into who the competitors are and how they operate. Perhaps the water consultancy in question needs to revisit the way they do marketing. In addition, competitor 2 has a very specific specialization and may be a good partner for a future alliance.

Importantly, the matrix can help guide decision making around changes to your company offering. It may highlight a weakness that needs to be minimized or strength to be reinforced. The competitive landscape is a crucial part of the Sales Ecosystem, and any changes in competitor information should be fed back into the company immediately.

Your Competitor Matrix

Take some time to think about your own competitors. Develop a list of key attributes and generate a competitor matrix. What insights does it provide?

As always I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out via the normal channels.

Scaling Your Revenue through Alliances and Stakeholders

By Tom on June 10, 2022

My thoughts on using alliances to enhance your business development follows on from my previous post on the external environment.

When I started work as a State Manager for a national asbestos removal company, I had very few contacts within that industry. Much to my surprise, we had no recurring customers in our geographical territory either. While assessing the Sales Ecosystem it became clear that the consultants, who set up and oversaw the projects, needed a removals contractor whose work reflected well on them. In turn, we as the contractors needed good consultants —the relationship went both ways.

I quickly identified a series of consultants whose work ethic mirrored our own. Thereafter, began forging mutually beneficial relationships with them. This introduced us to projects and clients that we had no prior relationship with. In turn, we provided an additional source of jobs and the certainty of our professional service to the consultants. Both our revenues increased as a result.

This taught me that alliances with key players in the market can have a strong influence on your success.

A lady discussing business with three stakeholders. Perhaps there is an alliance in the making. — Alliances must be Mutually Beneficial

Assess Your Stakeholders

Take some time to really understand the market ecosystem. Firstly, who does what and why? Secondly, who are the key players within your Sales Ecosystem and how much influence do they have? Thirdly, do any of these influencers align with your organizational mission and values? Finally, is there a gap that can be filled in a way that benefits both parties?

Similar to the exercise for internal stakeholders in my previous post, a matrix can be developed for those stakeholders external to the company.

Who Are Your Stakeholders?

A simple external stakeholder matrix should cover the following groups:

Industry Experts. Technical experts with a strong positive reputation within the industry. Their opinion carries a lot of weight with industry groups and customers. Often a great source of market intelligence, technical advice, and referrals, if they like your company offering.

Key Influencers. Not always the industry experts. These individuals have a large industry-wide network and always know what is going on. An invaluable source of industry intelligence, and vital to have regular contact with at least one of these.

Consultants. Providing specialist advice is a critical part of any industry, and consultants can be found for almost any topic or service. These can be customers themselves and are often the gateway to more prominent end-user customers. Forming an alliance with a consultant who shares your principles and values your company offering, is an excellent way to get access to specialist skills and a different stream of opportunities.

Government Departments. While not relevant to all industries, government departments provide valuable insights into industry trends and legislative requirements. They can make excellent recurring customers. Proving to these stakeholders that your offering is best-in-class can make your company the benchmark from their point of view. If this becomes the case, government departments can often become a good source of unofficial recommendations.

Industry Groups. Most industries have groups, clubs and peak bodies that form a hub for professionals to network and share ideas. Joining and attending these groups can provide up-to-date news on the industry and face-to-face access to customer contacts. Attending networking events and talks by these groups can place you in a relaxed setting allowing you to form connections with people that would be difficult to contact during their busy working hours.

Choose Your Alliances Carefully

Looking at your stakeholder matrix it will become apparent which ones should be considered the Key Players. Have a look at my previous post for strategies to nurture these stakeholders. Ultimately, your alliance proposition must be beneficial to both parties. It has to encompass a true win-win relationship.

Think about the external stakeholders in your industry. Are there any opportunities for alliances or closer working partnerships?

I’m always keen to hear your thoughts on this. Drop me a comment below or get in touch via the usual channels.

How the Lewis Model can help me Understand Culture

By Tom on June 3, 2022

In my previous post about the External Environment I talked a bit about things to consider when developing business in different geographies. In addition, culture forms a massive part of business in different countries that often gets forgotten about. It is an all too common mistake to expect others to think and act the same way you do. Taking time to understand any differences in culture and behavior and considering approaches to bridge them is very worthwhile. For example, a business development campaign in Australia would take a very different form to one conducted in Indonesia.

The Lewis Model

Social and hierarchical behaviour varies significantly from place to place. Therefore, if company operations span multiple geographies and cultures, read around the Lewis model. It will really help you gain an understanding of how to navigate any potential communication pitfalls. In short, Lewis broadly divides the world’s cultures into three communication styles: Linear-active, Multi-active and Reactive and describes how each style behaves. A summary of each style is provided in the table below.

Linear-Active	Multi-Active	Reactive
Talks half the time Does one thing at a time Plans ahead step by step Polite but direct Partly conceals feelings Confronts with logic Dislikes losing face Rarely interrupts Job-oriented Sticks to facts Truth before diplomacy Sometimes impatient Limited body language Respects officialdom Separates the social and professional	Talks most of the time Does several things at once Plans grand outline only Emotional Displays feelings Confronts emotionally Has good excuses Often interrupts People-oriented Feelings before facts Flexible truth Impatient Unlimited body language Seeks out key person Mixes the social and professional	Listens most of the time Reacts to partner’s reaction Looks at general principles Polite, indirect Conceals feelings Never confronts Must not lose face Doesn’t interrupt Very people-oriented Statements are promises Diplomacy over truth Patient Subtle body language Uses connections Connects the social and the professional

Summary of Lewis Model Communication Styles (from crossculture.com)

Working across geographies – always consider the cultural differences

What Does This Mean

Each of the three groups can be applied to different parts of the world. The Linear-active group comprises the English-speaking world—North America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and Northern Europe.

The Reactive group is located in all major countries in Asia, except the Indian subcontinent, which is a hybrid.

The Multi-active group are more scattered and comprises Southern Europe, Mediterranean countries, South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Arab and other cultures in the Middle East, India and Pakistan and most of the Slavs.

Please remember that these are generalizations. However, understanding them can really help bridge communication across cultures.

Understanding culture can help you work well within a multicultural team

Why This Is Useful

The importance of understanding cultural differences became apparent to me in the first two weeks of starting a new role. I was reporting through to Singapore and we had a huge variety of nationalities working in the same team. Experiencing some urgent technical issues with one of our customers I tried to push things through quickly outside of our regular operating process. To me this seemed the obvious thing to do. Not so to the rest of the team. I met resistance. Moreover, they would tell me that they would help, but didn’t. It was infuriating.

Luckily for me a great mentor of mine, Shirley-Anne introduced me to the Lewis model. I was operating as a Linear-Active whilst most of my colleagues were Reactive. They weren’t happy that I was circumventing the work process and as Reactives wouldn’t confront me about it. As a Linear-Active I was becoming impatient and the logic of bending the work process seemed obvious to me.

Importantly, Shirley-Anne helped me see that what was infuriating for me was also exasperating for the Singapore team. I gained insight into how the team members operated and adjusted my style and expectations to suit. Ultimately, a good outcome was reached for our customer.

What Next

If you find yourself working across geographic boundaries take some time to investigate the working cultures in each. This is important for both your customers and team. Gaining this understanding early will give you a better chance of avoiding any future communication pitfalls.

Check Out Your External Environment

By Tom on May 27, 2022

Having gained a good understanding of the inner workings of your organization, it is time to define the external environment of the Sales Ecosystem. Where are the customers and competitors, and how does your company fit?

A simple market analysis gives an idea of market size and customers. However, the External Environment includes much more. At the basic level we want to understand the setting that our team, organization, and customers operate within. This includes looking at the industry, geography, external stakeholders, and of course, those competing with you for your customer base. In this post we’ll have a quick look at the industry and geography. The external stakeholders and competitors will form their own posts in the coming weeks.

Operating Industry

In the context of the Sales Ecosystem your industry comprises the habitat that your target customers operate within. Additionally, this includes their sources of influence. Starting with the broad industry consider the following questions:

Who are the visible influencers of this industry internationally, nationally and locally?
Which industry bodies are the most popular and the most active?
Where do members of this industry go for information and advice?
Which segments of the industry are most applicable to your company offering?

Lets take the construction industry as an example. There will be well regarded individuals who regularly talk and interact at the industry level. They will be active on blogs, social media, webinars and industry discussion panels.

Here in Australia some of the construction industry bodies to investigate and interact with include the Australian Construction Industry Forum, Engineering Australia, and Institute of Architects, to name a few. If your company focuses on the engineering side of the industry, Engineers Australia would be an ideal place to start.

Answering these questions around your operating industry will begin to give a picture of the key influencers and most influential organizations. This information is essential in developing your External Stakeholder Matrix. That discussion will be saved for a future post.

Geography

Where in the world are you doing business? How does this impact your approach? This is usually straight forward to answer when you are operating within your home country. But, a thick layer of complexity is added if the business is developing overseas.

For each geography in your portfolio develop an overview of the broader environment that your Sales Ecosystem sits within. Determine how business is done there, what the culture is like and how to navigate it. The PESTEL analysis is a simple tool that helps shape our thinking in this regard.

P	Political
E	Economic
S	Social
T	Technology
E	Economical
L	Legal

PESTEL Analysis (Kaplan et al 2008)

The PESTEL analysis covers the following:

Political

What is the political environment like? Is the government stable, are there trade restrictions and is corruption rife?

Economic

Is the economy of the area growing? Are companies thriving and do customers have disposable income? Are the exchange rates favorable (particularly useful if you are importing/exporting products)?

Social

Is the population growing, and what are their attitudes to safety, health and career? Are they socially aware?

Technology

Is new technology and innovation widely accepted and actively encouraged? Are there incentives in the advancement and introduction of new technologies?

Environmental

What is the environment like? Does it suffer from harsh conditions, and is it protected properly?

Legal

How robust is the legal system and how strong is the focus on discrimination, consumer laws and health and safety?

If you are operating within multiple geographies the PESTEL can give a good feel for the differences. While coarse in its approach it does get you thinking along the right lines.

For more depth on the PESTEL analysis check out this website.

More external environment content coming up…

More on the External Environment

This post focuses on the operating industry and geography and has introduced the PESTEL model as a practical tool. Of course, there is much more to this topic and my next few posts will continue on this theme. We will be exploring, differences in geographical culture, external stakeholders and competitors in more detail over the coming weeks.

In the meantime I’m keen to hear your experiences with understanding the external environment that your company operates within. As usual please get in touch through the normal channels.

Internal Stakeholder Alliances and Strategies

By Tom on May 6, 2022

In last weeks post we explored some tips around building relationships with the other teams inside your organization. It is vital to understand your organizational network. Who is responsible for what? Where can you go for additional market intelligence, support or assistance? Who are the key internal influencers and who gets things done?

Taking the time to develop a stakeholder matrix for your organization, will really aid you in the development of your business. Having clear connections with this internal landscape allows you to take advantage of opportunities that might be out of reach for you on your own. The matrix is the first step in securing these connections.

Team member engaging with other stakeholders from his organization. — Ally with the other teams in your organization

Potential Allies

Some of the groups to consider when looking for future alliances include the following.

Subject Matter Experts

The technical specialists who know their subject inside out, are often a great source of market intelligence.

Team Leaders

It is essential to communicate with the team leaders during the sales process. Touch base with them once opportunities have been won and delivery is required.

Key Influencers

Well-respected long-term employees or energetic newcomers, these are the staff members who others listen to and take seriously. Having key influencers as strong allies can help you to gain support for future business development initiatives.

Proposal and Quote writing resources

Personnel who are recognized as being particularly strong at writing quotes and proposals. A close working relationship is vital to give proposals and quotes the best chance of success.

Market sector experts

Great sources of business intelligence, leads and contacts. Consult with these people to gain an understanding of the customer organizational chart, and to secure personal introductions to key customer contacts.

Marketing team

This group will be a primary source of leads. Develop a strong working relationship with this segment to keep messages and customer targeting aligned. If communicated with clearly, this team can add significant weight to the top of your Sales Funnel.

Personnel with revenue targets

These are generally the leadership roles within the business. Understand their revenue targets and find out if they are willing to share resources in an effort to reach them. The business developer can really be a savior to these individuals through the development of revenue opportunities, which can directly impact their end-of-year bonuses and the growth of their team.

Multiple teams winning a project together. — Collaboration feels good!

Populating your Stakeholder Matrix

Populating the matrix is relatively straightforward and should comprise the following columns shown on the following table

Name	Role	Department	Interest	Influence	Action

Internal Stakeholder Matrix Table Template

Simply allocate Hi or Lo to the Interest and Influence columns and plot on the matrix below. This will allow you to define their category and subsequent actions.

Stakeholder Strategies and Action

A summary of the stakeholder actions is given below:

Key Player

With a high level of interest and influence, these stakeholders can have a strong impact on your business development efforts. The majority of your stakeholder engagement must focus on this group and it is beneficial to involve members in decision making at times. Action: Engage and consult regularly.

Meet Their Needs

The high level of influence has the potential to make this group a valuable resource. Engage and consult this group on areas that are of interest to them. Perhaps on particular market segments or project types. Action: Try to increase their level of interest and move them to become key players.

Show Consideration

This group has high levels of interest but limited influence. Consider them as potential supporters. There is an opportunity to make use of their interest and involve them in low-risk areas around specific customers, products or market segments. Action: keep informed and consult on interest areas.

Least Important

The low interest and influence levels gives this group the lowest priority with regards to engagement. Action: Keep informed through general communication and aim to increase interest levels over time.

Assign Actions

Once the matrix is complete, assign time and resources to each of the key players. Learn their preferred communication styles and how best to connect with them. Consider the other stakeholder groups and think about how and when to engage them. Perhaps a business development agenda item at team meetings or individual discussions on specific topics. Remember that each internal alliance is different. They all have a role to play in getting the company offering into the market and ultimately solving the customers problems.

Add the most critical stakeholders to the Tactical Action Plan as part of the Aim stage. Ultimately, the Tactical Action Plan will systematize the contact and action with each stakeholder, keeping engagement on a regular cadence.

Other Alliances

Take a step away from the business development capability for a moment. There will be people within the organization who have complementary skills and goals but who sit outside your normal sphere of operations.

This can take the form of teams with different offerings, willing to take a multidisciplinary approach to work-winning. The ability to bid on projects with other teams really strengthens both your proposal. Or perhaps a customer account manager who knows that your offering aligns with their sector of responsibility and feels they can help get your foot in the door. Using their account influence to increase your sales and ultimately reach their targets quicker.

Many of these may have already been identified as key player stakeholders. Think about who these people and teams may be in your workplace. Consider how an alliance might work, it must be advantageous to both parties.

Think about how best to approach them. A simple coffee catch up, and a sharing of capability knowledge and opportunities may be enough to begin with. But if you are both working on proposals together reflect on how to share the effort.

Importantly, make sure to capture these catch ups systematically in your Tactical Action Plan or CRM. Otherwise, your business development agenda will get lost in the thousands of other priorities that each of these people have every day.

Further Action

As an immediate action develop an internal stakeholder matrix for your organisation. Determine the Key Players and make a plan on how you intend to engage with them.

How do you prioritize your internal stakeholders? Let me know in the comments below or drop me a line here. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Tips on Successful In-house Business Relationships

By Tom on April 29, 2022

In-house business relationships are a critical part of business development.

Developing a business takes more than having a stellar product or service and a willing customer base. This is especially true when working in an organization with more than one employee. When the delivery of the product or service relies on other people, the moving parts within your organization need to be understood and key relationships developed.

Imagine having discussions with a potential customer with urgent technical questions that you are unable to answer. Having a strong working relationship with the technical team, means they will work with you to solve the customer’s issues.

A great working relationship with other teams means they are more likely to help you with your customers requests. This allows you to respond quickly with the required detail, resulting in the customer receiving a much higher level of service. In turn, this gives you a stronger likelihood of winning or retaining their business.

Communication is Crucial

Developing a relationship with the other teams in your company is not difficult. Keep them informed of what is going on. Let them know if large orders or projects are expected. Communication helps teams plan and prioritize their workload. It removes the unknown.

Ask their opinion on the subjects within their domain. Usually, this is beneficial to all parties involved. These teams value the interest shown in their work, and you learn from them at the same time.

I have worked for a couple of organizations with strong technical teams who rarely got to meet the customers. I found that chatting to them about customer feedback was invaluable to them. This helped form a two-way relationship where we both got value from our conversations.

Communication with your technical, production and delivery teams is critical. Photo by Ryan Ancill for Unsplash.

Which In-House Business Relationships to Focus on?

Gaining an understanding of the internal landscape of your organization is incredibly important. How do the different departments interact when responding to customers or delivering the product? Who are the key players? What is the status of your relationships with the different teams? Can you call on them for help and most importantly can they call on you? Remember that relationships go both ways.

It is critical to know who the main influencers and departmental contacts within your organization are, as well as gaining a good understanding of the way they function within their positions. Internal relationships and alliances are essential when developing a durable foundation on which to base your business development action. Often a joint effort with another team greatly enhances the company’s offering to the customer. Market intelligence and contacts gathered by team members can make the difference between winning and losing opportunities.

Team laughing together. Building strong in-house relationships is key. — Building strong in-house relationships is key. Photo by Brooke Cagle for Unsplash

Team Mates Uncover Opportunities

Engaging with teammates who have long industry experience, are likely to uncover customer contacts that you would not otherwise have known about. However, never underestimate the work-winning potential of your younger staff, you never know who they may know or who they may bump into. This happened to me as a new graduate member of an environmental team in London.

I was having a beer at the local pub with some friends who also worked in the environmental industry. I was chatting to a friend-of-a-friend, and inevitably work came up in the conversation. It turned out that he worked for a large oil company and was looking for environmental consultants to undertake what he considered to be a small piece of work. We swapped details. The next morning, I went straight to my boss and discussed the opportunity. A few emails and calls later, we were tendering on a multi-million-dollar contract.

What’s Next

How well do understand the other teams in your organization? Who are the main points of contact in the other departments? Who are the influencers? If you can’t answer these questions it’s time to act. Draw a simple org chart of the teams that you interact with or would like to work with more. Identify the key people to talk to and invite them for a quick coffee. Start building these relationships now.

As always I’m keen to hear from you. How have you approached developing relationships within the company you operate in? Let me know in the comments below or reach out via LinkedIn.

Discover The Simple Trick Of Customer Segmentation

By Tom on April 15, 2022

Following creation of your customer matrix it’s a good idea to look at customer segmentation. It is obvious that not all customers are created equal. Business Developers only have a limited amount of time and resources. These must be spent on customers that give the best return.

Therefore, priority of effort must be defined. An easy method is to segment the list into three tiers. A quick way to determine priority level is to focus on both of the following:

Potential service spend
Target customer’s need for your company offering.

A series of legs hanging over a wall. Each have a different pair of shoes on. This represents the diversity in your customer base. — Your customer base is not homogenous. Photo by James Baldwin for Unsplash

Example Customer Segmentation

Lets take an environmental consultancy servicing the mining industry. They specialize in managing and mitigating environmentally sensitive sites, particularly involving threatened ecosystems.

A company like this might define customer segmentation using potential spend first. Next, they might use the customer’s number of environmentally sensitive projects to highlight the need they have for the company offering. This results in the three priority tiers:

Tier 1: $100,000/yr. spend and/or many environmentally sensitive projects.
Tier 2: $60,000/yr. spend and/or some environmentally sensitive projects.
Tier 3: $30,000/yr. spend and/or fewer environmentally sensitive projects.

Looking through their customer list and placing them into the three tiers becomes a straight forward exercise.

Tiles spelling the word focus. This post should help you focus your business development efforts. — Focus your effort. Pic by Brett Jordan for Unsplash

Focus Your Effort

This division can help you focus your effort on those companies that give you the highest return. Of course, Tier 1 should be the given the highest priority. However, the lesser tiers also have the potential for significant revenue and must not be forgotten. Think about how much effort you will assign to each tier. How often will you contact your target companies? Will it be different for each Tier?

I recognize that this approach can be considered too simple by some. But, think of the customer segmentation as a guide to focus your business development effort. However, there will be times where customer opportunities fall outside of this framework.

In these instances sit down with the team, discuss the likely returns and the effort needed to attain them. Use your customer segmentation to help shape the conversation. Work together to determine how to proceed. Perhaps there are unique strategic reasons to elevate a customer to Tier 1?

How Do You Do It?

As always I’m interested in how you prioritize your customer base. Do you segment into tiers? What attributes do you base them on? Drop a comment below or let me know via the usual channels.

The Most Powerful Question: Who Are Your Customers?

By Tom on April 8, 2022

Who are your customers? is a critical question for every business. I remember starting my first day with an environmental services company as their State Manager. A leadership and business development role that was outside my previous water focused expertise. This was an exciting posting, and I was looking forward to building on the existing customer base. Enthusiastically, I sat down with the small team and asked the question: “Who are our customers?”

I was met with blank stares. I was falteringly told that they had once met with two or three companies, at which point they stuttered back into silence. Not the greatest of starts.

I recognized that there were two ways to respond. First, I could hang my head in despair, throw my hands in the air and admit defeat. Or I could see this as an excellent opportunity to define what our ideal customers looked like. I could identify the low hanging fruit and take action. Of course, I chose action.

You may have the best product in the world and not be able to sell it. You need a willing buyer. The start-up scene is littered with the husks of companies that developed great products that nobody wanted. Effectively it boils down to one simple fact.

If there is no Customer there is no Product or Service.

A company is nothing without customers who use its services or products. Each company has an ideal customer. The characteristics of this customer has to be defined. Each characteristic must be rated in terms of importance to your business and the direction of your future business development growth.

Empty office. — No customer, means no business. Photo by Aldolfo Felix for Unsplash.

Who is Your Ideal Customer?

First, picture what an ideal customer looks like. Who would you love to do business with? Give this some serious thought. Next, dive deep into the characteristics that make up the companies that you aspire to do business with. Ask yourself and the team the following questions to help define your perfect customer:

Which industry does the company operate within?
What size staff and annual turnover do they have?
What work do they focus on?
Are there specific products or services they need to be successful?
What sort of people work there?
Where are they located?
How much will they spend on your product or service?
Who are the decision makers around implementing your products or services?
Who controls their budgets?

This is just the start. There will be many more questions that are unique to your industry and offering. For example if you develop software solutions, you may need to know what operating system the customers use. In the environmental space, you may need to be aware of specific environmental legislation that relates to particular companies.

Who is your ideal customer? Photo by Amy Hirschi for Unsplash

Forming a Customer Matrix

From your final list of questions, determine the top five to ten that are most important to your business offering. These will form the core attributes of your target customers, allowing potential customers to be easily identified and benchmarked. For easy comparison embed these into the customer matrix shown in the table below.

Attribute	Ideal Customer	Customer 1	Customer 2	Customer 3
Annual Turnover	$3M +
Company type – miner, contractor, support	All three
Potential Service Spend	$100K +
Projects with Environmental Sensitivity	Many
Limited in-house capability	No more than 1-2 in house specialists
Bureaucracy of Accounts payable	Low
Strong social Licence to operate	Yes
Current Customer	Yes

Example Customer Matrix for Environmental Consulting for the Mining sector

Filling in the matrix with existing customers gives you a good picture of who should be retained, and who shouldn’t. It allows you to make a quick assessment of target companies to see whether they are a good fit for your business and whether time and resources should be allocated to their pursuit.

Use this matrix for new target customers, and for existing customers who both need to be serviced properly to be retained.

Next Stage

Have a go at creating your own customer matrix. Think about what customer attributes are important to your business.

As always I’m keen to hear your thoughts on which customer characteristics are important to you. Drop a comment below or get in touch through the usual channels.

The Mysteries of Market Mapping Made Simple

By Tom on March 25, 2022

Market mapping is the process of interpreting and characterizing the part of the Sales Ecosystem that your company lives within—the market. In my experience, this analysis tends to become hyper detailed, filling pages of spreadsheets and a multitude of charts. The amount of hours and cost can become prohibitive, especially for the start-up or small business.

I once undertook an exercise like this for a local start-up looking at the global mining industry. I spent two solid weeks collecting data and compiling a spreadsheet of planet wide mine sites and their statistics. Of course, this resulted in a highly complex dataset. It was so detailed that the CEO had to code an algorithm to interrogate it.

Man looking at complicated market map — The complications of hyper-detailed Market Mapping. Photo by Per Loov for Unsplash.

Luckily for them I conducted this exercise free of charge. If they had been paying for someone’s time I don’t think the application would have been half as appealing.

A better use of my time would have been spent getting a high level understanding of the global industry and then talking to the people within it. You can’t beat real time feedback.

Unless you are a multinational conglomerate with very deep pockets I believe you must keep your market mapping simple. All you require is a broad analysis of the main constituents, enough to allow decision making around industry and segment priorities.

Simple Market Mapping

A simple market analysis involves the following steps:

Geography. Which region does your business development responsibility cover? Whether it is a particular region within a single country, or a group of countries, the boundaries must be defined.

Site Type. In what sort of sites is your product or service going to be used? Hospitals, contaminated land, mines, factories, water treatment plants, lawyer offices, you need to be specific here.

Site Numbers. Establish how many of the sites identified above are present in your geographical area of responsibility.

Market Size. Consider how much money a site is likely to spend on your offering over the next three years. Average this number out across all the sites for a single year. The total of these figures is the market size that your company is operating within. If you are operating within multiple site types, do this for each and combine the total.

Market Share. Think about how much market share you can realistically attain over the next year. Linking it back to the Planning Hierarchy, what types and sizes of projects you are looking to win? How many competitors are out there? Will you be playing in a blue ocean with no sharks, or a red ocean full of sharks competing for your customers? If your company is well established, your market share could be at 30% or more. If you are just starting out in a market with many competitors, 1-2% may be more achievable.

Available Market. Using the formula: Market Share x Market Size = Available Market, provides a good indicator of where the opportunity for your offering is greatest.

Simple Market Mapping is like a compass it will help you find your way. — Simple Market Mapping is like a compass. Itwill help you find your way. Photo by Aaron Burden for Unsplash.

Affordable Research

The research required is often considered an overwhelming task, especially if you are expecting to collect millions of data points. However utilizing market researchers on gig economy sites like www.fiverr.com can get you the specific site data for your region quickly and cheaply. Surprisingly, a hundred dollars can get you a decent data set, listing the relevant sites within your region, in the fraction of the time it would take you to source that information yourself.

Example of a Simple Market Analysis

The table below shows a simple analysis that you would conduct for each of your segments. It allows you to prioritize which segments to pursue. I’ll use the following example to show how it works.

Jen is an experienced water engineering consultant with strong industry connections who has recently decided that she is going to start her own consultancy. She knows her services are in demand in both the water utilities and mining sectors. While she has contacts in both industries she wants to know where she should be prioritizing her valuable business development time.

Lady looking at Map. Going to start her Market Mapping — Jen starting her Market Mapping! Photo by Nick Seagrave for Unsplash.

Using a freelance website, Jen requests all the water treatment plants and mine sites in her region. She estimates that the water treatment plants would be likely to require $50,000 of her services a year, while the mine sites would only need $10,000 per year. There are five water treatment plants and forty nine sites, so Jen created the following table:

Segment	Site	No. of Sites	$ per Year	Market Size	Market Share	Available Market
Water Utilities	Water Treatment Plant	5	$50,000	$250,000	25%	$62,500
Mining	Mine	40	$10,000	$400,000	5%	$20,000

Example of a Simple Market Map

While the mining segment has a larger market size, Jen determines that the number of competitors and her own network in the mining industry provides a share of only 5%. Whereas, her work is well known and valued in the water utilities sector. Though the market size is smaller, she should be able to capture 25% share for water utilities.

This allows the available market to be calculated providing a very clear picture of where Jen’s business development priorities should be focused. That is not to say that she would not seek opportunities in mining, this could be a longer-term strategic play. However, the immediate low hanging fruit is definitely within the water utilities segment.

Call to Action

I hope you can see that market mapping doesn’t have to be complicated. Why not run through the same exercise I highlighted in the example. It may support you’re current strategy or it may get you thinking differently about where to focus your business development efforts.

As always I’d love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch through the normal channels or leave a comment below.

The Secrets of Product Prioritization

By Tom on March 18, 2022

This post explores two ways to help with your product prioritization. A couple of weeks ago I posted about the usefulness of a generic strategy. This works well when thinking about the broader positioning of your organisation. However, a business developer can be responsible for a number of products, service lines or industries, and it can be difficult to determine which to prioritize.

Product Prioritization With The GE/McKinsey Matrix

A quick assessment is made using the GE/McKinsey Matrix . This method plots the company offerings or industries on two simple axes:

Industry or market attractiveness – commercial potential of the market or industry, i.e. potential to make money.
Business unit strength – ability and skill level of current staff to develop that industry or market with the offering being assessed.

Product Prioritization Strategies

The original form of this analysis is conducted with a high level of detail. However, for ease of use I simply divide each axis into high, medium, or low. Each offering will plot within a general strategy. These strategies are described as:

Grow – strong business development effort and investment. Aggressively Hunt for opportunities.
Hold – medium business development effort and investment. Farming opportunities from existing customers
Harvest – limited business development effort. Act on opportunities as they arise. Do not pursue.

Combining the GE/McKinsey Matrix with the Porters Generic Strategy provides a fast assessment of where the product offering sits and its broad commercial strategy. Therefore, doing this for each of your products or service lines gives a clear direction for your business development effort.

Using the Product Life Cycle

Another tool that aids with prioritizing products within a portfolio is the Product Life Cycle. Plot the product and service offerings on the graph below. Annual sale volume and time product has been in circulation form the two axes. Each stage of the Cycle has its own broad strategy.

Introduction – New product. Hunt for new customers and establish brand trust.

Growth – Established product. Pursue new customers and ensure quality service to retain existing customers.

Maturity – Well established product. Farm existing customers. Accordingly, customer retention is a priority.

Decline – Product replaced with different offering. Business development effort is low. In addition, customer retention effort is low.

Understanding where the offering fits on this curve will assist in defining priorities for the business development effort across a portfolio of products or services.

Call to Action

If you look after a portfolio of products or industries print out a copy of the two tools. Plot your portfolio. Does it help you determine where to focus your effort? I’m keen to hear how you go. Put your findings in the comments below or get in touch through the usual channels.

Starting My Journey With Triple A

By Tom on March 11, 2022

It began with me starting my journey as a hydrogeologist investigating contaminated land and groundwater across London. My first field project involved running three drill rigs in the snow on a bleak windswept construction site. Talk about trial by fire (or ice). The work was fun, varied and as a newcomer to the workforce I was given quite a lot of autonomy.

Fast forward a few years, a few jobs, a huge mine site and a couple of countries later I found myself newly promoted as a Team Leader in a large multidisciplinary engineering consultancy. Not only was I running a team of water and ecology specialists but the expectation was that I start work winning as well.

My Ops Manager kept on asking, “Have you brought in a project with Rio Tinto yet?”

My answer was, “I’m working on it.” And I was.

All of my experience and training up to that point had been technical hydrogeology, project management and leadership. No sales, client relationship or business development assistance was forthcoming. I am not alone in this many of my colleagues in the environmental and engineering industries have experienced the same.

Pilbara Hydrogeology and Dewatering TEamTeam — Me as a mine site hydrogeologist

Where Do I Start?

I honestly didn’t know. I had a couple of contacts in one of the big mining companies and that was about it. Who should I be talking to? What should I talk to them about? Really I had no idea. It was terrifying.

Luckily for me, Jim, our team’s experienced principal, was keen to guide me in the right direction. Together, we planned and tackled business development inside and outside the company. We looked at our main customers and those we aspired to get on the books. I arranged meetings and Jim came with me to the first couple providing useful feedback.

Jim showed me the power of networking within the organisation. This turned out to be vital because our team often supported the outcomes of large projects won by other departments.

For a few weeks, I took colleagues in other business units out to coffee and explained what we did. Most of them didn’t know that we could offer our capability in-house. Building those internal relationships made a noticeable impact to our funnel of projects.

Jim and I also developed a rudimentary sales plan for communication with our customer base that kept us regularly talking to the right customers. It wasn’t just the two of us. We involved the whole team from the graduates up.

Getting that first win! — What a feeling!

The First Win! Really Starting My Journey

Then I had my first win! It was a tiny piece of consulting work for a government department. Not even a rounding error on the company books. But I had found the lead, pursued the opportunity, written the proposal and won it. What a feeling!

I found myself really enjoying the work. Meeting potential clients, finding out their pain points and working out solutions for them was immensely satisfying.

From that point on I started evolving into roles with significant leadership (my other passion) and business development responsibility and never looked back.

Mentor and Mentee discussion — Mentor discussion – Thank You Jim!

Thank You Jim & Paying it Forward

I often think back to the help that Jim gave me as an inexperienced Team Leader and cannot be more grateful. I have taken that start and continued to hone my skills. But the gap experienced by technical specialists thrust into the business development is still present. Whether technical consultants, entrepreneurs or small business owners the transition from specialised professional to client facing business developer can be bewildering.

Which is why I developed the Triple A Framework and written Business Development Begins Here. I have developed the tools and advice that I wish I had been given access to early in my career. I’ve aimed to simplify the world of business development and provide a strong foundation for people to grow from. If I can help a handful of people make this transition quicker, allowing them to gain fast systematic results then this effort has been worth it.

What was your journey towards business development like? Or are you thinking about starting? Please let me know, get in touch or leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Is a Generic Strategy Useful?

By Tom on March 4, 2022

If you are representing an organisation in the marketplace you must have a good handle on where your products or services sit commercially. As discussed previously commercial savvy is a critical attribute of a successful business developer.

Porter’s Generic Strategy

Though coarse in its approach, Porter’s Generic Strategy can be a good indicator of where your offering is being presented financially. At its core, the model utilises two characteristics to define your company offering:

Scope – Does your offering target a narrow or broad customer base?
Competitive Advantage – Is your offering advantage based on being the cheapest, or on its unique differences?

The overall company Scope and Competitive advantage are plotted along the horizontal and vertical axes allowing you to plot your company offering on the matrix determining the generic strategy that it fits into. See the figure below.

These strategies are:

Cost Leadership (no frills, winning on cost alone)
Differentiation (creating uniquely desirable products and services to a broad market)
Focus (offering a specialised service in a niche market)
Cost Focus (offering a no-frills, cheap service to a niche market).

For example, a dams and tailings consultancy servicing the mining industry would plot on the Differentiation Focus. They are offering a specialist service to a niche market. Meanwhile McDonalds sits firmly within Cost Leadership, offering low cost meal options to the mass consumer market.

Are Generic Strategies Useful?

I can hear you saying, these strategies are too general. But, while these strategies have do have coarse definitions, it allows the business developer to think broadly about how to approach the target customers. This allows framing of a message suited to their market.

Approaching customers with a Cost Leadership mindset is very different to a Differentiation mindset and would require widely contrasting conversations. I have seen environmental consultancies employ both models to great success. Though the customers and opportunities pursued by each were relatively separate.

For example, a Cost Leadership environmental consultancy might focus on government contracts where low price is the governing win factor. Alternatively, the Differentiation focused consultancy would focus on a specific industry where strong defensible scientific work is required for community engagement and licensing requirements. The latter can justify charging a higher price.

Further Thinking

Consider the business that you own or represent. Where do you plot on the matrix? Does this align with the message that you are sending to customers?

What do you do if you have multiple products that plot in different quadrants? We’ll be exploring this in a future post.

As always let me know your thoughts in the comments or via LinkedIn.

For more detailed information on Porter’s Generic Strategy visit this website.

Must Know Your Team’s Intent

By Tom on February 11, 2022

Continuing with the Assess Phase of the Triple A Framework today we will be looking at the intent of the individual business unit or team. Once the strategic intent is understood at an organizational level, it is time to determine how this relates to the specific business division, product line or team. This may be obvious, but if this is not sit down with the team and work it out together. A few questions to consider include:

How does the Business unit work towards the Organization’s vision?
What are the key aspirations of the team?
What are the niche differentiators in-house and, in the marketplace?
What are the short-and-long-term objectives?
What resources are available?

Business Unit Planning Hierarchy

Once you have the team objective in place it use the Planning Hierarchy above to start shaping your plan. Starting with the business objective in mind, the hierarchy establishes the projects and jobs that your company wants to undertake. This in turn determines the customers that must be pursued to get them. This allows a rudimentary road map to be drawn of the direction and growth of the business unit over time. Having this hierarchy mapped and understood by the team, forms an excellent compass for where the business development effort should be pointed.

Getting the answers to the five questions above and developing a resource planning hierarchy, will provide clarity around the strategic intent at the organizational, business unit and team levels. This will keep the business development effort aligned with the outcomes of the organization as a whole.

Call to Action

Grab a piece of paper and answer the questions above. What is the objective of your team? Next write the three headings of the Planning Hierarchy and see what appears. This is a great first step in determining who you should be pursuing. It will form the basis of the more detailed planning in the Aim phase later.

Once you’ve tried the exercise please let me know how you found it. Was it useful? Is there something else you would add. Leave a comment or touch base via LinkedIn or the contact page.

You Need to Know Your Intent

By Tom on February 4, 2022

Assess Phase

To begin your journey in business development you first need to understand the specifics of the Sales Ecosystem that you will be operating within. To gain that understanding you first need to define what the strategic intent of your organization is. This can then be followed with how your product offering differentiates itself, and defining your customers. This is the Assess phase of the Triple A Framework.

I must make clear that the Assess phase does not comprise a detailed quantitative data analysis. Rather a broad assessment that allows the shaping of a robust business development plan. Many technical entrepreneurs fall into the trap of getting hyper detailed with their market analysis. They spend an inordinate amount of time and resources collecting and scrutinizing market and customer data for no significant gain. It is better to have a broad assessment that can be shaped following feedback from customer and market interactions. Having a hyper detailed assessment with no customer interactions informing it is next to worthless. I believe that the Assess phase described below, achieves the right balance between being data-driven, quick to achieve and practical in shaping the plans in the following Aim phase of the Framework.

Why Define the Intent

The strategic intent of a company can be defined as its future intentions and direction. What does it want to become and what does it intend to offer to the market? The long-and-short term goals of the company will act as a broad guide for the business development activity. Taking on business development responsibility, it is easy to become overawed by the scale of opportunity, and to start attacking the problem by reaching out to the market with high energy but no focus on where to direct that energy. This can lead to you reaching for potential customers only as they come to mind, with no clear tactic on how to get them to meet with you or understand your offering. A lot of effort will be wasted approaching customers that are not suitable while high value targets may be missed.

The Wrong Strategy?

You may develop a robust plan and start pursuing it relentlessly, but unknowingly, into the wrong segment where there is no support from head office. This happened to me when I was leading the Australian sales effort for a European instrumentation company. I could see that the Mining Industry in Australia was one of the biggest in the world and that we were not taking advantage of this massive opportunity. To my mind, there was a huge gap that could be filled by our product offering, and running the numbers, the proposition was extremely compelling.

I armed myself with a plan, which detailed the target companies and the role titles of the people we would need to talk to. With high energy, I began the assault. But as I opened up meetings, I slowly began to realise that our initial offering was not compelling enough for the mine companies. They needed a slightly more niche offering. This aligned with some projects I knew were being run by our R&D team in Europe. I took my findings back to the bosses, explained where we were at, and looked for support for a trial, only to find that the senior management weren’t interested. Their efforts were being placed into industries with more strategic value to the company, which resulted in no support for my plan, and a lot of wasted effort. If I had interrogated the company’s intentions and gained an understanding of their longer-term goals, I would have realized that mining did not play a prominent role in their global strategy. Perhaps the hours and money I invested could have been put to better use elsewhere.

Strategic Intent

The solution is to understand the strategic intent of your company and align your plan with it. That is not to say that outlier opportunities should be ignored, but you need to understand where most of the resources of the company will be funneled.

Before you start any business development activity you need to determine the strategic intent of the organisation, including its vision, purpose, and direction. Defining the intent points you towards the desired end goal and provides guidelines and boundaries to keep your business development activity aligned with the desired outcomes of the organisation. The company-wide intent needs to be combined with the objectives of the business unit, division, or product line that you are representing. This will then inform the structure of your business development activities.

Define your organisational vision. Photo by Campaign Creators for Unsplash.

Company Vision and Objective

In an ideal world the company vision and objectives should be readily available and easily understood by all employees; however, this is often not the case. There may be pithy taglines and mission statements framed on the office walls but the clarity around their actual meaning is often clouded. A crucial part of business development planning, requires that the vision and intent of the organization must be clearly understood.

Develop clarity. Sit down with the leadership team, and gain an understanding of what you need. At a minimum, the following questions should be answered:

What is the purpose of our organisation?
What are the key aspirations of our organisation?
What makes us different from the competition?
What market do we play in now?
What markets do we want to play in for the future?
What do we want to look like in three years’ time?
Where does our business development effort fit into the above?

Small Business

If you are a small business owner and you don’t have a company vision or objective defined a great place to begin is Start with Why by Simon Sinek. Then answer the questions above and shape your own.

Call to Action

Have you defined the intent of your company? If so do your business development efforts align?

Are there any questions that I’ve missed to help define the company vision and objective? As always I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Please get in touch or leave a comment below.

Introducing Triple A

By Tom on January 28, 2022

To the uninitiated business development can feel a little overwhelming. How do the Sales Ecosystem and Sales Funnel fit together? Who should I be speaking to and when? There are lots of questions that need answering. This is made harder when business development forms only part of your role description, and other work commitments compete for your time. To help make things simpler, I have formed the Triple A Framework. This has a cyclical structure that guides you through the process of business development (see the figure below). The framework is there to steer you towards strategic planning and systematic action to ultimately increase the revenues entering your business. It comprises:

Assess

Assess the strategic intent of your company, product offering, customers, and internal and external environments.

Aim (Plan)

You must aim your business development action towards achieving the intent of your company. Understand the available marketing options and develop an aggressive strategic, operational, and tactical plan with a systematic cadence to maintain daily, weekly, and annual business development activity.

Action (Execute)

Execute systematic pursuit and opportunity development within the Sales Ecosystem to grow long-term revenue. Implement Act as a conduit of information and feedback between the customer, market, and your organization.

Introducing Triple A Business Development Framework

Over the coming months we will be discussing Assess, Aim & Action in more detail. Each component will be explored and practical advice provided. This will allow you to create a robust and practical business development plan that you can action immediately.

In addition to the Triple A Framework we will discuss some simple marketing methods as a way of acquiring a variety of brand-customer touch points from your customer base. These simple and cost-effective marketing tactics allow your target customers to become familiar with your brand, products and services, feeding leads into the top of your Sales Funnel.

Call to Action

Do you use a framework to shape your business development activity? If so let me know what you are using in the comments below. Are there other aspects to this framework that you think I’ve missed.

I have written a book that takes a deeper dive into the Triple A Framework. It’s due to be released in September 2022. For more info check out the page here.