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MBD
insight #51
Are You a Strategic Business Leader?
Many individuals
with this title bring a working, personal relationship with the senior management of organizations being pursued. There are a lot of individuals with this basic profile who declare
they are strategic business development professionals. However, in reality,
they are not.
To be a true Strategic Business Leader who is innovative,
creative, and successful, you must be able to innately apply
the following seven critical concepts.
First
you must exhibit the hunter profile, always pursuing the next
best strategic opportunities for your company and crafting
those opportunities before competitors recognize them.
Second,
it’s critical that you understand the goal and purpose
of business development. You should understand that the
purpose of your role is to help organizations understand
their real issues, challenges or concerns, and identify
their pain.
Third,
you must have a developed knowledge of psychology …
understanding how and why people behave. The application of
people knowledge is what motivates a prospect to
trust an individual and share information.
The
fourth concept is the capacity to develop behavioral
characteristics of an intelligence-gatherer.
This is
the critical ability to know what information is important
to gather early on, and then who to gather it from, and how.
The fifth
important aspect of the strategic business leader is the ability and
courage to disqualify opportunities early and efficiently.
That means
let go, close the door, walk away and move on to a better
opportunity.
The
sixth must-have is the skill to quickly build both a short and
long-term pipeline. To do this you must develop and hone the
thinking, have the character and be educated or re-educated in the
role of professional business development.
The last
quality is the ego drive to continually pursue new
opportunities as an alpha-wolf. With their heightened
sixth sense they have the ability to see leverage points and
make connections that others fail to make.
Are
Strategic Business Leaders born with the BD gene, or can
they be developed in this role? From three decades in this
business, the simple answer is that it’s a little of both.
Few bring it all. That’s where professional development and
mastery education come into the strategic BD equation.
Are you a Strategic Business Leader?
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