Insights

Do your homework the first time and on every call. Focus your research around the 4 Cornerstones of Business Development: Technical, Business, Money and People Knowledge. Pay special attention to [...]

Do you find yourself taking your role as a Business Development Professional too seriously? Over the many years we’ve been helping students differentiate between and prioritize [...]

Do you constantly struggle to reach growth targets or achieve revenue quotas? Does it seem like you’re sinking deeper into a ditch, while working hard to climb your way out? Turning around an [...]

For more than three decades, we’ve been challenged to describe what Business Development is all about. More often than not, it’s been defined by explaining what it isn’t. It’s not the [...]

Every organization has a culture. Like the tale of the tortoise and the hare, some businesses choose to take a commanding lead in the marketplace, while others prefer to hang back and survey [...]

As a BD professional, you invest a great deal of time and energy building the requisite, first-person trust relationships with potential or current customers. You also allot time to understand [...]

This insight owes credit to Samuel Morse, 1791-1872, the inventor of Morse code and Lieutenant General Russel Honoré, U.S. Army (Ret.), who coined many colorful Cajun phrases. Whether or not you [...]

We’re often asked, “What do professional Business Development people look like”? There are many studies about personalities along with tests and articles on the subject. In [...]

Regardless of our backgrounds and upbringings, we are all taught to treat others with respect, and in some cases deference. Professionally, we often find ourselves in a structural hierarchy with [...]

The role of Business Development is not for the faint of heart. When starting out in a BD role most of us were never provided with a “how-to” manual for success. This is probably due [...]

There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for… you may get it.” Similarly, be careful what you go after in your pursuit of business. In Business Development, every [...]

When we evaluate Business Development Professionals using the 12 Core Competencies of Business Development, we discover many individuals serving in a BD role lack a fundamental understanding of [...]

When I’m With Myself … I’m In Bad Company “The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.” – Epictetus [...]

One of the issues Business Development Professionals struggle with is when to show intelligence or technical knowledge. Unfortunately, some people aren’t very astute at knowing when this is [...]

This quote was provided by a recent participant at one of our workshops. The wisdom of this quote is that it raises an important question… what is a real opportunity? As we teach in our [...]

Every now and then we should all read some of the stories on the Darwin Awards website. This site chronicles strange and often bizarre tales of how people find a way to eliminate themselves from [...]

At one time or another, everyone in Business Development has been faced with the challenge of being emotionally affected by what a prospect says on a call. It takes a person with a lot of [...]

Every organization wants consummate Business Development professionals on their team. It doesn’t matter whether they are strategic hunters, organic farmers, strategic leaders or perennial [...]

Business Development Professionals know that credibility is established by the questions you ask, not the statements you make. They know that the questions they craft rather than the presentation [...]

“…neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor the winds of change, nor a nation challenged, will stay us from the swift completion of our appointed rounds. Ever.” [...]