17 Tips for new executives with business development responsibilities

culled from:linkedin.com

1. Business development is about what you close and not about how many leads you have. Closing requires understanding what it will take to win.
2. For services businesses, the best competitive advantage is an information advantage.
3. Only bid leads where you have an information advantage. If you don’t have an information advantage, it means you are competing on price or luck.
4. Relationship marketing doesn’t work by getting potential customers to like you. It works by producing an information advantage. You can measure the success of your relationship marketing efforts by how much they produce an information advantage.
5. People are not enough for successful business development. Being successful takes more than just hiring smart or charismatic people.
6. What it will take to win the proposal should drive what you do during the pre-RFP pursuit. If the staff involved in the pre-RFP pursuit don’t know what it will take to win the proposal, they can’t deliver it. Thus, the pre-RFP pursuit is really about discovering what it will take to win.
7. You can measure your readiness to win at RFP release by how well you can answer the questions related to what it will take to win. You can build your pursuit process around that, as well as your bid decision process.
8. Don’t debate whether a lead is a “good opportunity” or not. Debate whether you understand what it will take to win and have an information advantage. Making your meetings about what it takes to win and how to get an information advantage will set the right expectations and help train your staff.
9. Your strategic plan should tell people where to prospect for leads and which leads are acceptable. It should become a tool used in making bid decisions, and not just sit on a shelf.
10. Make sure you understand how to build a funnel or pipeline and the math related to it. This will help you set the right targets and know what to expect in the future.
11. Put the burden of proof on those who recommend bidding and not on those who recommend cancelling. No matter how hard it might be emotionally, you can improve your win rates by making bids easy to cancel and hard to get approval to continue.
12. Your best chance to influence and improve the proposal occurs before it is written. If you come in late to the game and see that changes are required, that’s your failure and not the proposal team’s failure. Be a good role model and set the stage for success early.
13. Be aware of the questions that your proposal team can’t answer on their own, and help them get the answers they need.
14. Don’t allow the proposal review process to be subjective. Proposal quality should be defined in writing. Reviews should validate specific attributes or criteria. If your organization can’t articulate what those criteria should be in detail or hasn’t done so before the writing starts, then you’ve got a problem.
15. Proposal writers and reviewers should have the same definition and criteria for proposal quality. Otherwise, neither one of them can fulfill it.
16. If you hardly ever cancel a pursuit, you’re probably doing something wrong.
17. The best proposals are written from the customer’s perspective. They should not describe your company, they should describe why your company’s qualifications and approaches matter to the customer. You need to understand what matters to the customer in order to achieve this.