2023: Take Control Of Your Growth (4 of 5)
What's On My Mind
Time to scale BD across your team.
In Part 1, we discussed a simple model to evaluate your business or book of business.
In Part 2, we differentiated your Solution.
In Part 3, we rocked out your PreBD so that it actually works.
We'll take another step forward today, scaling BD across your team.
Here's the model again. If you already have it, skip this section.
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The Model: What You Need To Succeed
We all have four things to pay attention to that might be limiting factors in our books of business.
These pinch points create friction, making it hard to grow.
The bottlenecks can be in four big areas:
- Undifferentiated Solution.
Symptom: Sounding like others in the marketplace.
Great solutions are unique in the buyer's mind in less than 5 minutes.
- Not enough or compelling enough PreBD.
Symptom: Not getting as many "predisposed to choose you" leads.
Great PreBD gives you more leads (that already want you) than your team can handle.
- Inefficient or unaligned BD.
Symptom: not enough of your opportunities are "closing."
Great BD playbooks and moves are seamless across your team in the way IT uses an agile–efficient system, common playbook.
- Inadequate Delivery.
Symptom: you aren't creating enough "Raving Fans" in your work.
Great delivery creates Ravings Fans very quickly and enhances the experience over time.
What You Need To Scale BD Across A Team
If you've been following the prior articles...
You've got ideas to differentiate your Solution, so that prospects think "your approach is different, and I like it" within 5 minutes of meeting you.
You've thought about how to systematize your PreBD so you have more "predisposed to use you" leads than you can handle.
Let's say you can make those happen soon.
What's next?
Efficiently aligning your BD across the team.
Let's take a step back to leap forward. Slingshot style.
Think about every other important business process at work.
I'll bet you have a system everyone understands and uses.
Examples:
IT has some flavor of Agile.
Accounting has GAAP (or something like it if you're outside the US.)
Manufacturing has Six Sigma.
Common systems create efficiency.
Could you imagine the auditors getting together in December each year and saying, "Hey, how do you all want to do the audit this year? I got some great ideas from a friend of mine at a BBQ last week!"
That's scary.
And I like BBQ.
Yet this is exactly how most organizations treat Business Development.
No common system.
New approaches all the time.
Random.
And random systems create random results.
What The Best Do
There's a better way.
Big picture first, then we'll dive into details.
Here's what the best do in three simple steps:
- Develop a common approach and language.
This is important for efficiency because certain commercial and relationship moves work.
Key: You want people doing what works, not having random acts of lunch.
- Set a longer-term strategy.
This can be done across a geography, practice or product area, or client team.
Key: The key is prioritizing the most important activities.
- Make it a game.
Once you have the priorities, make execution a game.
Key: Focus on what you can control, measuring and promoting those that lean in.
Let's dive deeper into each of these...
1. Develop a common approach and language.
Science and steps that accelerate growth. Our specialty!
Of course, you can send your teams through our comprehensive GrowBIG Training.
But, we have tons of gratis resources for you too.
I personally took a week of time to record the Top 100 micro lessons your teams need to know to be great at growth. It was a LOT.
HERE is the first in that series. The last one just dropped yesterday, so all 100 are now available!
Click on that and skim through the topics in the following micro lessons, most are less than 7 minutes or so.
Most of our clients watch the lessons at a specific interval, like 5 per week, then discuss learnings and how to implement them.
This is the most valuable resource we've ever created that doesn't cost a thing.
2. Set a longer-term strategy.
After you dig into enough micro lessons, you'll want to get together and set a longer-term strategy.
Break down your BD process and ask: what should we focus on to have the biggest impact?
Is it meeting the right new potential clients? The initial discovery, including asking great questions? Creating curiosity to get the next meeting? Co-creating the approach? Talking about money? Closing the deals to get started?
All those topics and more are covered in the series, again here.
Get your team together and prioritize. Focus on the biggest bottleneck, the most upside.
It's invigorating to have a plan!
3. Make it a game.
We learn when we're playing games.
When most people think of games, they think of games at home. Whether it's the addictive ring on a string or Wingspan , we love playing games with friends and family. (We're digging into Terraforming Mars over the holidays!)
We can play games at work too.
How do you create a game at work?
Here are your steps:
Have your team work together (co-create!) and pick something they want to do more of (behavior!) and something they would want (prizes!). Maybe pit teams against each other. Be creative and have fun with this part. It's best when people create it together because of, well, you know–people buy into what they help create. (Bonus: better ideas too!)
Then define something you can count that's 100% in everyone's control. Find a way to collect the effort and publicly display the results periodically, like weekly.
Finally, have fun running the game! Promote the results often. People work harder when you praise others in front of them.
Think of how an announcer announces a horse race–how much they shout as one horse rallies to move in front of another, how they increase their cadence and excitement as the race gets down to the wire.
Emulate that but spread it out over several weeks. Being a great "announcer" calls attention to the game and makes it that much more enjoyable.
Who's going to sprint to the finish to win!? I can't wait to see!
Example:
Many of our clients love our system of creating demand, of using Give To Gets.
If that's your focus, here's how you could design the three steps:
- To develop a common approach and language, you could have everyone watch our Give To Get videos in the 100-part series HERE.
- Then say you got everyone together to set a longer-term strategy, and everyone agrees to focus on demand creation through Give To Gets. You could determine exactly what Give To Gets to focus on across the team. What Solution do you want to promote?
- To make it a game, the thing to measure would be Give To Gets offered. Note the word "offered." That's 100% in everyone's control and the team could easily create a leader board to keep track of them.
Maybe the whole team could determine metrics of how many each person or the team wants to offer. The best part? What prizes the team might pick for say 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. That would be a blast to figure out, and you can reinforce it throughout the "announcing" of the campaign.
Imagine the impact of something like this.
Common language, speeding things up. More efficiency.
Clear, longer-term strategy galvanizing focused effort. No more random acts of lunch!
And fun! Making it a game drives more involvement, more activity, and more enjoyment.
What's Worth Lingering On
It's crazy to me that growth is maybe the only important business function that doesn't have a common system.
IT has Agile. Audit has GAAP. Even actuaries have common systems for Incurred But Not Reported reserving.
(You knew the actuarial joke was coming, right?)
But for some reason, growth is treated as ad hoc. Like you're either good at it or not. The science shows that's just not true.
All technical expertise is both learned and earned. And that includes business development.
Let's blow the doors off 2023.
Differentiate your Solution.
Create more leads than you need with PreBD.
And streamline your BD with an effective, doable, common playbook.
Do that, and you'll create the most beautiful bottleneck of them all.
Having more work than you can handle.
And that, my friends, is what we'll tackle next week.
Mo
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