Mo asks John Tigh: What is your personal definition of business development?
- For John, business development begins and ends with acts of service. It’s all about following up and finding ways to help people.
- The fastest way to build a relationship is to deliver value and not necessarily in a commercial fashion. By being useful and helpful to other people, there are often second, third, and fourth order connections that come as a result of that.
- John aims to put a pause in people's fight or flight response when they hear the word sales, and just focuses instead on being human.
- By asking what makes someone special and giving them space to answer, John is trying to help them identify where their T-shape uniqueness is and how he can broaden the conversation from there.
- People always have areas of commonality. The more John knows about what makes people unique and special, the more opportunity he has to connect them with other people that need their products, services, or talent.
- Whenever John finds one person that they believe should know another person, he goes out of his way to find them interesting people to connect with. He sends an email that he refers to as a gusher about what makes those people awesome and why they would be even greater if they knew each other.
- If you think of business development as acts of service, it’s about learning what’s important to the other person and that creates a great buying process by showing you're trustworthy and you care.
- The habit that John tries to cultivate everyday is around being uncomfortable. The practice of discomfort and stretching his personal and professional boundaries is what put him on the growth path he is on today.