Your pitch goes perfect, the guy on the other side is fired up…this one is in the bag!
But what unfolds is different than what you expected. Your emails go unreturned. Your calls are ignored. You’re left scratching your noggin at the radio silence.
This ever happen to you? It has to me plenty and in retrospect it could have been potentially avoided.
Usually you start by pitching one person. What I’ve come to realize is that even when this person is the decision maker they still might need to get buy-in from multiple people. This could be the rest of their team, an adjacent department, or even the CEO. It’s great to make this person you’re champion, but that doesn’t mean you …
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I thought it might be useful to highlight some products I use on the reg for BD.
Rapportive
For those that aren’t familiar, Rapportive is a gmail plugin that populates social profile information attached to an email address in your inbox. It sharpens my BD blade in a variety of ways:
Context/Rapport Building – People are constantly eliciting relevant events or things they’re interested in through facebook and twitter. Rapportive helps me identify these signals which can be used to add a personal touch to an email.
For example, if someone was writing me an email right now, rapportive might inform them that Mashable just covered the newest release of the YP App and the extension of our partnership. This is news they might …
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I heard our VP of Sales Adam Liebman say something a few weeks ago, that I think is very important for all Sales/BD people to understand. Sometimes it’s just as important to get to a no than a yes. Why? It’s in your time’s best interest. Every moment you spend on a deal that’s never going to happen, is time you could be working on one that will. Thus, the faster you determine that someone isn’t buying, the more you can focus on people that are. The idea is to get to a resolution as fast a possible without jeopardizing a positive outcome. It’s an art that can only be learned through time and experience and is more appropriate …
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Usually within the first 5 seconds of picking up the phone I can tell if its a cold call. A creative mispronunciation of my name followed by monotone script reading typically give it away.
The person on the other end could have the greatest offer in the world for me. But it doesn’t matter. For better or worse, I’ve conditioned my brain to turn off as soon as I recognize these interactions. Its as if a trigger goes off that immediately diverts all of my focus towards determining how I can politely extract myself from the conversation…I might as well be talking to a machine.
Pro-active business development often requires a lot of cold outreach. When I’m reaching out cold via email …
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The first two parts of this post are good context for the third and final part below. It probably makes sense to read part 1 and part 2 here.
Now let’s talk about where BD came into the picture.
While I was working on Sfter I got to know Charlie O’Donnell through his softball team which I joined through twitter. I was excited to get back on the diamond, but I have to admit that a strong motivation stemmed from the desire to get to know Charlie. He’s definitely a cornerstone of the New York tech scene and someone I wanted to know. I had a great time that season and enjoyed getting to know Charlie.
It was through Charlie …
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In the part 1 of this post, I described how I broke and entered the startup scene. This outlines the initial trajectoryof how I ended up in BD. It probably makes sense to read first before continuing.
During the denoument of my YouAre.TV days, I secured a product consulting gig for a technology consulting firm. My initial outlook was that this would keep me afloat while I saw my subscription commerce project through. I had met the founder of the firm that hired me through an event I put together. I guess I must have made an impression on him. My assignment was to figure out how to make their consumer web product that was receiving little traction “work.” The gig …
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A lot of people have been asking me how to get into BD recently. Similar to Venture Capital, I don’t think there is a boilerplate prescription for getting into BD. There are definitely things you can do to put yourself in a favorable position like networking, blogging, and gaining an understanding of what BD actually means. That’s all great, but I’m here to tell you that I think getting a job in BD is about putting yourself in a position to capitalize when a “right time, right place opportunity” presents itself by working your ass off.
I think it’d be useful to outline how I got into business development by re-telling my startup journey. More than anything else, I want …
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Pro-active business development is about finding decision makers and making it happen when you do.
LinkedIn is a pretty powerful tool for finding a decision maker, but sometimes it’s not enough. Let me illustrate an example of what I’m alluding to from my subscription commerce days.
As a budding sub-com warlord, I wanted to reach the person in charge of allocating sampling budgets for a large brand. My guess was that I needed to talk to someone in the marketing department, but there would be 13 marketing coordinators on LinkedIn. Of course none of them mentioned anything about sampling in their job description. What’s a little known startup to do?
When I find myself in …
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