Tips for Successful Business Development

Many founders and CEO's come asking, “We need to hire a Good person, do you know anyone?” Few roles have more varied job descriptions than business development. It’s no wonder why it is hard to figure out who to hire, what this person should do and how to measure success. Read below for tips on successful business development for startups, including how to avoid many of the typical frustrations with business development.

1. Hire the Right Person at the Right Time

A person with deep industry knowledge and strong network ready to “do deals” can turn into a disaster if it is too early in a company’s product lifecycle. There are three stages in the commercialization process and not everyone is suited for every stage.

• Scouting: The earliest stage of a company. At this point, business development is about identifying various routes to market, points of leverage and providing the internal team early market feedback. The ability to work with product and engineering teams is a key skill.
• Testing: At this stage, Good employees will close a few deals to test assumptions and provide measureable input before you scale the business. Analytical skills to set up a framework for what to measure, and examining the data, will determine if and where to scale based on the company’s strengths and vision.
• Scaling: After gathering data from early deals and validating a path to achieve your goals, business development is ready to start replicating deals and putting a support structure in place.

2. Business Development Is Not Sales

In general, business development will identify and create partnerships that enable leverage for driving revenue, distribution or that enhance the product. Sales are focused almost exclusively on driving revenue. Similar distinctions will apply when hiring a sales leader for an early stage company versus a more mature organization.

3. Post-Deal Management Is Crucial

All successful deals are a result of accountability and proactive management — by both Good employees and account management. In most cases, the account manager is a different person than the Good person who did the deal. Ideally, the account manager has variable compensation or incentives tied to meeting the goals established by both parties. If you are not ready to allocate the resources to support a deal, think twice before signing it.

4. Qualitative Versus Quantitative

Companies sometimes try to build a business purely around a qualitative value proposition, which is difficult and has a higher likelihood of failure. The market is less willing to pay for a better user experience or the promise of increased engagement, even if they like the product and find it useful. A quantitative value (lowers cost, drives revenue, more customers, etc.) dramatically increases the odds of success, one way to remember this rule is the pacemaker versus the hearing aid analogy: If you could only have one, which one would you choose?

5. Support for Business Development Is Essential

A good business developer will engage internal resources along the way to ensure the company can meet the goals and expectations of a partnership. A lack of support will almost certainly lead to finger pointing and blaming when things go south. Everyone should own part of the success or failure from the start.

6. Establish a Framework for Assessing Opportunity

In order to gain support from your team, everyone needs to understand why the deal makes sense for your company. Does it drive revenue, lead to new users or enable the company to enter a new market or vertical? When the goal is clear and measurable, it makes it easier to address issues like, “Why are we converting below projections?”

7. Make Deals Carefully

There is a difference between doing deals and doing the right deals. A good deal maker can help identify a false signal –- when there is just enough market momentum and revenue to mask the greater opportunity. Conversely, a less experienced deal maker or one with the wrong incentives can generate enough momentum and distract the company from the bigger opportunity. Many companies have been weighed down by a bad deal they later regretted -– this is where you want to develop a level of understanding and trust with your business development person.

8. There Are No Legal Issues

A legal agreement codifies a business arrangement and includes commercial terms as well as what happens if things do not work out. This requires business development and legal counsel to assess the business opportunity versus the business risk and explain the trade-offs to management.

Building a company is hard and requires a lot of things to go well including having a great product and team. Watching an idea become a product and a product generate revenue that becomes a successful company makes it all worthwhile. Bringing in the right business development person at the right stage, and following these other guidelines, will keep your company on the right track.

HR as a Scapegoat…..

Scapegoat is defined as someone who is punished for the mistakes of others.

I thought of writing this as one of the cases was being discussed in the forum about Operations people blaming HR department for some failures.

Amusing isn’t it, but still we all have faced it some point of time in our organizations that we as HR professionals are punished or blamed for what some other department or may be the owner is doing.

Sometimes, people even forget that HR people are also employees and do not take all the decisions on their own, they also have reporting structure and a decision making authority is all above them, still the blame for anything goes to “yours truly”..HR department.

Be it delay in opening bank accounts, salary transfer delays, low ratings during appraisals, bad hire, policy implementation, less or more training, low hikes, less salary…and what not. You name it and our fraternity has taken that blame.

The case which is being discussed talks about if Hr department can be made accountable for the failure of operations team, what do you think?

If it is the case of Bad hire, than obviously single handedly one cannot blame HR department as operations people must or should have taken part in the recruitment process.

If it is the case of Non performance, then what were the senior officials doing….sleeping when the performance is going below par what were they up to? What about the internal checks, KRAs and performance reviews? Do you really think only HR department needs to control all these things. The answer is no.

Then why are we being treated like that, because when you are dealing with 100 different cultures, 100 different backgrounds, and 100 different personalities and yes with different attitude these things are bound to happen.

Yes this is the only department who takes the responsibility when they are not able to solve the problem of any of the employee, or to be honest we get the blame as we do not communicate properly or in abundance.

• It is our failure actually to not communicate properly, if it is about non opening of bank accounts tell the employee clearly that you are just a mediator between a bank and employee, the delays can come from Bank side if the documentation or paper work is not complete.

• If it is about not giving enough hike in the salary, please communicate informally that HR department also works with budgets, there is a specific budget within which we have to finalize the salary hikes. So, how do we be held responsible for something like this?

• Open communication channel always work where you are dealing with such diverse backgrounds, and yes do not take unnecessary responsibility of dealing with everything on your own, involve people from other departments especially during Recruitments.

• Have SOPs, policies and procedures for everything, no matter how small the thing looks like make sure it is documented and clearly communicated.

• Create a culture where there is no blame game, people take responsibility of their own actions and make sure they are accountable for certain things related to their work areas. Companies with such cultures of strong leadership do not come across such scapegoat kind of problems.

• Process orientation is very important, for completely avoiding the passing of the ball in the organization. Process integration is one such solution where you have well defined process, where operations process ends, where Accounts department process starts everything should be clearly declared and decided. This reminds me of an example in one of the Textile Company I worked for, everything goes wrong the scapegoat was Administration department, if logistics department failed to transfer some goods from one place to another; it was Admin Deptt’s fault as they did not provide the driver on time. Bingo!! Does it solve the problem? No my dear it would not.

So just stop being a scapegoat, grow up and let the company grow with you. When the ball is in your court make sure you utilize it completely for the sole purpose of your and company’s growth.

Dear friends and members of HR fraternity…do share your problems and solutions so that we all can grow together.

Implementation of Career plans

Career planning may start during the performance appraisal. At that time, the person’s growth and development should be discussed. Career goals and personal ambitions can be considered, in selecting and promoting and in designing training and development programs.

Development of contingency plans:

Career plans are developed in an environment of uncertainty, and the future cannot be predicted with great accuracy. Therefore, contingency plans based on alternative assumptions should be prepared. While one may enjoy working for a small, fast-growing venture company, it may be wise to prepare an alternative career plan based on the assumption that the venture may not succeed.

Monitoring Progress:

Monitoring is the process of evaluating progress toward career goals and making necessary corrections in the aims or plans. An opportune time for assessing career programs is during the performance appraisal. This is the time not only to review performance against objectives in the operating areas but also to review the achievement of milestones in the career plan. In addition, progress should be monitored at other times, such as at the completion of an important task or project.

Dual-Career couples:

An effective career strategy requires that consideration be given to the career of the spouse. Dual-career couples, with both partners working, sometimes have to make very stressful choices. For examples, if both partners have successful careers, the opportunity for a promotion that requires relocation is a particularly painful decision. Sriyam International, conducted a survey of 600 major companies and found that 60% of relocation involved dual-career couples. It has been estimated that in future the figure will go up.

Some companies are accommodating the special needs of dual-career couples by having a flexible approach to transfers that involve relocation, considering the needs of both partners in career planning, helping to find employment for the spouse either within the company or outside, and providing maternity leave and day-care services for children. With the large number of married women in the work force, an increasing number of companies have recognized the stressful situation of dual-career couples and implemented more flexible policies, career planning, personal selection, placement, and promotion.

Building a brand for self

Employees who can brand and market themselves well carry an image that gets associated with not only their brand name but also the organization’s. Self branding always helps. But the employee should not resort to bragging or pretense  It is a careful study of oneself in a quest to understand what one excels in and then leveraging on those attributes to create a brand called ‘me’. A great communicator for instance, brands himself /herself likewise. Whereas a silent performer carries this very attitude as his/her brand identity.

Personal branding is not all about self promotion and marketing tactics, it is more fundamental than that. It is a clear, deep and profound understanding of who you are and what you stand for. Every organization should believe in playing with the strengths of the individual.

This is not a new phenomenon. It happens in all relationship; people always wish to establish their identify (brand). Branding is a positive and an essential long term process in one’s career as long as it is based on and backed by one’s competencies and achievements. Branding oneself stems from a simple fundamental of how human beings co-exist in a given environment. Humans can exist only in two forms of relationships. Either, they compete or collaborate. Taking advantage of natural opportunities to promote your accomplishments and letting others know what you have done is a good thing and needs to be encouraged. One of the ways to stand out, shine through is to wisely promote your accomplishments and use effective self marketing and self branding tools.

Is it a fair deal for the silent worker whose effort go unnoticed and some other employee who is good at branding himself/herself walk away with all the applause? Branding is neither about making noise nor is it a popularity contest. Hence it does not matter whether you are silent or outspoken. Branding is about what image/brand one wants to build for oneself and how he/she goes about doing it. Building a brand for oneself is a highly individualistic process and what works for one may not work for the other. So, being an introvert or an extrovert does not matter.

Talking about whether it is an unfair for the silent workers. There are many successful introverts. An extrovert or a good orator need not be successful compared to an introvert or poor speaker. Networking and blogging are domains where introverts can beat their more talkative rivals in their own game of self promotion. It would be wrong to say that these silent or the introvert employees miss out on a lot as they do not get the appreciation or recognition as they tend to maintain a low profile. If they are good at what they do their ‘silent’ attitude towards work may even add to their performance and productivity. In fact, at Endeavor, every Project Lead has a special knack of identifying and rewarding the silent performers. Extrovert employees are more suited for the client-oriented roles, where their ability to speak out and good presentation and persuasion skills may do wonders. On the other hand, an introvert employee may be suitable for the back end delivery kind of roles where a dedicated and focused effort is required.

Fairness in this entire process is only about an opportunity being provided to all to showcase his/her success. Leveraging the opportunity is only a function of his/her ability to communicate with confidence. Introversion could be referred to someone who lacks confidence in articulating his/her success openly. Such an employee would expect his/her supervisor to point out his/her success to the rest of the team.

It is imperative for any organization to make sure that their employees gets the right kind of appreciation and does not feel side lined and disappointed. How do organizations make sure that they keep employees who blow their own trumpet at bay and identify the deserving talent? Differentiating a deserving employee from a hypocrite is only about an organization being knowledgeable about human behavior and work performance standards. With so many skilled self-marketers around, leaders need to develop tools and skills to evaluate and reward real performers.

It is very important for organizations to weigh the claims of individuals against time; It is easy to form opinions about employees as professed by them in the short run and determine roles and responsibilities, accordingly. However, a real brand is created only when the opinions are vindicated time and again and the individual delivers consistently over a long period of time.

Hence the moot point remains that as much as self branding is highly recommended for every individual a short term image should not be confused with branding. It’s always in the long run that an individual’s brand gets established. If organizations are good at identifying the deserving talent then the practice of an employee branding oneself will certainly work wonders for both.

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