The Business Development Hacker

This last week I had lunch with a team of sales VPs and the subject of hiring came up. The central question: How do you spot great salespeople during the interview? A common response was “you just know.” Some people have the “it factor" by this line of thought. It struck me as odd that seasoned sales people would fall back on instincts when they excel in a profession where preparation and process are so critical to success. The best salespeople are good learners. Questions about past mistakes are a great place to start. Great salespeople will volunteer how they learned from their mistakes. Tell me about your biggest mistake? What was the last mistake you made? We need salespeople that are intellectually curious. Ask questions about when they took initiative to learn and what motivated them. Were they forced to learn or did they want to be ahead of the curve? Tell me about a time you had to learn something complex. Listen to the questions they ask you during...

It may seem like a silly question to ask, but businesses have widely different visions for their business development team. Small companies and start-ups may see the term as interchangeable with “sales.”  A business development executive needs to employ all the tools of a great sales person. The process of establishing a new account - especially with an enterprise client - is certainly a sales process. However, there is a key and important difference. Business development involves getting other organisations to promote your product. It involves a convincing the business partner to commit valuable resources that may require critical changes in they way they do business. This requires the business development executive first understand the partner’s corporate objectives intimately and be capable of installing trust between the organisations.  A single effective business development executive will often out-perform an entire sales team. They can do this by leveraging...

Legend has it that the Masonic lodge was the first labor union. The story is that the masons formed a fraternity to guard the engineering secrets used to construct the great pyramids and other marvels of that era. Times have changed. Today’s software development culture embraces the hacker mentality. Why reinvent something that already works? We reuse code, tools, shortcuts, and tips about how to do things better in a way that just wasn’t common a generation ago. But I still see many people struggling in their careers because they are bashful about asking for help. Maybe they don’t want to show ignorance. Maybe they don’t want to risk putting somebody in the spot of saying “I can’t help.” In any case, I’ve found it’s always better to treat one's personal development with the mantra of the agile product manager:  The generosity of people when you ask them to share something specific aways amazes me. When I was young I had an opportunity to meet a woman named Suzanne M...

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” My career has been spent with early stage technology companies at the intersection of product, marketing, sales and business development. I have 30 years of “experience” in these areas to draw from. Many lessons over that were often expensive, and painful.  Most of us care deeply about the quality our work. We take enormous pride in what we’ve done well. My career would not have been successful without people that believed in me and shared their stories with the hope they could help me along. My goal with this blog is to share some of those stories and the lessons I’ve learned - to pay it forward.