Organizational alignment isn’t necessarily a positive. Huh? Having everyone on the same page, aligned, and headed in one direction can be a very good thing…unless of course the same page happens to be in the wrong book and/or the direction is the wrong direction.

There is something called ‘Choice-supportive bias‘.
In short, you ascribe much value to the known quantity that is your decisions.

When someone looks to take a company or a division a new direction or re-align sales territories they are bucking the system. Perhaps in a small way, perhaps in a big way, but either way, there is no longer alignment but rather diffusion is introduced.

If you are in sales or marketing you run up against this everyday. When I am selling something I am attempting to challenge another individual’s (or company’s) past decision/s. This is emotional. People, myself included, really like the decisions we have made and sometimes hate it when people try to ‘buck’ their system. 

Thus, selling is not for the faint of heart. People, once again myself included, are arrogant at times…thinking that whatever it is you are telling me can’t possibly be as good as what I know to be true.

Number one ally = PAIN

Regardless on whether or not the prospect made the right decision or not, pain inevitably comes from that decision at one point or another. Identifying the pain in the prospect’s current situation is the first thing you must do (done through asking good questions, not rambling on and on about your company). Pain is the megaphone that gets their attention and why you have their ear in the first place.

A system breaks, a CPA does a bad job, a steak must be sent back because it wasn’t cooked to order, etc. All pain causes one to wonder whether or not they made the right decision irrespective of past successes. Current pain speaks louder than past successes. Thus for a sales/marketing person it’s their job to be on the short list of options should pain occur.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if there were candidates for a prize. -CS Lewis

Rarely do you hear a referral/non-referral of a product or service that is void of emotion. Rather, it’s based on emotion. We find ourselves using the features and aspects of a service to justify our emotion behind the praise/dis-praise always adding a personal bias to what it is we are describing. Lawn care, a bowling ball, outsourced technology, a CPA – none are exempt from this range of thinking.

Thus, as a marketing/sales person I must remember the ramifications of this as I engage in the market place.

• Our clients, to no fault of their own, will only dig as deep as their recent emotion to validate or dismiss the product/service.
• Managing expectations may be the most crucial aspect in protecting the future praise of your service
• In a service model, strong client relationships protect against dis-praise and/or promote praise despite the actual evidence for such a testimony
• Law of diminishing return will set it in with long standing clients, the pain, now gone due to your product/service, tends to lose meaning over time, thus emotions must be stoked through proving new value and/or services that further enable or prevent pain

When I went college it cost roughly $5,000 a year for tuition and books (yes, it was a state school). The same school now costs about $8,000 a year. My guess is that the education hasn’t changed much materially but the cost has increased roughly 60%. Why is this the case?

Baumol’s Cost Disease  – in short - a rise of cost with little corresponding increase in productivity

Many people, wrongly in my assumption, have turned to education as a way to punt on these ‘hard economic times’. They have chosen to stay in school or go back to school in search for greener pastures that they assume will be there after graduation. This has led to a surge in demand causing a material increase in the cost of education while the quality in education has remained constant and/or declined due to the volume/quality argument.

So how this applies to me – a sales/marketing guy peddling my wares.

I sell cloud services to the accounting profession. As you know the cloud and technology are sorda a big deal thus causing the demand for qualified IT people to rise. This is both good and bad news to my organization.

Bad news: The cost for talent, both in finding and retaining, will rise. Despite hard economic times more and more companies see the increase in production via the gains through good/excellent IT systems. People still create systems last I checked.

Good news: The people/firms I sell to will have a hard time affording IT talent needed to run their operation well. The production increase through the individual will not materially increase but market prices will climb higher causing non-IT organizations a stomach ache when the inevitable comes their way. Their decision’s look like this:

1. retain IT person and pay them what the market demands
2. hire a less talented IT person and roll the dice
3. hire an outsourced company to worry about the cost centers and make the shift
4. do nothing

First, what exactly is business development?

Business Development [biz-nis dih-vel-uh  p-muh  nt]
Business development comprises a number of techniques and responsibilities which aim at attracting new customers and penetrating existing markets.

Next, what should you look for in people (the 4 C’s)?

Connector
The person who acts like they are in timeout at a cocktail hour is probably not the best person for a business development role. This doesn’t mean they are the incessant storyteller who can’t shut up, but rather a person who rarely meets a stranger and when they do they LISTEN more than they talk. This trait is wired into an individual  and, best I can tell, cannot be taught. Sure someone can get better and improve, but this same person should not have that as their primary role.

Content Creator

Yes, content. The ability to present thoughts, concepts, and value propositions in both oral and written forms is a must for today’s environment. The reasoning is 3-fold:

• In the professional services environment, a person must be able to go at it alone, not taking away time from a billable professional.
• To be seen as an expert begins with being seen. Fancy that. The fact is that in this content starved world, if you are the one creating/delivering content, you are seen as the expert. In some cases it’s a complete farce and those are easily sniffed out; however, you must create content to gain the perception of being an expert.
• It’s leveraged. An article for the local paper, a presentation to 30 people, or a 1 on 1 pitch  can all be leveraged if you look at it as content. This is an aptitude one must learn over the years ahead, firms too for that matter.

Collaborator
The ability to work as fluid as possible across multiple teams, departments, and people types in order to pull together an answer for a client/prospect in a timely fashion equals collaboration in a professional services environment. This requires a level of emotional intelligence to push things along internally but not in a way that ruffles (too many) feathers. This value must not be underestimated because, as we all know, one sour grape can ruin the whole bunch – and many a projects go sour due to the lack of buy-in from internal resources.

Conscious
Ever been in a corn maze? If so, you have probably witnessed an individual darting around corners in attempt to find something other than a dead end. Perhaps this was you, and it has definitely been me before. You feel lost and can’t make sense of where you are going or where you came from.

So it goes with business. It’s confusing and maze-like at times. However, most corn mazes have a stand where you can step back (above) and take a look at where the path starts and stops, barriers, and dead ends. An individual in charge of your business development must have the innate ability to step back from the grind and have a conscious understanding of where the business is and where it’s going. This means shareholders must take time to transfer both the vision and DNA to their BD person. If the shareholders lack the vision themselves, it’s okay to have the BD person help supplement here, but ultimately this is on the shareholders to own.