8 Steps to Active Marketing Success

8 Steps to Active Marketing Success

Kelly Kennedy: ​ Welcome to episode 65 of the business development podcast. And on today's episode, we are outlining the steps of the active marketing process. Stay tuned. You're not going to want to miss this one.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more. This. Is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world, you'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences. And you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business brought to you by capital business development, capitalbd.ca.

Let's do it. Welcome. To the business development podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 65 of the business development podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. My gosh, 65 episodes. It's just these weeks have just been leading into the next week. It's just like one amazing thing after the next and you know, to all of our listeners of this show to all the guests of this show.

Thank you so much for the time and energy that you. Put into coming in week over week, month over month, not year over year, but we might get there. We'll see. I appreciate each and every one of you. And this show could not exist without the amazing support of our business development community of our amazing expert guests.

You know, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. The business development podcast, capital business development, and I, Kelly Kennedy could not do this without your support. And I appreciate you immensely. If you've just started listening to the show, this is your very first episode. Thank you for joining us.

If this is your 65th, you're a rockstar. You're amazing. I appreciate you immensely. If you have not had a chance to hop over to Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen and give our show a. Follow, please do that. That will 100 percent help us to reach new audiences. If you can give us a rating as well, that helps too.

And it just allows us to keep moving forward and which is what we always want to be doing, whether we're doing business development or podcasts or business, we want to be moving forward in the right direction and we can't do it without your support. I wanted to start out episode 65 just by giving a gigantic thank you to Curtis Craig for episode 64.

Entrepreneurship is a wake up call. Curtis Craig is the founder and president of Inferno Solar right here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Basically every large building or industrial building you see in the city that has solar panels all over the roof. Very likely Inferno Solar put it there. And Curtis is an amazing person.

I've had the pleasure to have lunch with him and meet him in a couple of different occasions. And Curtis, I appreciate you greatly. And even though that was your first podcast episode, I guarantee you, it will not be your last. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Just to give you a heads up, like I said, it's been a whirlwind.

We're about to cross 80, 000 downloads. We will cross 80, 000 downloads by the end of the week. We're at like 79, 200 or something as of this recording moment. And it's just going up and up and up. You know, we had a record day yesterday, 359 total downloads recorded on co host, our hosting platform for one day.

That is a new record for us. And we keep seem to be breaking them on a weekly basis. So it's it's pretty awesome. We pretty. Fairly consistently. We've crossed that 300 threshold and we're doing that regularly now. And once again, couldn't do it without your support our lovely business development podcast listener.

So thank you so much. Little update on YouTube. So like I said, we're coming to YouTube. It's a heck of a process. I'm I'm trying to put up. Like probably about 10 episodes a week. Whenever I can, it's a, it's a lot of work. We'll have to convert everything into a audiograms, throw it all up there, put descriptions.

I'm rewriting the descriptions because in the beginning of the show yeah, our descriptions kind of suck. So I'm fixing them, updating them on CoHost, then updating them on YouTube. So it's a process. I hope to be done it. You know, by the end of next month type thing, but we'll see what it comes down to.

We have 30 episodes on there now. So if you want to go and you like listening on YouTube maybe this is the first time listening and that's where you listen, hop on over. You probably have 30 episodes to catch up on. So YouTube's got 30 audiogram episodes and we're working to get some shorts and stuff up there as well to push our listenership.

We currently have guests booked all the way to mid October. And while I don't give names because anything can happen, they are awesome. We have. Awesome. Awesome show is coming up. I am so thankful for the level of guests that we're getting on this show, and it's going to be so cool. And if you listen to this show and you're an entrepreneur and you may want to be on the show, you think you have something you can offer our listeners, feel free to reach out to me, you know, LinkedIn email love to, doesn't necessarily mean we'll have you on the show.

I am a little bit picky about who we're putting on, but if if you would like to submit your hat into the bid, or you'd like to get ahold of me, or you think you got a great story, reach out. I'd love to hear from you. You can always do that at podcast@capitalbd.ca as well, just so you know. We are also taking community questions for September 2023.

So we've released our August one. I don't have any. I am out of community questions. We answered them all for September. So, if you are listening to this show, you're a business development person, you're a president, you're a business owner, and you have business development questions that maybe relate to your situation, your business, and you want some free advice, Reach out podcast at capital bd.

ca subject line, community questions, shoot me your questions and we will try to answer them on an upcoming community questions episode. So really looking forward to that. Send them over. I love doing that segment. So shoot me if you got three questions, if you got five, shoot them over. We'll do our best to answer them for you because if you have questions, so does everybody else.

So we love it. Send community questions. All right. And there is something new at the business development podcast. We are now accepting sponsorship applications. If you have a business and you love this show, you should sponsor here, reach out to me. Once again, podcast@capitalbd.ca with a sponsorship inquiry, either myself or Cole, we'll get back to you.

And we can start chatting about what that might look like with regards to sponsorship for your business. On this show. So reach out to me. We have a various tiers. We have everything from two shows all the way to 35 shows. So lots of pricing options, lots of opportunities to get on this show. So if you're interested, we are accepting sponsorship advertisements.

Reach out to me and let's have a conversation. podcast@capitalbd.ca. All right. That's it. Sorry. I know that was a little bit long winded. There was a lot of updates before we hopped into today's show, but trust me, it is worth it. You are going to love today's show today in episode 65, we are talking about the eight steps of the active business development process.

I'm going to lay it out to you. I'm going to show you the best strategy to follow for your business. If you want to grow your business and you want to do better at business enact this strategy and watch your business turn around. Okay. This is a strategy that we utilize at Capital that I've been utilizing for the better part of a decade that just works.

It works. And you know, I talk about it a lot on the show, active versus passive marketing, okay? Just to bring you back up to speed, active really means a real person reaching out via real phone. Real email, having real conversations, making real relationships. That is an active marketing process. A passive marketing process is like your social media strategy or, you know, the advertisement that you sent to everybody's house, or maybe your radio ad or your billboard or something that you are putting it out into the ether and you were expecting your customer to come to you.

Come to us. We want that. I get it. I want that too. It just doesn't work that well. And I hate to admit it because I, I really do. And you know, when I started capital business development, I fell into the same pitfalls. I, you know, put out my LinkedIn ads and just waited. Come on, even though I knew better, but no guys, you have to do active marketing, you know?

And it needs to be about 80 percent of your total strategy. So you need to have like probably 20 percent of your business marketing going to a passive strategy, whether that be billboards, radio ads, social media ads, social media stuff. You have to have it a hundred percent. Have to have it, but it needs to be about 20 to 30 percent of your full marketing strategy.

The other half, or you know, the other 70 percent at least needs to be active marketing. And we're going to talk about that today. Okay. I'm going to really break it down for you. This may be a long winded episode. It may be drinking from a fire hose, as some of our listeners have pointed out. I've had multiple times people reach out and say like, Kelly, like your information's great, but it's like drinking from a fire hose.

I'm sorry. That is how I do it. So you're just going to have to listen to this one a couple of times, but enact this stuff and it's going to work for you. And I'm really excited to hear some success stories from the people that do. All right, so step one of the active process is reviewing your marketing materials, okay?

This includes your website, your brochure, and your digital image, so your LinkedIn images, okay? Corporate and personal for my, for my business owners, all right? So, we always start with the website. Why? Your website in 2023 is your 20 story skyscraper. It is who you are. It is how you were going to be perceived.

Are you going to be perceived high quality credible, you know, trustworthy. A lot of customers are making this decision based on your website. So your website needs to be up to par. It needs to be visually stunning. Needs to be, have great visual appeal. Needs to be not too busy, have not too much detail, but enough to build interest.

Okay. We have to be focusing on our website. The next step is we have to take a look at our brochures. So I always suggest make your website first, make it beautiful, make it amazing. Keep those images. And then build your brochure. You can really, for the most part, take a lot of the information, if you've done your website right, and copy that word for word onto your brochure.

But always remember, if you want to build a good brochure, you have to have high visual appeal. We're marketing to millennials. We have short attention spans. I'm the first one to say it. I have a short attention span, too. We need something that's visually appealing that we look at and we just say, Wow! I want to open that or wow, you know, I'm going to keep this.

This isn't going in the dumpster and we don't want that because we know how much it costs to build a go brochure. We do not want our, you know, seven, 8 dollar brochures going into people's dumpsters. Okay. So if we don't want that to happen, we need to make sure that we are creating a very beautiful front cover, not too busy, maybe a one line, your logo, one line, beautiful picture.

Then you're about us. You're why us make it compelling, make it interesting, have pictures once again, right, visually appealing. And then, you know, make yourself some individual inserts for all of your different services and sectors you serve, because you really want to tailor. Your services to specific sectors, one that works for energy doesn't work for transportation and one that works for food processing doesn't necessarily work for manufacturing.

Remember that you cannot make a cookie cutter brochure and just say, all right, done. That's not how it works. You have to tailor them. The best way to do this is to create a portfolio style main brochure. With inserts for each of your services that can go over where your services make sense, why you're the best for the energy industry, why you're the best for manufacturing, why are you best for food processing, have a individual one pager or two pager for each one of those so that when you are doing that marketing, you're, you're tailoring it.

You're making it make sense for the industry you're marketing to. Okay. All right, and now our LinkedIn profiles, right? Corporate pages need to be active. You need to be doing stuff on there, guys. You know, I can't tell you how many company pages I go to, and you guys have nothing going on. You know you have a lot going on.

Start implementing a active social media platform, and do it on LinkedIn. If you're a business, that's the place to do it, okay? It just is. It just is where business is happening. It's where your customers are hanging out. You have to do it. So make sure that we are IMP implementing a good LinkedIn strategy.

We have a fully completed profile. If we're a company, we're posting information. We're posting updates. We're posting tips and tricks. We're letting people know that hey, not only do we care about you, we're gonna feed you with some great information. On a weekly basis, we're gonna give you some compelling material for your personal LinkedIn profiles.

We need to be making sure that we have a beautiful profile picture. Guys, stop taking these. Selfies with your crappy camera, go get a professional photo done. Or like most of us know a photographer. I'm sorry. You know, they're, they're everywhere. Okay, let's get some professional photos done. Let's complete our profile.

Let's make sure that it is up to date. It's complete. All of our information is populated. All the steps are done that way. LinkedIn will say, you know what? You got a great profile and they're going to start recommending you. Not only that, the people that are going to be coming to your page. They want to know who you are.

I should be able to look at your LinkedIn page and be able to understand your work history. Where you came from, what your education is, what are you doing, what's new. And start getting active on it. Start not just posting information people, but also making connections with other people. You know, comment on things.

Have, start conversations. Bring interest your way. It's, it's, trust me, it just benefits you moving forward. Especially if you're a business owner. Especially if you have a stake in a business, your director or something like that. It really makes sense to start taking this stuff seriously, okay? Because your social game is becoming more and more serious every year.

It's not enough to hide behind your company anymore. It's not enough to hide behind your employees. People want to know, who is the CEO? Who is the president? Who is this founder? Why do I care about him? Why do I care about what he's doing? It has never been more important and it flip side, it's never been easier.

So make sure that we are starting to take our social games seriously. Okay. And that starts by creating great LinkedIn profiles for both our businesses and ourselves personally. Okay. Step two, our target list creations. Okay. We've talked about this in previous episodes, target lists. We need to, we need to identify them by location.

Why? Because. Where you are, you're never going to be more effective than where you are, okay? So you got to decide, okay, if I'm going to be in Edmonton, I'm in Calgary, I'm in Fort McMurray, whatever. I know I'm naming Canadian places, but wherever you are you're never more effective. Your company is never more effective than the place that you are based.

So start there, right? So if you, if you're just starting a company, look at your city and make, make make target lists based on your city and then. Sub them, right? So we need to then figure out what industries do we serve best? What industries can my products or services work? And it's not just the gigantic companies that you think of right off the bat.

Remember there are sub industries There are sub companies that then service those gigantic companies that may also need your service So it's not enough just to break down the top dogs you need to break down the middle tier dogs, the smaller tier dogs, the low hanging fruit and And if you can separate this out and create target lists in these areas, it's just going to give you a great list of people to start reaching out to.

You're going to have a better idea of how, you know, do I need to upgrade my, or update my marketing material? Do I need to create a new brochure? That's more tailored to this industry, to this industry, the sub industry. But if we break it down with our target list creation, I know that we hate doing it.

But trust me, trust me, it is mandatory. So the next step, step two is always to do that. And then remember, we also need to collaborate. So this is important, especially when we're doing that target list creation to be chatting with not just not just the sales team, but also the operations team, the directors.

The presidents figure out where they want this company to go and who their ideal prospects are. The target list creation is all encompassing and you should really have the input of all stakeholders in your company to be able to make sure that you're not missing an industry or you're not missing a crucial target for your business.

Okay. All right, step three. We need to identify the prospects. Okay, so at this point, we need to take some time and say, Okay, we know the company, we know the industry we want to work in, we know we have the marketing material. Now, who do we reach out to? And remember, it's SCM is the low hanging fruit everywhere.

Everyone thinks, Oh, well, if I contact SCM, but remember, SCM is usually the last person to know that there's a problem or that there's a need in a company. And if you have project managers, if you have facility managers, if you have, you know, high level people, Deciding, well, hey, we have a problem, but they don't necessarily go to SCM.

They have a call list of three to five companies that they automatically go to. You're automatically disqualified. You're never getting that call. If you've just chatted to SCM, you need to start identifying who buys my product or service in the company. It's, and I get it. SCM is an easy one to look at, but remember it could be operations.

It could be, you know the facility manager. It could be the people in charge of maintenance for the firm. You have to really narrow it down and try to identify who is actually buying our product or service. It's not enough to guess you need to figure it out and this is doable, right? You can make some, you can call, you can call a friend, you can call the company and ask who would normally buy this service, but you'll start to see a trend.

As to at a certain industry who's buying that product or service and now that gives you that target that you can start to reach out to on LinkedIn, start to make the introductions and ask for meetings and it's actually relevant and you're going to have more success than if you just started targeting SCM alone.

Okay. All right. So we need to identify the prospects and then we need to establish your CRM. So, okay, we've got this far. Okay. We've gotten this far. We've figured out who at a company we need to reach out to the next step. We need to establish our CRM. And you guys know this. If you are a company period, you need a CRM system.

You need a customer relationship management system. These are. Easily accessible everywhere at this point. Pipe drive is always my recommended CRM only because I've used them forever and I've decided that they are going to be the standard that we use at capital business development. There are lots, as long as they are specific to sales and business development.

Okay. The ones that I've found that are. In an ERP system, they're often an afterthought. They tend to be slow, clunky, and not have all the horsepower that you need. It's going to slow you down. And the last thing that you need is your business development people being slowed down because you need them running at full capacity all the time.

So you know, this could change. Remember like this is September of 2023. Okay. If you're listening to this and. September of 2029. Maybe it's different. I don't know. But as of September 2023, ERP systems I have found are not as effective at the CRM systems as independent CRM companies. So I would start with an independent CRM company and, you know, move them to an ERP system only maybe once they become an active prospect, once they bought, until they bought, I would keep them in, in, in a sales specific or a business development specific CRM.

Okay. They're often an afterthought in an ERP, not the main plan. CRM flow is critical. Okay. A CRM. if you don't use it right is just as useless as if you don't have one. So it's very critical that we are utilizing our CRMs effectively. Okay? CRM flow is very critical and I'm going to give you a CRM flow that I like to utilize with some of my clients.

You can add to this. You can make changes where, where it makes sense for your business. But this flow in general tends to work pretty effectively. So what I like to do is my step one is always my digital intros count. So anybody that I've reached out to on LinkedIn, made connection with, sent a brochure to, they hop into that digital intro stage.

From there, I move them into contact made stage. This is after I've done my detective work, figured out their contact information, whether that be email, phone number, and I've made direct contact. That could mean you've left a message, but it has to be for them specifically. The next stage I like to have is back burner.

Cause what we want to do as quickly as possible is disqualify. Okay. So, you can do this in a couple different ways. I don't typically like to remove people from CRMs. Like, unless it's like for sure a no. So, what I like to do is I like to move them into a stage I call backburner. This is people say, I don't have a need for this right now.

Maybe in the future or whatever. Like, it's just not, they're not, they're not into it. It might be the wrong person or whatever else. But instead of just completely removing this company, what I like to do is I move them into my step, my stage three, which is backburner stage, okay? The next stage I like to have is future opportunity.

This is for the customers that I've contacted and they say, you know what, Kelly, this looks amazing. We don't have a need for this right now, but we may have an upcoming RFQ in like Q2 or Q3. Reach out then. Great. Move them to future opportunity and make sure that you have follow up notes in there. Your next stage after future opportunity is your meeting book.

So this is where we're always trying to take people to. These are the people that You talk to in contact stage, you've asked for the meeting. They said, yes. And you're like, and then we move them to meeting stage, pretty self explanatory, okay. After meeting stage, once we've had the meetings, I always move them into a next step stage.

Okay. Next steps means we've had the meeting, there's something to do now, like whether that be they need to do a vendor list application or they have an upcoming RFP, but either way, we've met with them. And this is how we track people that we have met with. I like to move them into next steps. Then from next steps, I like to move them into current customers.

So once they've actually purchased, maybe the RFP went through and they bought, great. Now they're current customer and now it's no longer your problem as business development to manage. It's account management's job now. This is the flow that I really like to use with my CRMs. I find it very effective.

And I think you will too, especially if you were just setting up a CRM for the first time and our last kind of thing with regards to CRMs, we have to use complete data, right? Your CRM is only as good as what you feed it. Okay. It's very, very critical that we are feeding our CRMs with good data. Like it has all the information from the contact.

What was that? You know, nowadays, a lot of you are using meeting summaries. When you're going into meetings, copy the meeting summaries in there, make sure that you have really good data going into your, your CRM, because heck, if it's that person that's asked you to follow up in six months, you think you're going to remember, trust me, you're not, you're not going to remember.

And it's like one thing we can go back to emails. Like we can do it the old school way. Or we can just be smart about it and make sure that if we have comprehensive emails, if we have all that, it's in the CRM, it's in that interaction with the customer. So make sure that your CRM data is always accurate, is always detailed and could be understood.

Even if you come back to it in six months and have no idea what the hell you talked about, you should be able to take a quick peek at the CRM and know exactly where we're at with that customer in a six month period. Okay. All right. Okay. Now we're moving up to step five. Step five is our very first main step in the, in the business development process.

When we're reaching out to people, that's our LinkedIn or other digital introductions. I love LinkedIn for this. Honestly, LinkedIn digital introductions is like one of the key things that we like to utilize. Why? Because we live in a day and age where you can search the people. In the specific role that you have identified buys your product or service.

Great. Add a whole bunch of them. You can add 100 a week. 100 prospects a week can be added on LinkedIn. Yeah, heck, they don't always accept. But even if 50 percent of them accept, that's 50 new people to reach out to next week. So this is a great process to get into. Oh, I should mention that with LinkedIn, if you want to start searching a lot of people, you have to have a premium account.

I always recommend the LinkedIn business. account, just the plain business account. You don't need the sales navigator. You don't need all the other stuff. If all you're doing is trying to send a hundred invites a week to potential prospects, make that connection. I don't think there's anything better than the business account.

So just get the business account, save yourself some money and and just connect with them and send those digital introductions. Okay. So we want to add 100 prospects a week. We want to create a very short and sweet digital introduction. This is like one paragraph. Right? You know, you can, your, your experience may vary and you can figure out what amount works for you.

But remember, shorter is better when it comes down to LinkedIn. You definitely want to send a nice short and sweet introduction. Always attach a brochure, always attach a digital brochure. What I've noticed is that even if people don't respond to you, which happens regularly, they probably do open your brochure.

Like that actually does tend to happen most of the time. I don't know if it's like human. You know, we just get curious. We have curiosity as humans, but even if they don't respond to your message, most of the time they open your brochure. And what did that do for you? That turned a cold call into a warm call because now they actually know who you are.

They've read your brochure. They know what XYZ company does. And when you do make that cold call, it gives you just a little bit of an advantage that you don't get if you don't do this. Okay. So. We always want to do our digital introductions first. Short and sweet introduction. Attach brochures and then make sure that we are adding this person into the CRM.

I get it. You don't have all their data yet. That's fine. That's fine. Put them into a LinkedIn digital introduction space. You know, put that you've added them on LinkedIn, put their name, whatever information you can find from that. And now this is your target list to shop from. To find the contact information and turn that LinkedIn digital introduction into a contact made stage and start moving them down the line, right?

But we got to do the detective work to get there. Okay? So we've done the LinkedIn digital introductions. Now we're at the contact stage. Step six, contact stage. Use your detective skills to get the contact info. So start going through your LinkedIn digital introductions. Try to find phone numbers, emails.

Direct ways to reach out to these people in person. Okay. We want to reach out via phone or email. Yeah. This is where the, this is where the cold calls and the cold contacts start to come in. Okay. And this is where if you do this on a regular basis, you are going to get better at it. I get it. It's scary.

Cold calls suck. They, they, they're hard. I know, I know, but the only way that you're going to get better at it is to do it and do it consistently. Because consistency is key in business development. You need to hold yourself to a standard and stick to it. But if you do that, you're going to get better and better and better.

Your pitch is going to get better and better and better. And you're going to find that what used to be hard to make five calls starts to become not that challenging at all to make 20 or 30 calls. Believe me, you hit a cold call cadence and away you go. So get them into that contact stage. Okay. So use your detective skills, get the contact info, reach out via phone or email.

Introduce your company in a compelling way, right? Hey, XYZ company, I work for this company, and we do this, this, and this, and I think that this could be something that you guys could use. I just wanted to make this connection. Do you mind if I send you a formal email? I love to do this. This is a line I like to use all the time.

Because then you can send a formal email, and you can follow up on that email in a week's time. And usually, if it's compelling enough... You can get a meeting from, so you always want to start doing that and make sure that you are introducing your company in a compelling way. Always, always, whether it be a formal email, speak to the need you solve, speak to why your company does it best, explain to them why they should be interested in your company because your job in business development, in marketing is to build interest in your company.

to build like so much interest that the customer has to learn more and they will want to have a meeting. Okay. So that's always where we're trying to get with this. Remember to make weekly contact until you disqualify or move to a meeting, right? Our job here is to, is to disqualify customers as soon as possible or move them to a meeting as soon as possible.

Either one of those outcomes is ideal. The outcome where you disqualify is great because now you don't have to waste another five weeks on this customer. They're gone. Who cares? Onto the next. And if you move them to a meeting, great. Don't stop there. Get another one. Start again. Remember one meeting is not enough.

You need to book meeting after meeting after meeting as often as you can. And so. We need to make sure that we are always moving these people to either a disqualification or a meeting, and that we're only following up once per week. Why you do not want to become that super annoying, pushy salesperson.

You do not want to be that person. You do that by showing a little bit of respect. And what that means is we hit the ball over the net once a week. If they don't hit it back. Who cares? Hit it back again the next week. But don't keep reaching out after reaching out after reaching out. You will disqualify yourself so quick, your head will spin.

Okay? Don't be that person. Once per week, hold yourself to that rule. Trust me, it will work for you. All right. So, and then remember, when you do get the customer on the line, Ask for the meeting. Okay, always remember what is our goal in business development? We need to get in person. We need to have that face to face interaction.

We need to build a relationship. You cannot do that over emails. You cannot do that. Really, that way you can. You can somewhat do it over a team's call, but It is just not as effective. We want to try to get to face to face, in person meetings whenever possible, okay? We need to do that as often as we can.

Whenever we do that in person, it's just more effective. So, remember, always the goal of the contacted stage is to get them either disqualified or to a meeting. Make sure that we're asking for it. If you ask, you will receive. If you do not ask, you will not get what you, what you want, okay? Make sure that you're asking for the meeting.

Give a compelling reason as to, as to why that might be, okay? All right. Now we're in step seven, the actual meeting. Okay, here we go. So we've done all the work. Great. We've got there. Now it's game time. Right? The meeting. We need to have in person meetings whenever possible, like I just discussed in the last part.

Step seven, meetings, we have to have in person meetings whenever possible. Whenever possible as well, have the meetings in a neutral location. This is why lunch and coffee is amazing. You get out of your office, they get out of their office, you're meeting as individuals. You no longer have that like power struggle.

Being in each other's offices, if you can have it in a neutral location, it's actually better to create relationships. So if you can have that at lunch, I love lunch. I love coffee, anything where you can get out of your offices, meet the person and really have like an organic conversation in a neutral place where you're both kind of on even ground.

That's definitely the best way to do it. So meet in a neutral location. Make a real connection, right? So remember, like, I get it. We're there to talk business. Everybody knows this. Don't start there. You don't have to just sit down and be like, okay, my company does it. No, don't do that. Would you do that with a friend?

No, what are you trying to build? A friendship. Okay, I get it. It's tough. It's tough. But we have to maybe be a little more vulnerable. We have to maybe be open to answering harder questions and asking open ended questions. You know, how was your summer? How's your vacation? How's your kids doing? How many kids do you have?

What do you do for fun? Did you guys go camping this year? Do you ride motorcycles? What are your hobbies? Start asking, learn about people, show genuine interest, right? We need to show genuine interest to people. Because that is what we need to do to build relationships. And the business comes, okay. Mark my words.

It always comes. It might be the last five minutes of your conversation. Great. You know, the, the, the, the job is done either way. Okay. Mark my words. It can be done either way. If you start with business and you're bit Mr. Business or Mrs. Business, and you're just going, going, going. It's you're not really building a relationship.

I hate to admit it to you. If this is your approach right now, it's not working very well because you aren't able to relate to that person. As a person. And that's what we all need as humans. We need to be relating to each other. And you do that by connecting. Talk about your family. Talk about work. Talk about your struggles.

Talk about your struggles. Talk about what was hard last week. Talk about what is amazing this week. You know, have some emotion. Be a real person. And you are going to be much, much more effective at your meetings. Okay? Remember, always business comes later. Human connection first, relate with them, and you will be more successful.

Always ask for the next steps. Okay? At the end of a meeting, this meeting was amazing. It was a pleasure meeting you. I'm really excited for what's next here. What do you think is the appropriate next step? Can we fill out a vendor application? Is there an RFP coming? What do we do? Is there an opportunity coming up that we can put into our calendars and reach out and bid for?

Ask the customer for the next steps. Be quiet. Let them answer. And take it to the next step always, right? If you don't ask for the next steps in a meeting, you typically don't get them. I really mean that. Once again, it goes back to confidence. We have to ask for what we want. If we want to move forward with the company, we have to ask for the opportunity.

And I know it takes courage. I'm encouraging each and one, each one of you to take courage, you know, be courageous, ask for the next steps and you will find success. Okay. All right. And now we are into step eight. So you guys know what I say with regards to business development, this should be step seven should really be the end of the business development process.

Once that customer has said, absolutely. I have an RFP coming down the line. It'll be coming shortly. Great. Once you get that RFP, you should be handing this over. Step eight needs to be a smooth handover to your account management's team, your operations team, the people who will actually be executing this work, because most of the time, it's not your business development person, or you, or you, Mr.

President, for the most part, it's not you. Okay. So we need to make sure that we have step eight, which is a smooth handover. Okay, we need to hand the company. We need to hand this to a company rep that will be handling the account management or the operation moving forward. We need to make sure that we have communicated well during this handover that they have all of the relevant details about this, about this customer, their contact details, the nature of your conversations, the exact order they need.

We need to make sure that we are as detailed as possible in this handover. Okay. And then we need to have account management provide the next step. So at that point, just say, Hey, you know, you know, CC me in the next email that you have with this customer. If you're going to be taking it over, make sure that I'm involved so that I know that my job is done and your job is started.

So make sure that there's an appropriate communication to say, all right, handovers completed. I have this moving forward. You, my lovely BD person, head back to the beginning and find us a new one. That is the best way to handle this. And I know a lot of companies would say, well, yeah, but now I have my BD person do the account management too.

Remember, that is not the best way to do this. Most of the time, if you have your BD person start to handle account management as well, both jobs get done subpar. I know, I know. I hate to admit it because I wish I could say that we're amazing at everything. No, what we're, what you need your BD people doing is going back to the beginning and finding a new opportunity and repeating the whole step over again, have dedicated account management, have dedicated operations, handle the execution of that project, the management of that customer moving forward.

And yes, if you have dedicated account management and dedicated business development, you will just do better. Period. All right. That is the end of episode 65 of the business development podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you immensely. If you've enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate, follow, subscribe on your platform of choice.

I appreciate that immensely. Like I said, we're coming to YouTube. We're on all major platforms. You can find us anywhere. Give us a follow. Give us a subscribe. If this podcast has made your life. Better has improved. Your business has taught you something. Let me know. I want to know about it. Shoot me a LinkedIn message.

Shoot me an email. I would love to know your experience on the business development podcast. Shout outs this week, Tim Rella, Ken Gee, Chase Capps, Christopher Ecklund. I appreciate you guys immensely. Thank you for your continuous support of the business development podcast. Until next time. We'll catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.