Community Questions: July 2023

Community Questions - July 2023

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 45 of the Business Development Podcast. And on today's episode, I am so excited. It is Community Questions, July 2023. Today, we are answering listener questions. Stay tuned.

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 45 of the business development podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in with us today. We have an absolutely amazing episode. I've been waiting for this one, waiting and waiting and waiting for our community questions to roll in, and today we are going to be doing our second community questions episode.

Before I start this episode today though, I would like to give a gigantic shout out to Leaha Mattinson, founder and talk show host at Master Your Life. She was our expert guest for episode 44. It was absolutely amazing having you on Leaha. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom and insight and helping people to make better choices, both in their business life and their personal life.

It was amazing to have you. Thanks for coming on the show and being such a rockstar. You were absolutely amazing. All right. So we are moving into an interesting time with regards to the business development podcast. So we are at 45 episodes, 45 episodes, everyone. We are a little over five months. We're going to be coming up on our six month anniversary coming up here in August.

It is July 11th at the moment. Our we've been live since February. 6th, February 6th of 2023. So it's pretty crazy. It's pretty wild to think now that we've been on on the air almost six months that we've rocked out our, this will be our 45th episode. And hopefully, hopefully by the next by the next anniversary, we'll be coming up on our 50th episode, which would be pretty freaking cool.

I'm very excited. I'm thrilled to be on doing this. If you are enjoying this show, thank you so much for coming back week over week. Thank you for supporting me at the business development podcast. I make no money with the show. The show is very much at the moment, just just for the good of people and and the growth of my business and the growth of your business.

And I hope that week over week, we're able to give back and really improve both your business life, your personal life and hopefully give you the motivation, encouragement to take your business to the next level. And if that's taking your existing business to the next level, If that's starting a business and taking that, that leap that we talk about all the time, I really, really hope that we bring benefit to your life.

And I hope that this show is consistently bringing benefit to your life. Yeah, rolling in. So we're doing community questions. Episode number two. I want this to be a monthly thing. I want to get to a point where we are doing a community questions episode every month and heck maybe even if we start getting enough questions maybe even twice a month like I think this is such a great way to give back to you guys because the reality is is that we all have business questions and some of the questions that I have here.

I can tell you a thousand, maybe, maybe 10, 000 other people have these same questions. These questions that you have are not silly with regards to your business. And they truly are questions, I think, on the back of everyone's mind and can be applied to many different businesses or many different needs across the industry.

So If you have a question for the show, please let me start this episode off by saying if you have a question that I can answer for you on the business development podcast, please send it to me podcast@capitalbd.ca that's podcast@capitalbd.ca. Subject line, community questions. You send that to me, you send me your question, send me your name, who you are, where you're from, where you're working, what you're doing.

And I would love to answer your question on the show and acknowledge you. And hopefully, like I said, we don't just help you. We help a thousand other people. Okay. All right, so we are just going to move into it today. I have, I believe, seven questions here. There was actually eight, but I kind of feel like the two kind of rolled together, so I'm just going to put them together.

All of our questions are actually only from two people, so I do want to give a gigantic thank you to Alexander Javier, Alexander. Thank you for being so patient with me. Alexander shot us a question. I kid you not, probably about a month and a half ago. So he's just been waiting until I was able to get a couple more questions where I could really put this together.

And thank you to Monica Jamie. I really appreciate you reaching out. She reached out, I believe it was from the Philippines and had a question with regards to conferences. So thank you so much for submitting community questions and making this episode possible. Okay, let's just roll right into it. So I'll give you a little idea on how I'm doing community questions.

I'm going to be answering them from the best of my ability. I will be giving you the Kelly Kennedy Capital Business Development answer to your question. Will there potentially be other avenues for you to take? Yes. Please take what I say with a grain of salt. You know, while I will try to answer it as best as I can for you, your industry, understand that I, I live in Canada.

I work in Canada and North America. And so most of my answers are going to be more of a North American answer, as opposed to an international answer. I know that we have lots of international listeners, like heck I get, I get, I just got a messages this week from Australia and the Netherlands and the Philippines.

It's so cool. I never thought when we started this show that we would have so many listeners from around the world, but that is the case. That is what we have here. So once again, please just take it with a caveat. When I answer questions with regards to the business development podcast, it will very much be my answer, Kelly Kennedy and, and capital business development, the way that we do things here.

And it will be more oriented towards North America because that is where I do business. However, I imagine that most of the things that we do with regards to human to human connection are really applicable around the world. I did just want to give that caveat before we move forward. Okay, so Monica, let's start out with Monica.

Monica works at a tech company in the Philippines and she reached out and said, How would you do business development at a conference, assuming that most attendees are a good prospect and you have a limited amount of time? That is a very great question. Monica. I have had the privilege of working in business development for a lot of years.

I've attended a lot of conferences and my goal. Now, once again, you did not say to me whether or not you were exhibiting at this conference or whether you were just an attendee. I am going to make the assumption that you are an attendee at a conference trying to get in touch with a lot of the companies there, which is something that I used to do with regards to the oil and gas companies here in Canada.

The secret with these conferences, assuming you have a whole bunch of attendees, is to... You know, I'm gonna get a little bit of flack for this because I know that the people exhibiting are not big fans of this. However, I understand the flip side of it. The flip side of it is there's a lot of smaller companies that are out marketing at these conferences.

They're trying to make connections with these big companies, okay? So my recommendation, Monica, would be your goal at the conference is not actually to sell anything. Or do particularly business development at the conference. What your goal should be is to go to these various booths and make a connection and ask them and introduce your company.

And ask them, do you have a connection at your company that I could reach out to you? Would you be able to provide me a business card for someone that I could talk to you? This is something they very likely can do for you and will be willing to do for you. The business development from a conference perspective doesn't typically happen at the conference.

It happens after. It happens after Monica. So you need to be focusing on how do I make as many connections as possible? How do I get as many contacts as possible for people that I can reach out to after the conference? Because at the conference, especially people in the booths, you know, I was literally just working a booth not a month ago.

And we're talking to so many people, it's such a crazy thing at these booths. There's so many people coming by, talking, wanting to know a little bit more about your company, that it just all blurs together. It really does. If you're an exhibitor working a conference, all of the people coming up to you are kind of blurring together.

So, what you need to do in that case is you need to just reach out to that booth and say, Hey, I'm Monica with XYZ Company. We're a tech company, we provide this. I think there could be some synergies in the future between us and your company. Do you know who I would reach out to after the conference? And have them either write it down on a piece of paper, so you can connect to them on LinkedIn or some other way, or have them give you a business card, because most of the people at the conference are carrying business cards for lots of people at the company, not just the people attending, okay?

So try and get your contacts at At the conference or at the show and then make your make your connections after unfortunately, trying to make a BD connection, you know, build a rapport and stuff. Like I said, you can do it, but the problem is that they're talking to way too many people. They all start to blur together, and you just won't be as effective this way.

It's much better to use the conference to get new contacts, use the conference to make new connections, or to, and then you can obviously reach out to that connection and say, Hey, I met your counterpart at the conference. They, they said to reach out to you. This is what we do. It's, it kind of gives you like, a warm lead as well.

It gives you kind of something to connect about. Hey, we were at the conference too and and we chatted about this and yeah, it was great to see your company exhibiting there and we have this company. It's a tech company. We do this, this, this. If you do it this way, you are going to be able to build a connection.

Quicker and and with less obstacles. I think so. So I hope that answers your question, Monica. Make sure that you're utilizing the conference to get connections and then do the business development work after use the conference for what? What is great for what is great for is getting contacts. Use it to get the contacts handle the business development side after.

Okay. All right. Now, all these other questions are from Alexander Javier and Alexander thank you so much for being patient with me. I know that this has been a minute. Sometimes, unfortunately, I just had to make sure that we had enough questions for this to make sense because I wanted to do a show that was encompassing.

And so it had to wait a little bit, but I'm going to hopefully answer the rest of your questions today. Okay, so Alexander's first question was, can you deep dive on KPIs? What are the best KPIs for business development reps? Okay, this is what I can say. So the best KPIs for business development reps, you need to be measuring effort.

Okay? The reality is as business development people, We do not control our customers and you know, our companies hate hate that like they wish that they wish that every call we made went to a sale or whatever else and unfortunately a lot of business development reps are are graded on how many sales they are making and this is a really really bad metric.

Yeah, obviously that is the outcome of what we are trying to do. However, that comes way down the line. The reality is business development rep. efforts pay off over time. It is not an immediate win. It very unlikely, very not typical for business development people to make a connection and that connection just buys something immediately, right?

Like that just does not typically happen. What we're doing is we are creating a long list of companies who now know what our company, what our company is, what we do, what products and services we sell and what the match and fit is. And then Typically, those, those, those relationships start to pay off, you know, months and years into the future.

Okay, so as a good business development rep, what do you need to be tracking? What are the what are the KPIs that I want you to focus on? I would like you to focus on the number of digital interactions whether that's LinkedIn introductions, whether that's just any type of cold digital introduction, where you where you reach out to somebody, and either attach a brochure, or, or send a quick intro message we track our, our LinkedIn digital introductions at Capital.

And, and we want to be tracking these because these are your future contacts. These are the future people that you are reaching out to on a weekly basis, right? Which is what we're going to get to next. The next thing you need to be tracking is how many email digital introductions.

Number two, phone interactions and email interactions, okay? And then number three, we want to be tracking how many meetings we are booking. This is the opportunity. This is where all of the efforts that we are creating are supposed to be going to. We need to be booking meetings. The reality is, nothing happens without the meeting.

The digital introductions, the phone calls, all of this, the emails, they're all to get us... to a meeting where we have a face to face, we build a human interaction, a human relationship. We build trust, we build rapport, and we build number one, interest in our product or service. This is done in person, you know, and by in person, I mean, this is done either on teams.

This is done obviously best in person. So I like to say like a face to face meeting at an office or lunch or a neutral location. We do when you were having first meetings, it is always best to try to have them in person and out of the neutral location. I understand this is just not practical for everybody.

But that's why lunch is such a great opportunity to make a first impression with somebody. It allows you to take two people out of their powerhouses out of their businesses, put them in a neutral location where they can connect as people as humans over something that humans do together with friends, which is Eat.

Okay. So what we want to do is we want to build human relationships and trust. We do that in person. We do that in meetings. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to this. You asked specifically about KPI's . Okay, so key performance indicators. What you want to do, like with regards to these tracking metrics that I've given you.

Okay. What you need to do is set yourself a standard that is leading you to results, okay? And, and this is gonna be different for each of you. This is gonna be different because it really does depend on how effective you are or where you're at in your business development career, or your sales career, your marketing career, right?

We need. You know, not everybody is going to be as effective as the next person. So you need to figure out what works for you. First off, figure out how many meetings you need to try to book a month. Okay, so set your goal, right? Are you trying to get 10 meetings a month? 15 meetings a month? 20 meetings a month?

Like, that would be crazy, but sure. Like, if that's what you're going for, go for it, right? Set yourself, set yourself your goal. And then try to figure out, okay, Out of that, how many, how many LinkedIn digital introductions do I need to make? How many follow up calls do I need to make to be consistently hitting the meeting numbers I need to book per week?

And then, set yourself to it and hold yourself to it, right? It's all about accountability. The reality is... And this is a not not the best reality. But the reality is, is that most people are not making the phone calls. We're just not. We're not. And I get it. I get it. It's a fear thing. It's sometimes you can even look at it and be like, I don't even know why.

I don't want to do this. I just don't want to do this. Typically, it comes from like a fear of rejection. Okay. Typically, it comes from a fear of rejection. But you got to remember, you can't get to the yeses without going through all the no's. Right. And yeah, like. The first couple cold calls are really hard.

I get it. You know, it's still hard. You know, I've been doing this for whatever, 12 years, whatever it is now, business development directly. I still struggle at times to sit and make those first few cold calls. But once you start the cold calls, you hit a cold call cadence. Okay. It's like a runner's high.

You can't get the runner's high without running. You can't hit a cold call cadence without making a few cold calls first. Okay. So You got to just make the calls. You have to make the calls because the calls are what are going to get you to the meetings and the meetings are what are going to get you to the sale that you are trying to achieve.

Okay. They're trying to, you can't sell unless you build the connection. Okay. So decide for yourself, decide for yourself, Alexander, what you're going to hit. KPIs, you know, they need to be relevant to you and your goals, but they really come down to what is it going to take for you, you know, for me, maybe it's 10 phone calls for you, maybe it's 15, I don't know, right, like, that depends on your effectiveness, you need to decide, okay, this is the goals that I'm trying to hit, these are the number of meetings we need to hit.

How do we get there? How many, how many LinkedIn digital introductions do I need to make? How many phone calls do I need to make to book the meetings I need to book? And not all weeks are created equal either. What you can do, what can make you equal, is setting yourself a standard. I will make 15 phone calls a day.

I will send 20 LinkedIn digital introductions this week or today. I will make whatever, four, four or five phone calls in the next hour and figure out what it's going to take, right? Like figure out what it's going to take to get to your meetings. But the reality is the end goal is meetings. The thing you need to be tracking the most is are the efforts I'm making leading to the meetings I want to get.

Okay. Set the number of meetings you want to do work backwards and then decide from there. This is the KPIs I have to hit in order to hit the meetings that I want to make. Okay. Alright, the next question that Alexander asked was how do we track it and what should a report look like? He he kind of answered his question in in, in the secondary question, which is why I grouped them together.

So, how do we track it? We track it with a weekly report. So, well, okay, sorry, sorry, Alexander. I'm going to take this a step back. We're tracking a lot of these efforts on our CRM first, okay? Like, obviously, we are doing... whatever, 20 digital introductions this week. We sent 20 LinkedIn introduction messages and we've, we've written them down.

Okay. So now we're going to enter those into our digital introduction stage on our CRM. Then we made 25 phone calls this week or 30 phone calls this week. Great. They are now in our weekly contacted stage on our CRM. Okay. We booked five meetings. Great. They're in the meeting stage now. Okay. But this is not necessarily where you want to track your weekly results.

Okay. The CRM is great. We use it to keep our life balanced and in place and from going crazy and having business cards all over our desks, right? And we have to utilize them. We have to utilize them. We have to make them effective. We have to keep them relevant. However what I like to do with capital.

is I actually have a weekly report that I create for all of my clients. Okay. I create my weekly report for all my clients. And what I do is I outline for them. Here was the tasks, the critical tasks for this week. You know, maybe I had to go to Joe's meeting. Maybe I had to have the BD meeting and then I had to make followup calls, LinkedIn, digital introductions.

Were they all completed? Yes. right? Then I list out. Here's all the digital introductions I made. I made them to XYZ company, YFZ company, all of these companies. And I list them out and I put the number and then I give them my, my phone calls that week. How many phone calls and direct contacts did I make?

Great. I made 35. Great. Okay. How many meetings did we book this week? We booked five meetings. How many meetings did we attend this week? We attended two meetings. You want to create yourself a weekly report, and this is simple. You can do this on Excel very easily. You can create like a weekly report in week by week for a month, track it month to month.

But if you complete this for yourself on a weekly basis, it gives you a standard. It gives you a standard to live up to, and it's actually trackable. Like you can go through after and say, you know, in the six month period, we made 80, 800. whatever phone calls and we booked 35 or 40 meetings. Like you can start to see trends.

You can start to see what, how many calls it takes, how many digital introductions does it take to get to the meeting levels you need to get to. But I think that all business development managers who are running a BD team, I think any companies that employ business development personnel should be asking for a weekly report from all their BD personnel.

And no, this isn't just to make your life a little bit harder. This is to give, this is to give. set a standard. This is to set expectations for your business development teams and and for what you expect with regards to meetings, right? It works. It just works. And you know, I mean, I'm going to sit here and say that I complained.

I did. I complained when my bosses implemented weekly reports when I first started doing them. I'm like, my gosh, you know, my, my life is hard enough. I'm doing all this work, making all these phone calls. Now you want this weekly report, but my gosh, now, now that. I understand it better now that I'm a business owner myself.

Now that I have clients who I want to provide weekly reports to, I couldn't imagine not completing a weekly report, not just for myself and for my clients, but it truly is. It's just, it keeps, it keeps you honest. It keeps you on track. It keeps you trying to strive for a goal week over week, over week to hit your numbers, to make the phone calls you need to make, to book the meetings.

And sometimes at the end of that week, You send that final report in that email and you just feel good. You feel like you've done a lot this week. You feel like you've accomplished something and it is, it is good. Believe me, it is good. If you are right now not creating a weekly report for yourself, start doing weekly reports for yourself.

Even if it's just for yourself, it will help you. It will make you better at business development. Okay. All right. So now his, the question, what would be question number four, if I didn't group the other two together, I guess. Can you provide a step by step guide to successful prospecting? Okay. So one of his challenges that he mentioned in the email was that, was that he wasn't quite sure, you know, how do you know that you have the right, the right prospect?

Okay. This is something you need to find out for yourself, Alexander. I can't, I can't name it for you. And the reason that I can't name it for you is it's different for every product or service you're selling. It's different for every industry. What you need to do is start to try to figure out, okay, do I need to talk to an operations manager, to a director of this, this, this, whether it's quality or whether it's safety or whether it's whatever, do I need to talk to a terminal manager, a plant manager?

Who is the person with the decision making power? However, you can figure this out fairly quickly by making just a few phone calls to a company and saying, Hey, I sell this. Do you know who I should speak to? And I think what you'll find is, is that. If it's a certain type of industry, it will likely be the same position in every company within that industry that will buy your product or service.

Okay. So with a little bit of detective work, okay, I can't give it to you. You know, I wish I could, I wish I could just say you need to talk to the operations manager, but I know that's not true. And I know that wouldn't be good advice for you. What is good advice for you is it's not that hard to figure it out.

Okay. With a little bit of detective work, calling a company, sending an email, introducing yourself, your company, what you do, and just asking, hey, do you know what position in your company buys this product or service? Is it a supply chain manager? Is it a technical manager of some type? Is it a director?

Who's buying this? And you get it from two or three and they both say, yeah, you need to talk to the purchasing manager. You need to talk to SCM. Now, you know, now you know who you need to reach out to in that company. And then it makes it a really, really easy to do the prospecting moving forward. But yes, you're going to have to do a little bit of detective work upfront.

I can't feed it to you, even though I wish I could, because it's going to be different depending on what you're selling. And it's going to be a different person depending on the product or service, but. Trust me on this. You can find it. It won't be that hard and likely, you know, three to five phone calls.

You'll be able to figure out who it is. You need to talk to at a various company and from there, go to town, man. Start adding them on LinkedIn and all the people in that, in that position and start, start marketing your company because you're going to find success. All right. All right. So. He asked again, once again, one of the questions that this was also related to supply chain and finding the right people, he asked, you know, like, obviously doing this going through LinkedIn can be challenging, you know, finding the right person.

Can I just buy the data? Yes, you actually can. I don't know where to buy it. I've never bought data like that. I just, I just don't, first off, I don't have the dollars and cents to do it. And two, I wouldn't even know where to go. However, yes, big companies buy data all the time. Guaranteed, guaranteed there's somebody selling this data.

Once again, though, is it relevant to you? That's the, that's the question I have to ask you, Alexander, because it may or may or may not be relevant. The reality is you're paying for data. That doesn't mean that that data has the right person for you. That doesn't mean that they, they necessarily tracked every SCM manager.

It might just have like a handful of people from my company, right? The reality is there's enough free tools out there. There really is. Like LinkedIn is an amazingly Easy to use free tool for finding people in various positions at companies. Okay. My suggestion to you is don't, don't buy the data. Just do the, do the legwork.

I know that it's a little bit I know that's not maybe the answer you were looking for, but trust me, you can only talk to so many people in a week anyway. And even if you have a team of people, great, they can all search other people too. Like the reality is you can only talk to a handful of people a week anyway.

Like my guess is as an individual, you're probably not making more than 50 to 60 phone calls a week. And that's on the high. That would be very much on the high end. The reality is, you know, you're going to have to call those people week over week over week for a few weeks anyway. I think if you just do it the LinkedIn way, you search people in an operations role or SCM role in a various industry that you're looking for, you're going to be able to find them.

You're going to be able to add them, send digital introductions, add them, figure out where they're at and how to contact them and go from there. But almost everything can be done either via email or by phone call. And most phone numbers are only a Google search away, okay? So like, you know, the reality is as BD people, we really are, we're like corporate detectives, right?

Like that is our job. Our job is to find people. We really, that's really the main job, find people, make a connection with them and hopefully sell a product in the future. That is our job. Okay. So part of the role really is. Doing that hunting. It's learning how to use the internet, use tools to your benefit.

But if you do this and you do this right, you're going to become very self sufficient, very resilient. And these skills transfer business to business, to business, no matter where you're working, you're going to be able to find the right people, make connections, and frankly, just become an amazing business development, sales, marketing rep, whatever you're trying to be.

You're going to be great at it, but just do, do the legwork, do the legwork. And you're going to be effective. Trust me on this. Okay. How do we lead a team of sales reps and show them how to work more efficiently? Okay. I totally get this one. So thank you, Alexander. This is a great question and it's a great question for a number of reasons, but one of the better reasons is, is that You know, I've worked in teams with other sales reps and everybody's doing something differently.

And there's usually one or two people that are rocketing. They're kicking butt, right? No matter where you work out, there's like a couple people in sales or whatever, and they're absolutely killing it. And the rest are just living off table scraps and wondering how the heck those two are killing it. What you need is a process, okay?

The thing that's making those two people so bloody effective at what they do is that they have created a process and they're following it for themselves, okay? No matter what that is, no matter what it is or what they're selling, they have created a process, they've set themselves a standard. It's like, I need to talk to 25 people today.

I need to make I need to add 30 new LinkedIn digital introductions and send 30 new LinkedIn digital introductions to the new contacts. I need to book five meetings today and they're, they're just giving it, they're giving it all to get those, to get those results. And the other people are kind of standing around and they can't see it.

They can't see the process. They see, okay, well, John's on the phone and now he's booked going to this meeting over here, but they can't see all of the, all of the work in the background happening, the wheels turning, the process happening. It's the process that makes us so effective at business development and sales.

That is what makes people effective, is consistently following a process. You know, like I said, whether that's, whether that's holding yourself to 15 phone calls a day, whether that's sending your 20 digital introductions per day, whether that is, you know, whatever, whatever it takes to get to those meeting stages where you actually make a connection and a sale.

The reason that the two people that you see that are killing it, no matter where you're working, the two people that are killing it are killing it because they have a process. And everyone else is standing around not following a process and wondering how it's happening. Trust me, what you need to do to make a team and supercharge a team is give them a process.

Give them a process that works. Give them a successful process and say, look, this is what it's going to take. This is what it's gonna take. This is what I'm measuring you against. I'm measuring you against this process and everyone else following it. So, that's the secret, Alexander. You want a team that's a rock stars?

Give them a process. Give them a process and hold them to it. Because the reality is you put five sales people in a room and you tell them to do it their way, they're all doing it a different way. And yeah, maybe one works. Maybe two works. Usually... That's not the case. Usually, they're all struggling together because it's, it's consistency and process that make business development effective.

It's keeping to a set of tasks and repeating them day after day after day after day that makes it so effective. So, you want a rockstar team? Give them a process and hold them to it. And watch, watch things turn around for you. Okay. How do we handle differences in priority between BD reps, sales manager and sales manager targets?

So in this case, the example that Alexander gave me was this. He said, we have a manager who. Only wants big fish. He only wants big fish. He's hunting in Canada. He'd be hunting the oil and gas companies. Okay, that's all he cares about and what he's missing is all the industrial companies that are surrounding the big fish that yeah, sure, the sales maybe aren't as high, but you could win them a lot easier and you could be more effective at securing the business.

And he asked how, how do I, how do I convince my manager that this is what we should be doing? Oh boy, Alexander. I wish, I wish I had an easy answer for you. I, I do not. I do not have an easy answer for this because the reality is, unfortunately, regardless of what we do, if you are answering to a manager, okay, and that manager is also answering to somebody, remember that, typically they are also answering to somebody, and the somebody above them has told them, look, we want your efforts focused here, and he's now relaying that information to you, and you're saying, Yeah, but like we have other opportunity.

There's no easy answer for you, man. There's no easy answer for you. If you've, if you've booked a meeting with the manager and sat down and pled your case and said, Look, I think, I think potentially we could make more, more, more money if we did it this way. Once again, I don't know your business. I don't understand what you sell or your service or your offering or why it might not be being looked at.

Okay, like once again, I don't have enough information about what you do in order to give a good answer here. But the reality is, is that we all have to answer to our managers, right? You know, the reality is I'm a business owner. I still answer to my managers. My managers are my, are my customers, right? They have wants and needs.

They have companies that they want me to go after. And it is, it is my job to try to achieve their goals, right? And it's your job to try to achieve your manager's goals. And like I said, whether you work for yourself or you, or you're part of a team, the reality is we all answer to somebody. We're all answering to somebody.

And there's always people dictating what it is they want from us, and you have to work the best you can within the system provided to you. Okay, that's that's my advice for just about everything. There's a lot of scenarios where people are trying to break the system or trying to do things against the grain or against the system, and it usually works out poorly, and it.

That doesn't mean that they weren't right. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't have tried to do it a different way. All it means is that we all have to work within the systems that are available to us, right? And if at this point in time your manager is saying, look, we want big fish, You just gotta try and get the big fish, you know, until, until, and plead your, like, I think, I think you have pled your case.

I think, ultimately, from the email I got from you, it did sound like you tried to explain why this was a better option. Maybe it will be considered in the future, Alexander. Like, this might not have been the nail in the coffin for your idea. It might just be that at this point in time, the directive is the directive, and they're asking you to follow it.

Here, here's a little bit of hopeful advice for you, though. If we are in business development, okay, there's no target that's out of reach. There's no target that's out of reach. I want you to, I hope that that's not the challenge you're facing, is that you're feeling like, how the heck do I get this big fish?

I've worked in enough companies now to tell you that the big fish are available. They're, they're available. Yeah, they take work, they take effort, but consistency and effort will get you there. So if right now, I don't, you know, like I said, I don't know what it is you do or where you work. However, in my case, It's oil and gas for Canada, right?

Oil and gas in Alberta is, is bread and butter, all the big, all the companies want the oil and gas companies, and they are available, but yeah, they're not, they're not quick and easy, they're not the easy, low hanging fruit on the apple tree, okay? They take consistency, and you know, I talk about it all the time, is that The average, the average, and this is like a very low average, but the average before you actually get through to somebody is about six phone calls, right?

Six direct contacts is the average. And let's get real, it's probably closer to 12. Like, I think, I think realistically, in my case, it's probably closer to 12. Before you get the, before you get the connection and they either disqualify themselves or they, they book a meeting with you, but with oil and gas companies up here, that might be 20, that might be 25, that might be 30.

And if you know you have the right person, you have to decide how much time you're going to dedicate to that, how many voicemails you're going to leave, how many connections you're going to make. But if the mandate from your company is we want big fish. Give them what they want, give them what they want, you know, just do the work, track the work, show them the effort you're putting into it, show them that you made the calls, show them you left the voicemails, and put it in their hands and say, you know, you, you always have the option to sit back and say, look, you know, I think this is great.

We've, we've made a lot of connections here. I'm still kind of struggling with this. Maybe can you, can I try some of these other ones? Like, don't necessarily lose hope that there's not going to be another option for you. Just understand that we are all answering to somebody. We're all answering to somebody.

They all have directives. And it is our job, whether you are a business owner, business development rep, it is your job to satisfy your client. In your case, your client might be your manager. In my case, it's literally my clients. But, I am obligated to try to satisfy my client. If my client says, Kelly, I want tech resources, or I want a gigantic oil company, I'm going to do my best to do that for them, because that's what they asked me to do.

If there's going to be challenges, I'm going to keep them up, up to date as to what those challenges might be. But as long as we're being open, we're being transparent we're doing what we can do. And I think you're going to be okay. I don't want you to feel limited. If, if they are asking for big fish, they are not impossible.

They are not impossible. And I want everybody listening to this to remember that big fish are not impossible. They just take more work, right? It takes a bigger fishing pole, takes a longer, longer reel of line. Okay. But you can get to them. Consistency is what will get you there. Okay. All right. That is the end of Community Questions, episode number two.

In this case, it'll be Community Questions: July 2023. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Monica, Jamie, Alexander, Javier for submitting questions. I hope that you've enjoyed this episode. I hope that you have taken some stuff away from it. If you're enjoying the show and you're wondering how you can help us, if you could follow us, rate us, leave us reviews on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, it goes So far, it goes so far.

Those are the ways that we grow. Those are the ways that we reach new audiences. The way that like Apple podcasts and Spotify works is they're measuring how many followers you get, and then they recommend you to other, other, other people. So if you guys want to help us, you want to help the business development podcast, you want to help me be greatly appreciated.

Please follow us, like, subscribe, and tell your friends that helps us absolutely the most. Just once again, a shout out to my listeners around the world. I know you guys are worldwide and that blows my mind. And I am so, so thankful. Thank you so much for coming back week over week and tuning into the Business Development Podcast.

And I hope that you are really enjoying these weekly shows. I hope that you're enjoying our guest expert interviews. And I hope that I can continue to do this for you week over week for the foreseeable future. All right. Shout outs this week. Alexander Javier, Monica Jamie, Beth Kevan, Colin Harms, Kamil Szczekot, Paul Coratella, and Aaron Haberman.

Thank you so much. All these people reached out to us either, in this case, provided questions for the show today, they left me a message just letting me know how the Business Development Podcast is impacting them. Once again, If the business development podcast is improving your business, is improving your life, is improving you as a business professional, I want to hear about it.

Please send me, send me a line, send me a message on the podcast, send me something. I'd love to hear the stories of how this podcast is affecting you and improving your life. This has been episode 45 of the business development podcast. And until next time, I will 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 at www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.