Should you measure Business Development efforts?

Should you measure Business Development efforts?

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast on today's episode. Why should you measure BD efforts? 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 the Business Development Podcast. My name is Kelly Kennedy and it is an absolute pleasure to be here with you today on today's episode. Why should you measure BD efforts? This one is going to be a fairly quick one, I think, but it is also very important cuz I think a lot of you out there, especially in sales and bd, or if you're just getting started in it, or if you're a new business owner, you might be struggling a little bit on.

What you should do as far as your day-to-day or how to be consistent in your BD efforts. And that is going to come with measuring. So we're gonna start there today. And the number one reason as we get started is to have a strategy. Most of us, when we get into business development, we are just kind of winging it.

We're making phone calls. We may be tracking, maybe not, maybe it's just a jotting notes on a page, which, by the way, I am a huge advocate of noting things. I have a I have a notebook next to me at all times. I'm consistently making notes on who I've talked to, what I've done. However, I translate this at the end of the week into my weekly reports or into my pipe drive, which helps me to move forward.

So I'll kind of chat to that as we move forward. But you wanna have strategy, and consistency. And the reason is you need to know where you've been in order to know where you're going and where you can improve. So I'm gonna start today just by chatting about some of the things that you should be measuring. And I'll try to go through them one by one just to kind of make it make sense for you and we'll move over to the end where we can talk about how to utilize that moving forward.

So what efforts should you be measuring. You should be measuring three efforts specifically. You should be measuring your digital contact. Your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, all socials. Depending on what you're using for your business, you need to be measuring who you're reaching out to and then adding them into a crm.

The next thing you need to be measuring is how many phone calls and emails are you sending on a consistent basis. So you need to set a standard for yourself as to what is going to be a consistent amount of phone calls or emails that you are gonna send on a weekly basis. And then you need to be tracking that.

The last thing and the most important thing you need to be measuring is how many meetings are you attaining from all these efforts you're putting in. If you're putting in, you know, a week's worth of efforts into LinkedIn socials, but maybe you're not doing a whole lot on the phone calls and emails and you're not getting the meetings you want, you might need to reevaluate and see where you might be making a misstep.

In this case, you were guaranteed making a misstep by not making the phone calls and emails you need to be having. The next part is obviously your meetings. Your meetings are the goal. All this work you're doing, every bit of effort you put into business development is to guide you to a face-to-face meeting, whether that be a Skype call or an in-person preferred with a with a potential customer who can buy your product so that you can build a rapport with that customer.

So you really need to be putting in as much effort as you can to get to those meeting stages. And the way that you're gonna do that is with consistency through tracking. How do we track? We track utilizing a crm. The preferred that we use here at Capital Business Development is called Pipedrive. I am in no way affiliated with Pipedrive. I just love their product. I've used it for many years. It has to be a standard with capital so that we can utilize it from company to company, and I would highly, highly recommend Pipedrive. However, there are many, many other ones. Salesforce being another big one. There are other options that you can utilize, but the most important thing at the end of the day is that you do have some form of customer relationship management CRM program so that you can track your efforts with your, with your marketing.

Okay. So you do it through through a CRM and then through weekly reports. If you're a business owner, yeah, maybe you have a bd team working for you who may or may not be providing weekly reports. I chatted about this in the previous episode. You really do need to have your BD teams providing you weekly reports that is showing a consistent amount of effort on a weekly basis. That's the key. The key to business development is being very, very consistent because it takes time. Sometimes, you know, I've heard somewhere it takes six touches, but let's get real. It can take way more, way less. It just depends. But the key is going to be consistency.

You need to be reaching out to customers on a weekly basis, no more than a weekly basis to my other business owner, friends who are getting eager. You do not want to annoy your customer. You do not want to piss them off. You always want to show up in a kind, friendly manner and a respectful manner. Okay? The way that you are respectful is you call and you either leave a message or chat with them once per week, no more, no less, but make sure that you are reaching out on a weekly basis to make that connection, especially if it is a customer that you are very, very interested in working with.

You need to show that you're committed, that you care, and that you want to help them. The other side of it as well is that if you are reaching out once per week, you are actually building a rapport with this customer, whether you know it or not, or they know it or. What's happening is, is they're getting to know your voice.

They're getting to know your product. You're, you're being kind, you're showing up in a respectful manner. And over time, that's actually gonna build a rapport so that when you finally do get in touch with this customer, they already know who you are. They know why you're calling, and they're gonna be far more interested in setting up that meeting with you than they would've been if they wouldn't have had those touches.

So it is important that you were doing those weekly follow-ups, but that's that's a video for another day. I just wanted to touch on that briefly. Today's we're gonna try to focus as much as possible on how to go about the BD efforts themselves, so BD itself. Really only has, like I said, it's those three main connections that you really need to be doing to get those introductory meetings.

All goal or all the efforts in BD are to create the goal of a meeting. So your job is as much as possible to get your client in the case of your, your, your company. It's either to get your company in front of somebody who can buy. Or your business development rep or a stakeholder an operations manager and your team into a meeting where they can pitch your product in a highly educational and informational way.

Have a two-way conversation, build a rapport with the client, and then hopefully that'll lead you to an order, an RFP a vendor list application, something along those. But all the efforts in BD are to get you there. And so the consistency is about trying to gain as many meetings on a consistent basis as you can.

The way that we do this is through, is through tracking, through BD efforts and measured BD efforts. So what I would recommend once again, just to kind of close this this video off for you, like I said, it'll be a fast. You need to be measuring digital contacts, your LinkedIn contacts, your Facebook, Instagram, whatever ways that you are messaging your customers, trying to get a meeting.

You need to be tracking this. I like to move these people into an introductory stage on my crm. So the very first stage on my CRM is people that I've reached out to in a digital way. The next, you need to be tracking phone calls and emails. On my crm, I like to have them in what I call a weekly contacted stage.

These are people that I've done the research for. I've figured out who the right contacts are in this company. They're added into my crm, and now they are on a weekly contact stage where I can reach out and say, Hey, I'm Kelly. I'm working for XYZ Company. We have a product I know you'll love. I'm looking to just make a connection and book an introduction meeting with you.

And I'm doing that on a weekly basis. So these are the people, and I'm tracking that on a weekly basis. The last stage, you need to know how many meetings you're attaining. So you need to be adding a meeting stage to your crm. You need to be moving people from contacted to meetings. We'll talk about the flow of a CRM in a future Podcast, but you'd need to have a, a spot on your CRM to track.

The people that you have met with. And then the next steps from those meetings. You have been listening to the Business Development podcast. My name is Kelly Kennedy and it's been an absolute pleasure to be here with you today. If you're enjoying the content so far, please do like and subscribe on your player of choice.

And please if you could also share with your networks on your LinkedIn networks, I would really, really appreciate it. I'm definitely trying to get this information out to the world and give back in a way that I can. So I really appreciate you listening and until the next time you've been listening to the Business Development Podcast.

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.