Why You Should Collaborate with Your Business Development Team

Why You Should Collaborate with Your Business Development Team

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 69 of the business development podcast. And on today's episode, we are talking about communication within your organization. What is the business development relationship between executives, operations, and how do we make it better? How can we improve the operational efficiency and get your team firing on all cylinders?

I'm going to try to chat to it today. 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 69 of the business development podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today on today's episode. I wanted to take some time and really chat about the partnerships and other relationships required to make business development effective. It's something that we've waited a little while to chat on, but today is the day.

Before we start off today's show, though, I just wanted to get to a little bit of show news and give a gigantic thank you to Don Murray, co founder of MPrint. He just did episode 68 with us, Partner with Your Printer. It was awesome, Don. Thank you so much sharing your 30 years of printing experience with us and bringing us up to speed on what we need to think about before we approach our local print shop.

Thanks again. Getting into today's show, my gosh, you guys know, week over week, this is just compounding and getting better and better and better, and it is all due to your support. And as you may or may not know, We are now accepting sponsorships and I have to give a gigantic, gigantic thank you to atWork Office Furniture who has just sponsored our show.

We are looking for many more sponsors, but if you guys are listening and you guys may notice that sponsorships are happening in before the show or at the end of show, please give them a listen. Give our sponsors a try. They're awesome. And most important of all, they support this show, which we all love.

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That's going to be one of the best ways moving forward. If you love this show and you want to sponsor us, reach out. I would love to chat about potential packages with you. All right. One other thing too, as we get into this today, we are at. Eight months! We are, eight months on Friday, so we're gonna call it eight months, it's Wednesday, we're close enough, so, we're right in the middle, eight months on Friday, and we are just pushing 84, 000 downloads, we're gonna be at 85, 000 downloads, probably by Sunday, by Sunday's show, which My gosh, guys, blows my mind, melts my heart.

I appreciate you immensely. Thank you so much for your continued support of the show. Whether this is your first episode or your 69th episode, I appreciate you greatly. And thank you so much for the journey and the support along it. One of the other things that I wanted to chat about as well, we haven't got quite as many of them.

So if you get some time today and you have a business development question that you would like us to discuss on behalf of your company, maybe addressed directly to you, reach out to me. podcast@capitalbd. ca. That is podcast@capitalbd.ca. And we can we can address some community questions for you on the upcoming October episode.

And it's October. It's the spookiest month of the year. And if you guys know, I've talked about it on the, on the pod before, I love a good, scary podcast. Some of my favorite podcasts are going to be like scared to death or box of oddities or Jim Harold's Campfire. I absolutely love these podcasts.

They keep me entertained during the week. And being in that vein, we have a friggin awesome Halloween special coming. I know, it's the Business Development Podcast, but we can have a Halloween special. And by gosh, we are going to have one. And it has been recorded. It is done. I'm not going any further than that.

But you guys are gonna love it. You guys are gonna love it. We have a Halloween special coming out this year, and it'll be coming out on the 29th. Alright! We have talked about it. We've talked about the corporate sponsors, we have talked about the community questions, and we have talked about the Halloween special, so let's just get into it.

Thank you so much for sticking with us. Alright! So we know this, right? Business development is not just a single person endeavor. It must integrate seamlessly with executives and day to day business operations. Yeah, I know. I've neglected this a little bit because we're like Lone Rangers, right? We're out there doing our detective work and finding all this information.

But one of the very critical. And I mean, critical aspects of business development is being able to not just communicate with future customers, not just to build interest and intrigue and move people down the pipeline to successful RFPs and RFQs. There's typically an entire business that we're also dealing with on the backend, isn't there?

And that's not always easy be you, me. I've definitely run into my challenges in dealing with both the executive level and the day to day operations level to make sure that the work that we're doing is not only effective, but it's not hurting them. And that is something that we don't talk about a whole lot in the business development world.

But the reality is, business development, if it is done incredibly effectively, and we are getting a lot of results, there's somebody that's gotta, that's gotta perform that work, right? There's somebody behind the scenes who's gotta now engage with the customer, mobilize a team of people, or manufacture and build and export a product, or heck, make the goals for the next year.

There's a lot going on in any organization. And business development has to learn how to not only... You know, obviously meet our own goals and criteria for what we find acceptable and what we want to do for the business, but we have to also meet the goals of the business and coincide those goals with the goals of the operation and not just goals, but ability of the operations team behind them.

So today I just wanted to take a little bit of time today. and talk to that. One of the most important things in this operations teams, executives, people listening to this that are from those worlds, you need to keep your business development team up to date. They need to be involved. They need to know what is going on operationally at the business.

What are the annual goals of the business? What are the next steps? What are other things? What are initiatives? What are targets? What is coming up for them? They need to be involved. And I've seen this happen at other organizations where the business development team is kept in a silo and where it's like, Nope, you guys just go out and you find business and we're going to do what we do and we will update you when we figure it out.

This Yeah, it can happen. But remember that your business development team is most effective when they know the corporate goals when they know the operational team when they know what you're capable with the capabilities of the business are okay. Keeping your business development team in a silo is kind of like having one arm tied behind your back.

It's critical that your BD team keeps good communication with both executives and operations. Okay? So for my executives, I want to talk to you now briefly, just to give you some ideas here on what your BD team needs to know from you. Okay. Executives, your, your BD team needs to know corporate goals and objectives for the year.

Okay. They need to know where the business is going, what the goals are for the business. Are you moving into a new sector? Are you moving into a new industry? Are you going to a new? city. Are you expanding the operation? Are you adding new services to the operation? And they need to be involved in all these steps because they can provide you critical information regarding how do we build this product?

How do we make something that's marketable that I can build interest in? Tell me what is going to separate us out if they're involved in every step along the way. When it comes time for them to make a compelling argument because you're pitching this new product in a new city, a new, whatever, maybe you're expanding it and it's a whole new, new product altogether, they've been involved since the very beginning.

So they've had time to put together all of the intrinsic important things that they need to. Use to articulate the value of that product to a customer to build interest. Okay. So the more that you can keep them in with the corporate goals and objectives, even include them in the development and building of those corporate goals and objectives.

It's just going to make them more effective, which is going to make you frankly more profitable. So keep your BD team involved. Okay. The next thing that they need to be 100 percent involved with and on board with, and in the know of is corporate values. Okay. What do you guys value? Do you guys have an ESG program?

Do you guys. Value community events. Do you do you have a good indigenous program where you're working with indigenous communities, keep them involved with what is important to your company and what initiatives they're taking value wise? Because once again, it just gives them more ammo in their toolbox to be able to say, you know what, not only Mr.

Customer, do we build this amazing product? We also support the community in these ways, and we support the indigenous groups. And we have an ESG program. Would you like to hear about that? If they can know as much as possible about what you guys are doing in the values side of things. Once again, it just, it just gives them horsepower.

And I know sometimes I've been at plenty of companies where this was an afterthought. This wasn't something they had these programs or they had these values, but they weren't communicated effectively to the BD team, which would have given us a little bit more to work with. Okay. We just touched on it.

We're in 2023 environment, sustainability, any type of your ESG goals. Okay. If you have an ESG program, or if you have something along these lines that you're doing for the environment, and we know if we're a large corporation these days, we have to have something. Make sure your BD team is well informed, okay?

They know exactly what you are doing on the ESG front. So that when they are pitching, when they're crafting these value propositions to your customers, they can add a blurb on it. They can say, look, not only do we do this great thing for the community, not only do we support all these industries in this way, we also have this amazing ESG program.

Would you like to hear about it? Would you like to be, to hear about how we're helping not only the community, but the environment? And I know that, you know, not everyone's doing it, that's fine. But if you are doing it, make sure that your BD team is well informed. Okay. Well informed. They know what is going on so that they can add that value proposition so they can build even more interest and potentially set you apart from your competition.

Okay. Financial targets. Okay. And I know this, this is maybe a little bit more for your sales teams, but it goes hand in hand. Okay. Being able to know what the corporate financial goals are for a company that year can help a BD team in a couple of different ways. Depending on what types of products and services you sell, there are going to be higher value targets, medium value targets, and low hanging fruit.

And depending on what is critical to the business, Or like what, what financial target is critical to the business at any given time is going to allow them to split their time between those high value targets, which take longer to get, we all know it, the medium value targets, which is, you know, where the money is, which we know.

And then those, those low value targets, which, yeah, the money's maybe not there, but we can sell a whole bunch of them really quickly. So. Being able to kind of say like, okay, like here's the target for the year. And here's the breakdown that I want you to spend BD personnel. I want you to spend 30 percent of your time on those high value targets fit 40 percent of your time on those medium and maybe the remaining, whatever 30 percent of the time.

On. You know, a lower value target, it's going to allow them to split that time up and be able to make better decisions with how they're doing their weekly reach outs, their follow up calls, who they're prioritizing over other companies, right? And we know this by kind of working within those financial targets for you so that we can try to help you achieve your financial goals, which is.

All we want to do business development. People want to meet and exceed financial targets for companies. And that's what we want to do. Exponential value to cost, right? So help us help you by giving us a breakdown of what that looks like for you over the course of a year, industry targets. We just talked about this.

It falls kind of under that financial targets. What. Industry are we after most companies can market to multiple industries. You're not just limited to the oil and gas sector. Heck, you can probably do mining. You can probably do industrial construction. Heck, you might even be able to do forestry, right?

There's usually a large number of customers that your product or service can service. Okay. And we talk about this in, in a few different episodes, but it is important that we know the directive of the company this year. Maybe the company wants to make a massive push into mining. You've been doing oil and gas for the past two decades.

And now you're like, look, we can service mining. We've put together brochure packages for mining, and we want to make a gigantic push into mining this year. Well, if all you've been doing is oil and gas for the past 20 years, and it hasn't been really on the radar, or the BD person hasn't been brought up to speed that mining is now a gigantic target, or it hasn't been emphasized to him that that is what you want him to do or her to do, you need to make, make clear that, hey, like mining is a gigantic.

thing for us this year. It's, it's a huge target. It's what we want to do. We would like you to dedicate 60 percent of your business development, new, new business marketing efforts to mining. Okay. That's easy. Now your BD person is in the know they they've had the directive from the executive group and they know exactly where you want them to fire.

And being able to do that takes a lot of the guesswork off of our plate. Whereas we would have probably continued to market oil and gas. Why? Because that's what we've done for. 20 years, unless you have taken the time to express to them that these are the directives we want for you. This is the change we want.

Please adapt. Please make the necessary changes and attack it. If you do that for them, my gosh, we are going to be so thankful that we've been given that directive and we are going to absolutely crush it for you. But you need to Bring us into the loop. Okay. I hope that what you're getting from this is that communication between the executive group and the business development team is not just critical.

It's mandatory for our success to fire on all cylinders with the business group. Okay. You can not keep your business development teams in a silo. I've seen this happen way, way departmentalized or compartmentalized, or it's touching the silo. And we're firing. We need to be firing on the same page. We need to be firing together, right?

This engine needs to be firing on all cylinders. And you do this by bringing them up to speed, keeping them part of your organizational meetings and making sure that they are not only involved, but they're part of the plan on how to execute it. All right. Timelines. Timelines is another one. Okay. A year is a long time.

And maybe you might have multiple initiatives that year. Maybe not only you're breaking into mining this year, but heck, you know what, forestry is out there. Maybe there's some local facilities work that you guys could do as well. Okay. Break it down into timelines for them. Like let them know, like, Hey, you know what, even though mining is super critical, we've also decided that forestry is going to be critical too.

So what I want you to do is I want you to break down. So let's say the first two quarters of this year, I want you to crush it mining. And then for the last quarter, I want you to spend a whole bunch of time in forestry. And then after that for Q4, what we're going to do is we're going to focus a whole bunch of time on the local facilities work.

If you can do this as well, it's also going to give them the ability to shift around or to be able to delegate within their team, who stays on mining, who's moving over to forestry and who's handling local facilities work for Q4. Once again, this just comes down to a good plan and a good plan comes from a collaboration between the business development team and the executive team to make sure once again, that we're firing on all cylinders and that we are delivering the best value possible for your business.

And this does not happen with teams that are working independently or with BD people that are working independently. Maybe. You know what? And I'm not saying that every company has to do this. I get it. There's a lot of companies where you have one or two products or service lines. It's not a big deal. If your BD person does the one thing and, and they know what they're doing because the business hasn't changed for 20 years, fine.

Fine. Okay. I'm not talking to you today, even though I still think that you guys should have developmental meetings with your executive team so that you can plan about how you can expand or how you can do things better. It just happens. Really? BD people are amazing people to bounce things off of because we've seen a lot.

So, Sometimes just having that beady person in the room to say, Hey, you know, John or Jen, what are you guys doing this year? You know, you know what we do. What else do you think we're missing here? You would be surprised your BD people will be able to do a little bit of nose to the ground research. And they'll be able to say like, you know what, we've been doing this for oil and gas, but I think this fits an industrial, I think with a slight tweak, we could Move this to forestry, you know, trust me, your BD people are smart.

Use them, use them, ask them questions, involve them in product expansions, involve them in, in the expansion of your business in general. And you will be surprised at how much value you can get by spitballing ideas off your BD team. They're smart people. Trust me. All right. And then timelines. And then we can get into partnerships, right?

We talked about this a ton. People are pretty consistently utilizing their BD teams to find new business, which 100%, that is what we are amazing at. We are built to find new business and we love the task. And if you can put us on that and you keep us on that and we have a great process and we're constantly following our process to make sure that we're getting consistent results for you, which is what we always aim to do.

We're going to deliver well, but you are missing a critical aspect of what BD can do for you. Once our executive team has identified potential partnership opportunities, maybe there's a partnership with an engineering firm, your construction firm, and you realize that an EPC agreement is going to be better for your customer, but heck, you don't do engineering.

Great, great. Enlist your BD team to now reach out to a whole bunch of engineering firms that meet your criteria. And start those meetings. We'll start those relationships for you. We'll, we'll engage them. We'll say, Hey, you know what? We're reaching out to you because we do this great construction and you guys do great engineering.

And we're losing out on a whole bunch of projects because we can't do EPC. Great. We, if we partner with you, we can do EPC. Would you like to sit down and have that discussion and see if there's maybe a collaboration there? This is something that BD teams can do and do very well because it is no different.

It is not different at all from our new business development plans. So consider using your BD team, consider engaging them to help you find new partnerships and partners and look for other opportunities like that, that maybe are just what you need to be more successful. Okay, so we are amazing at that.

So executive teams, consider using your BD, your BD group to find those critical partnerships once you have identified them. Okay. All right. We need to know the capability of the business to execute work. Okay. This goes both to executive team and operational teams in a, in a slightly different way, but we'll get into that.

So executives, you need to tell us what you are capable of doing. If you are not capable of doing a 25 million job and we are bidding to the largest oil and gas companies in Canada or the largest metro companies in Canada or US or wherever you're at, and their job bids start at 50 million, and we weren't aware of that, we are going to not only shoot ourselves in the foot, we are going to shoot the company in the foot.

And I've seen this happen. I've seen this happen, where a BD team was made to believe that a company could execute any job. We can do anything. You just go find it. But that is total bullshit. There isn't a company on earth that can do anything. They can do gigantic, gigantic jobs, but there's always a limit.

There's always a limit. And we need to know what that is. And that limit can change over time. That limit, maybe, maybe this year that limits 5 million. Okay, great. 5 million jobs. That's what we can do that. So we can make that pitch when we're, when we're pitching the client to say, Hey, you know. Right now we have the capabilities of doing 5 million jobs.

We're always growing. We're always improving. Don't rule us out. If you have a bigger job than that, let us know. We can probably, we can probably try to get funding or figure out a way to accompany that, but this is typically what we work within so that we can have a range so that when we pitch a company that their minimum job is a hundred million dollars.

We don't look like idiots when we get that meeting and they say like, you knew, you knew all we could do is a hundred million dollars. And we're like, well, yeah, but we didn't know what we could do. You do not want your BD teams in that place. Please don't do that to them. I've been there. It's not fun.

Please don't do that to your BD teams. Keep them involved on the capability of your business. Do not oversell it. Do not undersell it. Let your BD team know what, how many jobs you're capable of doing this year. What What industries you're able to serve, what areas you're able to service. Once again, a country as big as United States country, as big as Canada, there's a lot of areas that are just probably not serviceable.

Or, or, or maybe like in the case of Canada, we can only service it for, let's say six months a year because the other six months, the road is gone. Right, right. This is real. This is a real life. Okay. You can't service everywhere all the time. No matter, like, unless you're just a monstrous company, but I haven't had, I have not met that company yet.

Okay. There's always challenges when it comes to service area, availability project capabilities. Okay. And your BD team needs to know, okay, you need to let them know. So I, I know executives, I'm ragging on you a little bit today. I'm doing it on purpose. Cause I want a better world. I want us to be more successful.

I want our BD teams and our executive teams to work on. On all cylinders. And if we are transparent, okay, this is the key. Transparency. Transparency with your BD team is critical. You need to keep them involved. You need to let them know when things didn't go as planned. You need to let them know when there's a downturn and now you can't take on projects of a certain size.

You need to let them know when you've stopped serving an industry. You need to let them know when you're trying to either pull back from an area or expand into an area. They need to be aware all the time. So yes. This is going to take a little bit of work. I know I'm asking for a little bit of work and I might be asking for a lot more than what you guys are doing currently, but please, please communicate with your business development team.

They are important. They need to know what is going on at all levels. In some ways they need to sometimes know more than probably just about anyone else in the company, because we need to not only, we need not only to. essentially make sure that we are accomplishing the goals and directives of the executive team, but that we are also not interfering or asking too much of the operations teams too, right?

Like there's, we really carry that, that critical balance. We're like a stool. Okay. We're balancing what the customer needs with what the executives want with what the operations team can actually deliver. And most of the time, these are three completely different things. I have, I have never, at least, at least at this point in my life, I've never worked at a company where there was not a conflict between these three items.

Okay. And so the more that the, at least the executives, the business development team and the operations team can be on the same page. Now you only got one. Now you only got one of those things that you really need to juggle and balance. And believe me, it becomes a lot better to juggle and balance when you have that critical understanding in the direct, in the organization between the executives, the business development team, and the operations team that's expected to execute the work.

All right. And then obviously technical support. Okay. We need the ability to kind of when things don't go to plan or when we we identify something, we need to be able to reach out to the executive team and say, Hey, like, we need some help. This is one of the challenges that we're facing right now, and we need some support from the upper tiers here to help rectify it.

Or we need a decision quickly, or we need we need some direction or some directive. Okay, technical support between your executive team and your BD team is absolutely critical. Okay, all right. So now let's get into operations. Sorry, executive team. I know I ragged you a bit. I love you guys. You're amazing.

Trust me, trust me. Put some more faith in your BD team, bring them in to these executive meetings, or at least bring in the BD manager, bring someone, bring someone from that group who can, who can sit with you and say, look, okay. I appreciate being here. I just want to sit in on this so that I can tell what is going on so that I can give better directives to our BD team so that we can better accomplish your executive goals.

Trust me, this is going to work out for you. All right, operations, operations. I love my operations team, right? Remember, BD is a shared role. We're really balancing a lot of relationships. This is, this is just as true internally at the corporation as it is externally with your clients, right? There's usually a lot of interaction happening on both sides because operations is usually working hand in hand with us to say, Hey, here's how many people we have available that we need to get out.

Or this is our capability right now, or, you know, we need you to hold off because right now we are swamped. We can't do any more of this work. I know we're trying to accomplish this work with executives, but we, we physically can't do any more, or we have product limitations because hack. What have we faced for the past?

Like forever, we couldn't get anything logistically, right? We, we had shortages of parts. We had shortages of hell vehicle, entire vehicles over COVID. Right. These are things that operations knows a ton about because they're involved in that, in executing the work that we, that we find for them quite regularly, so they can, They have valuable, valuable insights for the BD teams, and it is equally important that our operations teams are communicating with the BD teams, and that the BD teams are letting operations know about some of the stuff that they're doing, or some of the initiatives that they're chasing, or some of the customers that are hot, so that They're not, they're not essentially out of the loop.

The other side of it is, and it depends on the organization, but usually when we're at the BD meetings, we typically have somebody from the operations group who is a product expert, a technical expert. When you're in business development, you learn a lot to be dangerous. You learn enough to be dangerous.

Okay. Like let me put it out to you. Your BD person should not be your product expert, please. If this is what you're doing right now, and your BD person is expected to be the be all end all product expert for your business. This is not the right approach. This is not what your BD person is. Okay. Your BD person is an expert at building interest, at finding new customers, at shouting your company from the rooftops.

They need to know enough to be dangerous. They need to know enough to answer basic questions from the customer, but ultimately what they need to do is build. Interest in your business, in your product, in your service, to get it to a level where we can have a face to face meeting where we can then bring in our BD team, but also a technical product expert, usually somebody who's built the product or who, or who uses the product on a daily basis.

It's usually somebody from the operation. Okay. So it is critical. Those are the people who can speak the technical lingo with the engineers who come to that meeting. Okay, the beady person needs to just know enough to get them in the room to shout from the rooftops to build interest to make people excited about that conversation.

The technical details can be brought in by a technical product expert at your company and really should almost every time let your BD person do what they do best, which is build interest in in your product or service to shout it from the rooftops and to lead it to a successful meeting RFQ. bid, whatever, but have somebody in your company in the operation side, come into those meetings with them as a technical expert, to be able to answer those really hard questions, because there's nothing worse than being a BD person, having, you know, enough to be dangerous, but you'll never know as much as the technical product experts.

You won't. There's too much other important stuff in your job that has nothing to do with that. And then being put on the spot and having to ask, having to say, look, I don't have the answer to that. Let me bring in my product expert when you frankly should have had the product expert in the meeting in the first place.

So right now, if your business is not bringing a product expert with your BD person to those meetings, Please initiate that, bring the product expert with you and let them answer those really hard questions because they're the right person to do it. Your BD person is the right person to take the meeting to the next step, to the RFP, to the RFQ, to the vendor list, to schedule the next meeting.

That's what your BD person needs to be doing. Bring a product expert. Okay. All right. So operations, our relationship with them is we need to know the current capability. We need subject matter experts. Okay. We just talked to that. We need in, in the case of a product, a product expert, someone who knows the ins and outs of your widget.

Okay. We can't know everything. I just talked about this. We can't know everything about your widget. Okay. There are better people to do that. Bring the product expert. We need meeting support. This is exactly what I was just talking to. Okay. A BD person, a proper meeting with business development, a first initial meeting should have a business development rep, the one who, the one who booked the meeting most likely, and then also a subject matter expert from your business in either the product or service.

Or your capabilities or all three, right? We need to, we need to have someone who can speak to all of that so that when the really hard questions come out, we can answer them in this meeting instead of needing to book another meeting because you don't always get another meeting. That's the important thing here.

Sometimes you get one shot and if you're only going to get one shot, you damn well better have the right people in the room. So right now. The big takeaway from this today, have a subject matter expert accompany your BD person to meetings. It is going to make you more effective. All right. We also need to know with our operations, the pricing and availability of a product or service.

Okay. So Well, yes, as BD people, we don't typically handle the, the, the, the contract negotiation, right? But we have to have a general idea of what our pricing models is, how we structure the pricing, what a contract typically looks like, so that we can explain that when we're having a conversation with a customer.

We also need to know the availability at any given time, okay? Just because you make a product or service does not mean that you can deliver that product or service today, okay? You might be so busy that you're out of people. You might be so busy that you're out of robots, or heck, you might have a supply chain issue.

And right now, we can't get that critical microchip to get your, to get your robot to market, okay? These are things that operations needs to keep BD involved with all the time, so that they know, okay, we have the availability to make, say, three of these machines, so, you know, don't overpromise, don't say that we can get you six of these machines in three weeks, because we can't.

This needs to be told to BD, so that, They're in the loop. They at least know the current operational capability of the business. Okay. All right. So as long as we do these things, we can be more effective. Communication within the organization and the business development team is absolutely critical. Okay.

It's absolutely critical. What are some of the ways that I have implemented, or I've been a part of Or that we use at capital to make sure that this happens. At capital, we have a weekly business development meeting with all clients. Okay, so we have a point of communication with the executive team, at least, if not the operations team, usually both.

In my experience, we have the executive team and the operations team and the business development team get together once a week. We call it a business development meeting. And what we do is we just discuss, okay, what's hot this week, what's going on and what do we need to know to be effective? And usually these are no more than 30 minutes, 30 minutes.

Okay. They don't need to be an hour long. They don't need to be 45 minutes long. They usually barely need to be more than 20 minutes long. 30 minutes is a great period of time to be able to sit down, have the BD team, let you know what's hot, what meetings we got this week, what's looking good and bring us up to speed on what is going on the executive team.

What are you guys thinking about? What are the priorities this week? What are the priorities over the next quarter, whatever, and operations? Are we having any issues delivering these services? What do we have available right now? How many people do we need to get out? Talk to me. It's an info session. It's an info session, but it's a critical info session because as long as your BD team is up to speed, they know what is available for people or resources, they know what the executive team wants, they are going to be able to execute.

Much, much better than if they had to shoot from the hip. So trust me, these BD meetings, they're awesome. They are awesome. If you are not currently having a weekly BD meeting with your team, please implement it immediately. For business development to be as successful as possible, great communication and understanding must be made available to them.

Teamwork and transparency will lead to better outcomes for. All right, that brings us to the end of our episode today. I know it was a long one. I know it was a tough one, but. Trust me, trust me, better communication internally between the business development team and the operations and executives is only going to make you more effective over time.

Trust me. I know it may be a bit of a pain to implement it immediately or, or, or initially, but it will get better over time and you will grow to appreciate this relationship. All right, shoutouts this week: Colin Harms, Rodney Lover, Christian-George Farauanu, Tim Valli Sr. and Gokul Ravindran, thank you so much for your time this week. Thank you so much for the support of the show. Until next time, this has been episode 69 of the Business Development Podcast, and we 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 @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.