Strengthen Your Business Development Team

Published: IPA Bulletin - November/December 2009

If you watch and listen to the wrong targets, you'll usually be late. And if you listen to folks who watch and report on the wrong targets, you can count on being late.

Too many association reports smother us with information about lower customer demand, fewer shipments, and what's new in technology and equipment. However, our industry's future is not just about us. Rather, ultimately, our industry's future is about what we can do with our resources to improve our customer's economic well being.

That's a different mindset, which starts with the customer's point of view and works its way back to our company's and our suppliers' resources. This leads to two critical questions, particularly as a priority. What have you done to:

• Identify, record, and track the unanswered needs, requests, and inquiries of your customers? and
• Rewrite the position descriptions of your customer contact people - particularly your customer service and sales representatives - to serve those priorities?

Each of those two actions, executed immediately, should result in additional business - business that grows and repeats itself. However, you won't know the difference if you do nothing. Remember Mark Twain's well worn cliche: Progress I'm in favor of, it's change I'm against.

Systems for Growing New Business

We at Chadwick Consulting encourage our clients to institute a system for capturing every customer request or inquiry that they cannot respond to positively. The angles and options for gathering this information are multiple, potentially including:

• Creating a system for capturing and forwarding the information to a central person in your organization for systematic review, follow-up, and reporting back to your organization.
• Training folks on what to listen for in a conversation. For instance, a customer's inquiry might be a subtle as, "You folks don't store and categorize all the electronic images we've sent you for the last three to four years, do you?" Or, "You folks don't have a trade show support and management team system, do you?" Or, "You folks don't have an education and training program for a customer's new employees, do you?"
• Obtaining information from personnel within and outside your organization, including those in pre-press, customer service representatives, sales representatives, bookkeepers, and even estimators and suppliers as well as delivery personnel.

If, for instance, you had such a system in place at least 10 years ago, you would have initiated a Promotion and Advertising Specialty Department, providing services that a few publications and associations are just now recognizing and reporting on but which Chadwick Consulting has tested for our clients through customer surveys for over a decade.

A Different Angle of Opportunity

Do you have the right people and are they doing what needs to be done? There's significant talent available in today's labor markets just wanting to be hired. Additionally, many organizations have individuals who are noticeably underemployed. For example, they have never been asked in their six-month performance reviews, "Do you have talents or skills you are not being asked or allowed to use here?"

In addition, have you taken a step back and rewritten your customer service representative's position description and remuneration plan to include the following:

• Invest at least five hours each week researching current and target customers and their business environment. Share and discuss information obtained and believed to be meaningful with your sales representatives, your supervisor, and target account personnel.
• Identify at least 15 customers (or divisions or departments of current customers) who do not receive time from sales representatives but whom you believe represent worthwhile additional potential and with whom you are willing to begin developing stronger working relationships. Discuss with your supervisor and company business development directory at least every six months (preferably every three months) who these are and how you would go about developing them.
• Make at least one visit every six months to your local library and learn what new resources are either available or that you have not previously used. Share and discuss information obtained and believed to be meaningful with your sales representatives, your supervisor, and target account personnel.
• Study your assigned customers' websites at least every three months and identify what's new and potentially meaningful. Share and discuss information believed to be meaningful with sales representatives, your supervisor, and target account personnel.

Some of you probably immediately recognized that your sales representatives could and should be doing each of those four points, but that's not my central focus.

We must change faster than our business environment, and that means becoming more proactive in understanding what our customers need, what resources are new, and which we should be using to make a difference in our customers' economic well being.

Become a More Valuable Supplier

If we do our homework, listen to our customers, and set up systems to capture and track their requests or potential requests (that means we might also call them and discuss the potential issues), we will develop information that allows us to be more valuable as a supplier. This more than likely leads to generating additional work.

And if we relentlessly make changes in our organization - changes in education and training and/or position descriptions and/or remuneration plans - to improve our contributions to our customers' welfare, we'll inevitably improve our own economic performance as well as our future.

Certainly, our industry is in a "pruning process." The deadwood is being removed, but organizations that are listening to their customers and understand that their customers' improved economic welfare is what they are to serve will more forward.

I recently listened to one of my CEO Peer Group members rag (that's Southern slag for criticize) about what his department supervisors and front line business development people weren't doing. I listened politely. Finally, he asked, "What do you think?"

After a studied brief silence, I said, in a direct tone,"It's my observation that the biggest problem is often senior management. They won't lead what needs to be done, encourage and praise others for taking reasonable risks, or hand off and get out of the way."

My CEO Peer Group member was understandably a little put off by my comments. Some months later he told me that he went back and told his partner what I had said. His partner, after a moment of hesitation, said, "I think he's right. We need to involve our sons more in the decision-making process and make them more accountable. You and I are not getting the job done that's needed."