Driving Business Development - Running Successful BD Meetings

In today's episode, our hosts Brenton Gowland and Ron Tomlian continue the series on Driving Business Development. Today's episode explores aligning your team and in particular, the role business development meetings play in getting your team into the sales mindset.

The topics covered in this second part of the series are: 

• The role business development meetings play in aligning your team
• Frequency and structure of business development meetings
• Using tools like CRM or Spreadsheets to coordinate business development meetings
• The value of reporting opportunities, risks and business as usual
• How to create effective meeting notes and how to use them
• Using visual indicators to engage your staff
• Conclusion

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Transcript

Brenton Gowland: 0:01

Today on The Business Builders podcast, we're continuing our series about driving business development, and our topic is alignment. So we're looking at the role the business development meeting plays in getting your team into the sales mindset. Ron talks about using visual indicators to keep your people up to date and engaged, and I talk about making business development fun for everyone. Well, welcome to the Business Builders podcast. We are your hosts. I am Brenton Gowland,

Ron Tomlian: 0:26

and I'm Ron Tomlian.

Brenton Gowland: 0:27

And Ron, here we are for our third instalment of driving business development, which is really quite good. We've been through four, well, we've got four topics to cover, that is planning, monitoring, or planning your BD, monitoring your business development, aligning your team and then winning as a team. So in a fortnight's time, we'll do winning as a team. But today is about aligning our team.

Ron Tomlian: 0:50

Absolutely.

Brenton Gowland: 0:51

Cool. So we'll get into that in just a sec. But we're coming to the end of financial year. In fact, we're recording this podcast a little bit early, everyone, we're recording it on the 30th of June. And when we release his podcast, which will be in a week or so it will be the new financial year. And I'm just wondering, because you spend a lot of time interviewing CEOs and getting out and about with different businesses. What do you see on the horizon for the 23, financial year and look at am I just caveat that with, if you're in other countries, you might have a different fiscal calendar than we do. But still, the question is, what do you see on the horizon?

Ron Tomlian: 1:29

Well, one of the things that I've noticed is that people sensitivity to if you like, the global situation is increased enormously over the last two years, I'm sure COVID has had a lot to do with that. And the repercussions of COVID. In terms of things like supply chains, exposure to world economies, realising that things that happen half a world away, are having significant impacts here, like what's going on in Ukraine, and it's affecting daily life like the price of oil. So I think there's in business in general, there's a greater sensitivity to what's going on with the rest of the world, and I've ever seen before. And that's not to say, Australia's insular, but we certainly are able to live in a very comfortable way within our own backyard. And that's gone. Some people might say, that's a good thing. Some people say, Oh, what about the good old days, but at the end of the day, regardless, there's a greater awareness of what's going on in the world, and the business community and how it impacts on us.

Brenton Gowland: 2:34

It certainly made the world a smaller place, isn't it? Yes. And I, to your point, like some of the businesses that I'm working with, supply chains are interrupted and so forth. And it's making them reconsider how they do things. And then there's uncertainty about what's going to happen in terms of inflation and all sorts of other bits and pieces. So the way I see it is necessity drives invention. So there's an opportunity, in fact, there's not an opportunity, we have to innovate as businesses, we have to innovate, we have to find new ways of doing things. And we have to understand how our market needs are changing.

Ron Tomlian: 3:08

Yep. And and I think people are open more open to that than they ever were before. People are more willing to accept that maybe they don't know, everything that's happening. You know, I've been in this game for 20 years type of thing is going out the window, because the game is changing. And so people are looking for how can I get that information? How can I open myself to greater awareness of what customers are looking for? And what suppliers are looking for as well?

Brenton Gowland: 3:37

Yeah. And that's why business development is such an important part of a business, because not only is it about driving your business, it's about listening. And so when you're in the marketplace, and your BD people, your staff are operating with other clients talking to other people, they have the ability to bring back useful information, which we're going to talk about today, and help us or help inform our businesses so that we can actually use that information and make good business decisions.

Ron Tomlian: 4:02

Absolutely. Now, we need to talk about our sponsors.

Brenton Gowland: 4:08

We do and we've got SA Business Builders is one of our sponsors. Yes.

Ron Tomlian: 4:12

Fantastic. And I think there's a meeting of informal meeting coming up on the first on the Fourth of July now as well, the 12th of July. That's correct, how I was gonna say How appropriate but it doesn't really affect me anymore. It's about a week or so away here. And of course, there's a Dapto Yes, that's

Brenton Gowland: 4:30

my business. And I come and operate as your chief marketing officer, sometimes one day a week, sometimes a little bit more, but usually over a certain period of time, where we help you get your marketing function within your business really driving the way it should be in such an important part of the business at this point, because it's all about communicating communicating with your clients, communicating with people who don't know you yet and getting that messaging, right so and

Ron Tomlian: 4:55

communicating internally as well. I find that the internal marketing is often The sorry forgotten cousin of the marketing game,

Brenton Gowland: 5:04

we were just doing vision mission values with one of our clients this morning, actually. And that was all about exactly what you're saying? Or how are we going to communicate this internally within the business? So yeah, it's interesting, because the CMO function then sometimes cuts across into that strategy work as well, because that's required to get a real understanding of the kind of messaging that you should be putting out in market. Where are we going as a business, if you don't have a target, you don't really know where to direct your messaging. So that's one of the things we work on getting right.

Ron Tomlian: 5:33

Which segues beautifully into our discussion today about aligning the team for business development to

Brenton Gowland: 5:39

read. So aligning to start with aligning really is about communicating, as Ron said, all throughout your business, and what the key thing is with aligning your business development, I believe, is actually creating a business development meeting. Now that sounds really simple, doesn't it? It does. But what's it involve? Well, it involves getting the right people into the room frequently, to be able to communicate what's going on with your clients internally, and your clients externally so that you can share that information with all the relevant parties. So everyone knows what's going on. And realistically, everyone needs to be in some way part of the business development effort within an organisation for it to work effectively. So that's why aligning your staff by getting them together for a meeting is really, really important.

Ron Tomlian: 6:30

You talked about frequently, what does that mean for you?

Brenton Gowland: 6:33

Well, with most of the businesses that I work with, every week, we have a BD meeting, at least, might be on a Tuesday, it might be on a Monday, but it's at some point early in the week, so that we can actually go right, what are the tasks for this week? Who are we going to speak to? What do we need to address to be able to get this pipeline that we spoke about on the last episode, actually in motion? Okay, and

Ron Tomlian: 6:56

who's in that meeting? All right. Well, this

Brenton Gowland: 6:58

is a really interesting question. Because a business might have one BD person, or it might have a few BD people. But it also has other people that deal with your clients in various other roles. There could be account managers, there could be project managers, there could be several different roles. I believe that, in essence, the people that need to be in these meetings are those people have front facing roles with clients, like account managers, or project managers, etc. And you might be choosy, because you might have one person who is across all your projects, and they're in the meeting. But I would highly suggest that if you've got account managers, because part of their role is building relationships, and PD is all about relationships, that you have those people in the meeting. And sometimes you have some upper management in those meetings, and so forth. But as we start to talk about this, you'll see it's not necessarily a requirement, but it in my view, the best practice is to have people who are dealing with clients in a meaningful front facing way for your business.

Ron Tomlian: 8:01

Yeah, I think it's important because it's a communication about what the customer is expecting, and what business could be on the horizon. So that affects your operational side of the business, it certainly affects the finance side of the business in terms of cash flow. So it really requires a lot more people than you think about in terms of business development directly involved with this business development to be in that meeting. Yeah, 100%, it doesn't have to be long either doesn't?

Brenton Gowland: 8:30

Well, it depends how many people you've got. And it might be worth talking about the structure of the meeting, because typically, a meeting with a few people would be about half an hour. But if you've got a team of 678, who are in that meeting, you might have an hour. So as for structure, I would usually break it up into three or four parts. And I would always start with some sort of introduction or motivational piece. Now it might be 10 minutes of just everyone getting together. And if you have it on a Monday, you might talk about what happened on the weekend, you know, just some general chitchat. But then you might talk about what's going on with your clients. But you might also do a bit of training around the CRM or a bit of information about hey, guys are using the spreadsheet correctly, depending on whether you're using a CRM or a spreadsheet, CRM is blue become very, very handy when you have multiple people in a meeting though,

Ron Tomlian: 9:17

so this is all about this. This introduction is all about getting people into the mindset of business

Brenton Gowland: 9:21

development. And one of the other things you might do is there's really, there's really great resources online where often I've played videos or different bits and pieces that can inspire people about the sales function, or stories about how people have got different clients over the line. There's lots and lots

Ron Tomlian: 9:39

of Simon Sinek talking about the importance.

Brenton Gowland: 9:43

Everyone's got to see that at least once if not 50 times. the why behind are what So yeah, that first 10 minutes is just really aligning everyone getting them motivated, so that they can really start to appreciate the BD efforts that they're making in and how they're contributing and how they can contribute

Ron Tomlian: 10:02

and the importance of this to the organisation?

Brenton Gowland: 10:05

Yes, yes, then I would go around the group and give everyone five to 10 minutes to report on what's going on. Now the centrepiece of these meetings would usually be either a spreadsheet if you're using it, or as we discussed the other week, a CRM, if you're using a CRM, it might have within that some sort of sales pipeline, where you've got some sort of arrangement, as we discussed the other week with each of the stages of the business development process, with different clients in each of those containers, buckets, columns, whatever you might call

Ron Tomlian: 10:36

them. And because I like to DJ agonise things CRM, customer relationship management system,

Brenton Gowland: 10:41

that's correct. Customer Relationship Management System. So this enables us to manage our customers. So you might go through the group and each person has their clients come up now, on that point, what I said is each person so it's not just your B D. FM's who are using the CRM, or the spreadsheet, whichever you're using, but it's also your account managers who are using the CRM. So in one particular business that I work with, we have each of the account managers inputting quotes into that system as jobs, when they're being quoted, when they're being approved, then they move them into that post one column, whatever it is, but we have everyone using that same system. And that gives us a much higher level of accuracy on the pipeline if we have everyone contributing.

Ron Tomlian: 11:29

So the CRM, and we talked about this earlier, when we talked about business intelligence, and people are Ganic, CRM can be that repository of knowledge. And the mechanism for importing that knowledge. Yes, for an organisation,

Brenton Gowland: 11:44

you need something to base the meaning around. And it can be just an agenda. But then you've got surplus notes all over the place, if you don't have some centralised location, as you said, to put that information, and if it's a CRM you might have on SharePoint, and everyone just inputs, brief details as they should. But you can isolate even in a CRM, you can just sort the data so that the name of Person X is the only name that showing what they've got in the pipeline, they can talk about those jobs. So that that next five or 10 minutes is where people would go around, and they would bring up information about what jobs they're working on. And then perhaps if they see any opportunities with clients, or perhaps if they see any risks with clients, which is sometimes really important, yeah,

Ron Tomlian: 12:25

obstacles and barriers to achieving what you're trying to achieve.

Brenton Gowland: 12:29

Yep, correct. And then your BD people can share what they're hearing about a market who they're targeting, they can and it's also important when you align the team that sometimes BD people can feel isolated, but if they can work shop with other people, about the clients that they're working on, you'd be surprised at the information that might come back from other members of the team, or just being able to talk about how to approach a different situation,

Ron Tomlian: 12:53

getting their perspective from external and what customers are saying what potential clients are saying and getting their perspective internally about what are some of the priorities in terms of production or service provision.

Brenton Gowland: 13:05

And that's really interesting, because you've got your account managers who are doing the internal BD predominantly, you've got your BD people who are predominantly doing external BD. That can be crossover, of course. But you get then a two way flow of information, where the BD people are learning about what's going on in in the lives of our existing clients. But that also gives them case studies. It also gives them information so that when they're talking to another client, they can go well, actually, for one of our existing clients, we've done that, how does that sound? Would that solve your problem. And if they, if you're not sharing the stories, you're not loading your BD people up with the right information. And on the other side of that coin, you've got the BD people going, I've heard this out in market. I've heard this at an event. I've heard this, this is what's happening externally, this is what we need to watch out for. And then you've got the account managers who are working with clients going you know what I've heard on the grapevine that this is NIS, maybe we should protect ourselves by actioning. What it just gives us a flow of information. So we can as a business be informed and aligned.

Ron Tomlian: 14:11

And the prospective of those BD people are talking to potential new clients, they're obviously looking at solving their problems. But some of those problems can relate back to the problems that existing clients have that you don't even know about. That's right. So understanding what new people or saying new potential clients are saying can help the account managers to look for opportunities that they hadn't even thought about.

Brenton Gowland: 14:34

That's right. And having that flow of information just helps us serve our clients. So much better, way better. So that takes about 10 minutes to go around the room and have a bit of discussion. But as you can see, if you've got 567 People that adds up really quickly. So the more people you have, you might have shorter reports and you might ask people to prepare them earlier but then you'll have discussion points that you might Park and then pull out at the end and go we really should discuss what John brought up or France has brought up or James or whatever the person is, you note it down. And once you've gone through your ports you discuss or you discuss at the time, depending on how you run your meetings. After that, then I would generally go through and talk about who's got blockers, who's available to help other people, blah, blah, blah. And then I would create a list of action points, things that have to be done that week, to get those opportunities that we see in the pipeline, close. If a risk has been brought up, we might say that we need to talk or bring someone else in the business to deal with that. But we need to deal with those things that were done in that meeting.

Ron Tomlian: 15:36

So what's really important is documentation after the meeting, yep, post meeting, so that people understand what their responsibilities, what they're accountable for, before the next meeting, you know, what I'm hearing in all this, in terms of your experiences, business development meetings is that really, it's a lot like the disciplines associated with executive management, and implementing strategic plans that we talked about last time, but focused on an area that is typically been a little bit more ad hoc, which is business developments.

Brenton Gowland: 16:08

Typically, it's sometimes an area of the business that can be isolated. And it's just such an opportunity lost if that's what you allow to keep happening within your business. The BD people go out and do their thing. And I've seen in plenty of businesses, they go out, and they're expected to bring in clients, but then how do they interact with everyone else, and some businesses do it better than others. But if you get a group of people working as a team, the sheer fact is, you will actually achieve a whole lot more if you're aligned. Now, to your point on notes. Absolutely. Every meeting should have notes, but don't make them exhaustive. Your CRM should contain most of the information half the time we're doing notes, or go Person X business as usual. There's nothing that stands out there dealing with that client just dealing with normal issues. But what you'd write down is client X might need attention because

Ron Tomlian: 17:00

it's the management by exception, action,

Brenton Gowland: 17:03

absolutely. Such as such BD person needs help from someone else with from another client to be able to help put a quote together, or whatever the case may be. They're the things that you write down, then you basically just create a list of action points. So your note should really only be one or two pages of dot points with a bunch of action points at the end, and potentially, a breakdown of and I like doing this is, what did we close last week? So it's basically a report and I do a report every week. And it's real simple. What work did we close last week dollar value, I don't even put the clients down, because that's listed in the CRM. So just click a couple of buttons and outcomes or your clients or if you've got a spreadsheet, there should be a place where you can maybe an extra tab where you can put the clients you've won and clients you've lost, so you can analyse it later. But I do what did we close last week, what's in our current active pipeline with our existing clients? What's in our current active pipeline, as in quotes that are out with potential new clients, and maybe what's been won and what's been lost. And that might be it. So you can start to see, oh, gee, we've lost a bid this this quarter, or this week, or we've won a bid this week, or we've got a lot of opportunity there. And then I would share that with the team that were there, just a few notes and who's responsible for what, but also give it to the management, they might have board meetings, or they might have just some general oversight that's required, but you keep them then informed with it. I can Oh, and management and I've seen this happen a bunch? They've read a line and gone Oh, no, that's a really important client to us. I need to go talk to account manager X about that, or I need to go inquire about it. So it just activates the business, to deal with issues and be proactive if you're putting those notes out into the right people. And I

Ron Tomlian: 18:49

noticed you said and I agree with you that management needs to be involved, even if they're not management directly associated with some type of customer activity, although I'm a great believer of, you know, the old saying, if you're not serving the customer, then you're serving someone who is but let's leave that to one side. But I think it's important as well to to engage all the staff. Yeah. And I found indicators as in some type of visual indicator, whether it's a thermometer, you know, where we're aiming for this tag in terms of new business, here we are at halfway through the year and we're at this stage, whether it's some type of needle, on a graph, on a on a dial, whatever it is, sometimes a visual indicator helps keep people up to date with what's going on, and engaged in getting that information that can be so vital to the business development.

Brenton Gowland: 19:41

And that can be a lot of fun too, because I remember, in one business I was working with we put it out wanted posters, and we put a whole heap of client logos that we decided we wanted to get to. And the idea was that if any of the staff and I think there was 30 or 40 staff in this business, if any of the staff knew someone who knew someone from these businesses, the BD people wanted to know. And then there was a whole process if they'd gone anywhere with it, they reported it back through. But these wanted posters be like those old or the old wanted posters in the wild west Wild West. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, once a fantastic, we'd have like 20 logos on the thing. So people would like it'd be in the lunch room, and people would be like, actually, that business, I know someone who works here, I can find out from them who the right person to speak to is fantastic. That's how you include people in the business development process throughout the whole business, you make it creative, and fun.

Ron Tomlian: 20:33

So it's not just allowing customer facing people who need to be in that meeting, as we talked about, it's aligning the entire staff.

Brenton Gowland: 20:39

Yeah. And then if you you really good with, as we talked about the business strategy and communicating, everyone needs to understand their role, because in actually contributing towards growing the business, and if people are doing exceptional work, it makes it so much easier for the business people to sell. So they're contributing, we've done a fantastic job with X client. Let's document what we did create a case study for the BD people to go and sell more of that, because we like doing that work,

Ron Tomlian: 21:05

and edit, it gives an opportunity for everyone to be involved in what we're going to talk about next week, which is winning as a team. Yeah, absolutely. Celebration and,

Brenton Gowland: 21:16

and mode and actually mobilising the right people to help you get the job done. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. One of the things I wanted to say, and I'm talking to CEOs and management here is if you have this process in place, particularly where you've got the notes coming out from BD meetings, where you're reporting on what sold last week and the week before, if these things are happening, and you got a lot of eyes on it, it keeps the BD people and the account managers accountable. And everyone steps up, when you start running meetings like this, people's performance improves, because when they see all of a sudden, oh, wow, there's a pipeline and there's more responsibility in it. And Person X has got a lot more work that they're doing to me dollar value wise, I better get on my front foot and really get active and do some more work, people can start to see where they relate. And we can talk about this at a different point. But it gives you the ability to motivate people if you run these meetings directly.

Ron Tomlian: 22:13

And it raises the profile and the organisation of a critical function, which is business development, and gives them a greater sense of engagement with the rest of the organisation as well.

Brenton Gowland: 22:24

Like we said in the preamble, it also enables information to flow through the business business development. And what I'm really trying to get across here is such a critical part of the business. And it's way more than just selling. And that's what we talked about right back when we introduced this series, business development is not just going out and selling a thing. It's about developing the business, developing the opportunities, we see whether it be opportunities with existing clients or opportunities with new clients. But it's also part of that is getting the information. It's aligning the team. So everyone understands their part in how they contribute to the business, winning more work and driving business development. So everyone's involved and everyone's involved, at least they should be in some way or at least informed about what's going on, as you pointed out.

Ron Tomlian: 23:10

Absolutely. So next time we talk about winning as a team, correct, we do. So I'm looking forward to that, because that involves popping corks, and so on. And that's, that's one of my favourite activities

Brenton Gowland: 23:22

involve popping involved. And we won't give anything away. But I think people get the idea involves celebrating in a way that is right for you. But you got to get to the celebration part. That's where the winning comes in.

Ron Tomlian: 23:33

And that's where the discipline of doing the type of things we're talking about today. And last week, monitoring your pipeline, aligning your staff to execution or implementation of that pipeline. That's why it's so important to do that, so that you can get to the end bid, which is the winning

Brenton Gowland: 23:49

Yeah. And that's what you were reading my mind. Because if that if those other three things aren't in place, making the plan the planning part of as you said, the monitoring and then aligning your team, then the winning just doesn't work. He just the disparate group of people where the BD people own ranges,

Ron Tomlian: 24:07

it won't be long before we'll be finishing each other sentences ranking. So we better stop.

Brenton Gowland: 24:11

That's a bit scary. We better end this episode, because I don't want to be there.

Ron Tomlian: 24:17

So it's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye

Brenton Gowland: 24:19

from me. But before I do go I'm gonna ask if you're listening and you're enjoying podcasts and they're doing something for you. Even if it's me, I just look for one nugget per podcast, please rate us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or whatever your listening platform is. We would really appreciate that. And until next time,

Ron Tomlian: 24:37

it's bye for me and bye for now.