Driving Business Development - Winning as a team

Today's episode is the final in the driving business development series and the topic is Winning as a Team. So our hosts Brenton Gowland and Ron Tomlian talk about how to activate your whole team to help your business win new work.

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

• Why winning as a team is important?
• Framing sales in a way that makes sense to everyone on your team
• Winning as a team with existing clients
• Winning as a team with new prospective clients
• Every one in your team is an asset
• Multi-year strategies
• Celebrating as a team
• 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 winning as a team. Ron talks about the fact that everyone in your business has a role to play in business development. And I steal a saying from Ron that perfectly describes the role BD people playing coordinating your team to win together. 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 it's great to have you here with us. But it's been three weeks since our last episode, Ron, and you've been away?

Ron Tomlian: 0:33

Yes. I've been on holiday up in far north Queensland. So good to be back. Having said that, and good to be back in the saddle with our Business Builders podcast, because we got out of cadence there didn't we!

Brenton Gowland: 0:45

We did it was because you went on holiday.

Ron Tomlian: 0:47

I'm sorry. I have a life.

Brenton Gowland: 0:49

You do mines coming out towards the end of the year when we've finished our episodes. So I won't cause a break. Although I might, I might decide to go off on a holiday, you should have a work life balance, should you? Absolutely,

Ron Tomlian: 1:00

absolutely. And we can do a whole section on that. If you want. We should, we should better school you up in that first.

Brenton Gowland: 1:06

And I'll put everything into practice and go out and and do everything you say including the holidays so that I can get back into the into the swing of things this year. But anyway, yes, if you're listening, our last episode was three weeks ago, we will get back into the cadence now and pop a couple of extra ones in there. So we get up to date. But it's great to have you're listening. And this week is our final episode in driving business development series. So we've had four episodes in the series, planning your business development. So making your business development plan that was a few weeks back if you haven't listened to it, monitoring your business development, which is all about creating a sales pipeline and and managing that aligning your team, which is all about creating effective BD meetings. And today, Ron, what are we doing?

Ron Tomlian: 1:50

We're doing winning as a team yet.

Brenton Gowland: 1:52

And that's so important. Because if you're really serious about business development, you want to make sure that business development includes your whole team and not just your BD people. Is that correct? That's right.

Ron Tomlian: 2:04

But before we do that, who is our sponsor?

Brenton Gowland: 2:09

We've got two sponsors, Ron, we've got SA Business Builders, who are

Ron Tomlian: 2:13

a group of people who get together to look at in depth business networking. Yep. So

Brenton Gowland: 2:19

we got SA Business Builders, did you adapt co MAY Yes, adapt CO is a business where we basically do outsource CMO, we come in and we help you build your marketing function within your business. And then we make ourselves redundant in the process. So that you've got an effective, fully functional marketing team, by the time we've finished with you all sounds

Ron Tomlian: 2:37

good to me, indeed.

Brenton Gowland: 2:41

So again, getting back into our topic for today, winning as a team winning as a team. So let's start with why is it important to win as a team run?

Ron Tomlian: 2:50

Well, to my way of thinking, it's important that everyone in the business understands, and it's not generally understood, I think across business, that everyone has a part to play in sales. That's right. Everyone has a part to play in sales. The difficulty is that a lot of people hate the idea of being in sales. So I prefer to think of it and a lot of people find this more acceptable, how do we help people? How do we how can we help more people? Not? How can we make a sale? That's a that's a sort of very transactional way of looking at it. But how can we get out there and help more businesses or more customers solve their problems with what we do? And that's a that's a everyone has a part to play in that in an organisation. I guess

Brenton Gowland: 3:35

there's two points there. The one point or one of those two points is the fact that we really want to include a whole team. But the second point is framing it in such a way that everyone understands that that's what I'm hearing by the, you know, helping more businesses, etc. Yeah,

Ron Tomlian: 3:50

unfortunately, and we've talked about this before sales is a dirty word for some people. And there's no organisation, whether they're poor profit nonprofit that doesn't need to help other people. That's why organisations exist, they exist to help other people or help other organisations or provide a solution to their problems. So if you think of it that way everyone in the organisation is involved in in that process, including the BD people, but everyone else, so everyone has a part to play in finding more people that we can assist and help solve their problems.

Brenton Gowland: 4:27

Just a quick aside, why do you think sales is such a dirty word?

Ron Tomlian: 4:30

Well, I've to a large extent, I think because people are tired of being sold to rather than thinking about other people out there who can help me with my my issues, my problem, everyone's got problems, everyone's got needs, everyone's got wants, soda organisations, and they'd like to be in control of the process where they find the solution, rather than being sold to, which is a I suppose, an old way of looking at it, where the person And who has the service determines when you're going to get something? It's putting the customer back in control?

Brenton Gowland: 5:06

Yeah. And I think one of the big problems with why people don't like sales is when you meet people who are pushing a sale, rather than looking at what you're talking about, which is finding a solution to your problems. Yeah. And there's, gosh, we could do a whole episode on that. But so let's just agree for this episode, that we're framing things because, look, the truth of the matter is, we wouldn't be in business, if we didn't have sales, we wouldn't be in business, if we didn't win larger clients, etc, etc. But it's not so much. To me, it's not so much sales, it's, it's being able to find clients, you can provide service to that require at NIDA, as you're saying, and I think that's massively important. So in my view, there are two fundamental areas that will seem very logical when we talk about them, that we focus on when we're winning as a team. Now, one is existing clients. And the second is prospective clients. So if we give you an example, talking about existing clients, if you for instance, don't consider those clients and don't give them attention, and you lose a client, there's a saying, and we've talked about this a little bit before it cost you at least 10 times as much to win a new client as it does to keep on, you really need to be always, in a sense, looking at maintaining that client and continuously doing business development with them. Now, business development means a lot of things as we've been talking about, it doesn't mean that we're going and winning a new piece of work all the time. But it means that we're developing a relationship, it means we're developing opportunities, etc, etc. And I think we really need to focus on our existing clients, if we want to keep those clients,

Ron Tomlian: 6:49

keep them and develop the potential to do more to help those people.

Brenton Gowland: 6:55

So if we're winning as a team, with existing clients, what are some of the things we should be thinking about?

Ron Tomlian: 7:01

Well, the first is, a lot of organisations will say, look, it would be great if we only had one point of contact with with a client. That might sound like a good idea. But I'm a great advocate of the concept of multi level relationships. Yes. And be careful that we're not talking about multi level marketing, which is a completely different concept altogether. Multi Level relationships means we have people at different points in the organisation who are acting with clients at different functions in their organisation,

Brenton Gowland: 7:30

when you think about it, and an analogy that I like to think about is like building roots, like the roots of a tree into a business, the deeper those roots go, the harder it is to up in that tree. Yes, absolutely. So when you build multi level relationships, it's like building a really, really solid foundation with a client such that the classic is when you have a single point of contact, that single point of contact is dealing with one person, that person leaves the business, another person takes a role, but they've got preferred suppliers from other businesses, and all of a sudden, what happens to you, you're out the door, correct, and you can't do anything about it unless you've done the groundwork. So when we're talking about winning as a team, it's making sure that the directors have a relationship with the directors in the company of tech people have relationships with the tech people, different people at different levels of your company, are utilised to build different levels of relationship. And the beautiful thing about that is, if you then have, you know, maybe you have quarterly yearly catch up meetings about that client, I would say quarterly of your major clients, you talk about that, and the people at different levels of business share that information. And you develop a really amazing understanding of that client. And it's very difficult. If you're providing a quality service, regardless of the price, if you are delivering a quality service to a client, and you've got an incredible amount of IP, because you've developed you spent all this time getting to know them, it's a very difficult decision for that client to decide to move on. And we can talk about customer retention strategies later, but some other day because there's a formula for, you know, customer retention. And it basically talks about the fact that if there's easy first steps to move away from a client that they're more likely to, you know, be able to go well, there's no easy first steps if you have to replace such a high level of IP. So you really create a, you know, an environment where these people are almost like dependent on you.

Ron Tomlian: 9:25

Yeah. And if you're switching that to a different frame, if you understand your clients better and you understand what's important to them, then you're able to help them more. So what is price important to them? Or is delivery time? Is lead time for new products important to them? Or is reliability? What are the things that are critical their organisation, if you understand that you can provide it in such a way that they are getting better value from what you're offering. So think of it in a positive way as well not just a How do we put the suckers in? can keep them there?

Brenton Gowland: 10:02

Well, it's actually how do we serve them better. And I've seen it recently with some of the clients, I've got that their clients, the ones that are focusing their attention on and really making an effort to streamline their service, create a better relationship, they're spending more and more. Now, that's always not always going to be the case. But the better the service you can provide, the more you understand their business, the more you make it easy for them, etc, the more likely you are to do more work, not because you're putting the if you're putting the suckers into them, as you say, and just in a sense, taking money because it's there and you can, you're not going to have that relationship forever, because someone's going to realise that at some point that the relationships built on basically extracting as much value in one direction, the value has to go into direction. Absolutely,

Ron Tomlian: 10:47

absolutely. And when people understand and trust, that the value is flowing in both directions, then there's a better relationship. And as you say, it's harder to break that relationship. Yep.

Brenton Gowland: 10:59

So if we're talking about winning as a team and focusing on existing clients, like we talked about, there's multi level relationships. There's also spending time with our suppliers. We talked about that earlier this morning in our little pre catch up to our podcast. Yes. So what about suppliers, Ron, well, suppliers

Ron Tomlian: 11:17

are supplying you and presumably your competitors as well. And they have information, they know what's going on. And so having relationships with them, where there's a level of trust that they can give you information that's pertinent to your relationships with your customers, and the industry in general, that gives you a level of asset, you like intelligence asset that goes beyond just the transaction, you're, I'm buying this from you, so that that information becomes important in how you service your customers as well. So having information about what's going on in the industry, what other competitors are doing, what other customers have those competitors are doing is critical information.

Brenton Gowland: 11:59

Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, it will very often not be the BD people who are dealing with these suppliers, because the suppliers will be working in the data that I had the business with other staff. So that brings us on to the to, you know, really emphasising what this is all about if you want to win as a team, if you want to really retain clients, because that's the internal BD part, continually developing that relationship. Because any relationship that you don't give attention to starts to fail, it starts to get issues, it starts to get problems in must give the most important relationships attention. So we were talking about earlier this morning, that we need to really build into the business, a cultural awareness that everyone has a part to play. In the business development process, everyone has a part to play in the sales process. And I think from what you're saying earlier, it's again, how you communicate that, you know,

Ron Tomlian: 12:50

I mean, there's plenty of strategies that you can employ to win business and so on. But But I was just listening to Dr. John Newton, talk about culture. And culture is so important in a business to develop something that other people you can, you can have products that are interchangeable between one supplier and other that you can have services that other people can replicate, what they can't replicate, is the culture of your business. And if that culture is about supplying better value than everybody else, and everybody understands their part in that culture, then it's very difficult for a competitor to replicate that. So it's critically important that everyone understands, and it is part of your culture, that the customer comes first, and that we are providing better and better and increasing value all the time to that customer. And that everyone, whether you're in the back office accounts, or whether you are in the front line selling everyone has a part to play in that business development process. So if

Brenton Gowland: 13:52

you want to win as a team, what I'm hearing is we need to build it into our culture. Absolutely. And that takes a bit of time. Okay, so external clients, in other words, new prospects that we wanting to win, so winning as a team, there's different ways you look at it, but similar, yet different, right? So we'll look at some of those strategies now. And one thing, because again, if you're listening to us, what we do when we're doing this podcast is we go and meet for a coffee. And we have a discussion about all these things. And we came up with about four things that were really integral to winning as a team with prospective clients. And we really just two really important ones. And I'll just bring them out, we can talk about them separately. But the two really important ones is understanding that every single role, every single role in your business is an asset to the sales process or an asset to the business development process, because you use people as assets in the building relationships in order to win work. The second one is looking at multi year strategies, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And understanding that Rome wasn't built in a day but if Do you want to really, you know, win clients in a consistent manner you need to do, you need to really be thinking long term and have the patience and in a sense position your staff and, and your relationships as chess pieces to actually start to bring these relationships to the, to the front, or to an important level where you can actually win where and we'll talk about that in detail. But those two were the most important things, and everything comes out of that. So maybe we'll start with everyone is an asset. Yeah, and

Ron Tomlian: 15:31

quite frankly, I think a lot of organisations don't understand that different levels in a client organisation want to speak to different people. And so everyone becomes important in terms of influencing a someone in the organisation to develop those multi relationships.

Brenton Gowland: 15:50

Are you sure that everyone's not interested? Because I would say, you know, we were talking about earlier with the looking at existing clients, it's a cultural thing. And I think sometimes BD people don't realise or don't feel that they've got the ability to bring someone in because they're out on their own, you got to go and win work, that's your job. And sometimes in a really, in a business where they're not focused on not really understanding the sales process, the management don't want a bar of sales, they're just bringing the clients and will work on them. And that's just so wrong.

Ron Tomlian: 16:19

Absolutely. Because those, as you say, everyone is an asset, if you've got a client, who is interested in the technical reasons why your service or your product is better use the technical people within your organisation for the explanations rather than having to think that you can do it yourself. The only way those technical people are amenable to going and speaking the clients is if they understand, well, that's part of my responsibility, correct. If there's a resistance to that I'm not a salesperson type of attitude, then they're not going to speak effectively to the client. And you are not utilising the assets that exist within your organisation to win work. So everyone, it goes back to the same thing, everyone has to understand they have a part to play actively or reactively.

Brenton Gowland: 17:09

And that comes down to the people leading the business, particularly the person at the top, because, you know, there's that saying a fish rots from the head, blah, blah, well, in the opposite fashion, you know, the business thrives when the leader, you know, instils the right culture into the business in the right expectations into the business. Well,

Ron Tomlian: 17:26

interestingly, many years ago, there was a speaker who came up with TEC TEC chair in the United States, Dan Wurttemberg. And he said there's there's actually only three roles of the CEO. The chief team builder, yes. And that makes sense. Chief Marketing Officers chief sales officer, and chief strategist. Yeah, that second one chief sales officer, well, we're gonna see your doesn't go out and sell Yes, he does, because he represents the organisation. And that's where sales begin.

Brenton Gowland: 17:55

I still remember. And I've told this story before. But unfortunately, the person who told me this is passed away to young, but this person ran a national company, I was working with him and so forth. And he sat me down one day, and we were just talking about, you know, winning work and strategies because he was coaching me. And he said, Brenton, nobody sells like the boss.

Ron Tomlian: 18:16

Or how many people as a customer, their immediate reaction when they they're not getting what they want, or they're not getting the answers they want. Say I want to speak to the CEO, I want to speak to the boss, people like to know that they have access to the senior person, because he's the decision maker, or she's the decision maker within the organisation. If

Brenton Gowland: 18:34

you're going to be able to bring a client on board, it's about knowing the right time to do that. You don't want to do it too early and waste the CEOs time. And if you bring them in too early, you sometimes devalue the role of CEO or managing director or owner within the business. So it comes down to those business development people, the frontline people that we've talked about in the past, really understanding that they and this is probably important with the external clients is the business development. People are like the thermometer with, you know, the client that we're trying to bring on board, they need to know when to deploy the assets,

Ron Tomlian: 19:06

the the orchestra or the the conductor of the orchestra.

Brenton Gowland: 19:10

I like that very good. That is a great term for business development person, the conductor of the orchestra.

Ron Tomlian: 19:16

Oh, don't don't Don't say that, because I use that for SEO. So do you know okay,

Brenton Gowland: 19:20

we'll just say this once in this podcast, but I like to, I like to give good BD people, their their credit, in a sense, because it is a hard hard roll, which is why it's a dirty word because people don't want to do it.

Ron Tomlian: 19:32

I think the other thing too, is understanding that it's not just the BD people knowing that they should be employing these assets. It's having the assets ready to be employed. And that's about attitude and culture. Yeah. And it's about all ties in together

Brenton Gowland: 19:49

some of those other topics we were talking about, like aligning your team so that there's the BD in the sales meeting. Some of the things we were talking about in there. If you haven't listened, it's the last episode. So go back and listen to it. Some of the items we talked about in there like sharing information from the BD meeting, using your account managers knowledge of the clients and actually having to a kind of communication, that really is part of preparing the team, because you should be when you're running these meetings, preparing the right people within the business, that we've got an opportunity come up with trying to qualify that at the moment, once it's qualified, we need to get some tech people in there to come and have a chat so that they can understand what's going on. Maybe we need our CFO to talk to their CFO, maybe we need the director to go in at some point, or the owner or the managing director or whatever. But it's, it's prepping people, like you said that comes from those BD meetings

Ron Tomlian: 20:39

and having those people willing and able to help. Yep.

Brenton Gowland: 20:42

So multi year strategies. Ron, let's talk about that for a while. So winning as a team. So having the patience and having the direction to be able to do this over time.

Ron Tomlian: 20:54

I think a lot of times people you know, for instance, one thing that I hear from people are, there's a tender on. Okay, so we can't talk to the client. We shouldn't be talking, they won't let go, they won't let us talk to them. Well, if that's the rules, and in some organisations, that's the way it runs, it's too late anyway. So you should have been talking to them. But if in the past, you should be thinking about when is their cycle of buying? And when should we be talking to them to influence that that the next cycle they're buying? So if you miss out, you haven't heard about a tender for an organisation, what you should be thinking about is okay, when's the next cycle? And how do we start the process of influencing, and that doesn't happen in one meeting. It often happens if you really want a client, and they've just gone out to tender and you know, it's going to be three years, until they tender again, you should be starting to talk to them now about what they're looking for, at different levels in the organisation, what are their needs? What problems can you help them solve, so that by the time it gets to that process, where they aren't allowed to talk to suppliers, you've already got all the information, you need to be able to help them solve their problems? Well,

Brenton Gowland: 22:11

if we're talking about multi year strategies, I think it actually comes down to an attitude. So we're in this for the long haul, not the short haul. So even if you get a tender and you lose it, right, so how many times when you lose a tender to people in the business just get so disappointed and and then then reflects in the way you talk to the client, once they you know, when the client rings you and say, Hey, you're unsuccessful. Everyone's sour grapes around the office, sometimes you can be sour grapes with the client. And that destroys future opportunity. So having the right attitude means that that's just a blip in the highway. Yes,

Ron Tomlian: 22:43

that brings to a good point when you lose to someone else. That's an opportunity for learning. Yeah, why did we lose? You could do some internal analysis. Why? Why did we lose that client? Why didn't we win that business? It means there's an opportunity for looking for information for the next time around, it gets you that much closer. If you think about it as this as an opportunity for learning. I actually

Brenton Gowland: 23:06

remember there was a client, I remember at one point, you have an opportunity for feedback after 10 are massively important. And it's really important that you know, because the person who's ringing you from that client is going to be sometimes nervous to be ringing people to tell them that they haven't got the gig, which is why sometimes it drags its feet for for that to happen. I've always made a policy of I'm just going to be really nice to them. Thank you. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity. It was great. Can we get some feedback? Is it possible to have a meeting, and I remember one client, we gave that feedback, and we congratulated him on winning that on selecting that particular client and wish them all the best for that. And we wanted to keep a relationship. And I remember they sat there in shock going, Are you sure? Is this what you really want? I'm like, Yeah, well, I want to get to know you as a client. I think you've based on what you've told me, you've chosen the right person for the job. So we just want to learn as much as we can about you. And then that then issues a relationship. And if you're talking multi year strategy, and you get to know that business you go on at different times, the next time the tender comes up, you're well known within that organisation you're liked. They know a bit about you. So there's already kind of a familiarity and that really helps. Well,

Ron Tomlian: 24:14

I like to think of it as keeping the door open. Yeah. As opposed to what's happened to me in the past when I've had to tell people, they haven't got the business and they've been quite nasty, or they've been very vindictive about the customer the choice that I've made. That's closing the door. Yeah, I mean, how many times have you heard people say, under those circumstances? I'm never using them. Yeah, because they've they've demonstrated a part of their culture

Brenton Gowland: 24:41

or even worse, and I'm never going to do business with that person again. So that person goes to another business and that whole other businesses besmirched because of that one person, so you got to remove the emotion and think long term and again,

Ron Tomlian: 24:55

it's it's a cultural thing. Okay, we haven't won this businessman there. Aspen opportunities in the future, we can still help you. So let's keep the door open.

Brenton Gowland: 25:05

So I want to talk about just quickly, when we talk about multi year strategies, I want to talk about an example I've seen with a business, this business won all of its work through tenders, but it wouldn't get the work unless they were invited to be part of the tenders. So long story short, they had to reach a certain type of person, right. And these people went to an event. So they set up an event strategy, where what they would do is they would go to this event where all these people were that they needed. And it was City Council's from around Australia that they needed to deal with. And what they did is they sponsored the event, set up their booth at the back. And you know how when you go to events, and you set up those tradeshow kind of things at the back, people walk through, and there's always people in the booth wanting to sell to you and so forth. And it's kind of like, do I talk to them? Do I not? Am I just gonna get sold to or blah, blah, blah? Well, they had this policy where they went, you know what, we'll set up the booth, we'll put it in a video, we'll put some pamphlets, all of the staff, go sit in the conference, and just get to know people don't sell. So how do you think that helped them? Oh,

Ron Tomlian: 26:07

well, at the end of the day, they got to understand what the problems were. And again, it gets back to that attitude of are we here to sell, and push, or we're here to help solve people's problems.

Brenton Gowland: 26:18

So what happened is it took about one to two years of going to these events, you know, consistently and people starting to see these people have started a part of the woodwork. And these people dressed all in black with their signature and they became known as the Men in Black in this conference, it was quite good, actually good branding anywho, they would go to these conferences, get to know everyone. And after 123 Times have seen these people not really being sold to just getting to know people understanding the business trust kind of was there. And all of a sudden, the tenders started coming split by bit by bit by bit to the point where basically, every council that they wanted around Australia was sending them tenders, because they'd built the relationships over 234 years, whether they won them all or not is a different story. They won their fair share, but they wouldn't want anything if they didn't build those relationships over 123 years.

Ron Tomlian: 27:11

So it's understanding that yeah, for a lot of business that you get from customers, whether it's retail customers or business to business customers, it takes time to build that level of trust and

Brenton Gowland: 27:24

multiple different contact points. So the boss would go to these they would have Yes, BD people going to these, they would also have some of their, you know, managers going to these, etc, etc. So it's about involving the whole team. So is there any other bits that you would think we should be talking about when it comes to winning as a team with prospective clients?

Ron Tomlian: 27:43

Well, if we're going to get everyone to think of themselves as business development or involved in the business development sales process, then we've got to think about how when we celebrate a win, we involve everyone in that. Yeah. Because if we say, oh, everyone's involved in sales, but only the salespeople get to celebrate when they get a win. And that's, that doesn't really sit well. Correct. It doesn't demonstrate that yes, you are involved. So like having two sets of values. Yes. So you need to celebrate as a whole team, not just the salespeople. That means the salespeople need to step aside and let their ego leave the egos at the door and say, Guys, we all want this not just

Brenton Gowland: 28:27

well, that actually means the Beatty people need to be leaders, leaders within the business, right? Because they encouraged and they build up people and they include people and that's a leadership role. So they need to be influences and leaders. But yeah, so take everyone out to dinner and so forth, as well. But that on the other hand also means managing people when you lose a client, because you know how he said sour grapes, after you've, you know, gone in for a big tender or something, there is a lot of work that goes into that. You can be really disappointed. I've seen teams get really depressed when they lose big gigs. So if you're going to include everyone in the winning, you got to include everyone in the losing and in some fashion that debrief and filter information through the company and and let people know it's okay. And that's why the multi use strategies become important. Yeah, I

Ron Tomlian: 29:14

think it's important to emphasise, then that doesn't mean flogging everybody when we lose. Oh, yes, equally, it means getting people to understand this is an opportunity to learn. Yes. And this is an opportunity to get one step closer to winning the next time.

Brenton Gowland: 29:29

Yeah, and like I said, if we're thinking multi year strategy, that means that we go well, this was step one in winning this client. So we're not successful. What have we learned? Now that we know what you know a lot more about the company? How do we now go in and build a better relationship over time? Who do we mobilise? Do we get other staff members out networking because realistically another thing is you don't have to sell but you should have your staff going to seminars and events and so forth. And and really To try and encourage them just to build business friendships or to build connections and so forth, not to sell just to get to know people, because when you get to know people, if you're going out and not everyone is going to do this. But as you get to know, people, the information flows back, you build trust, in a broader sense, your business gets a good reputation, because you've got the staff who are going out and talking about you in different places, it's important to include everyone in every step of the process. But communication becomes a key thing and

Ron Tomlian: 30:29

coordination within the organisation, which we talked about last time in aligning your team.

Brenton Gowland: 30:34

Yeah, great. So that's pretty much it. If you want to win as a team, really, the key takeaway for me from that whole thing is that you have to build it into the culture

Ron Tomlian: 30:44

and work at it over time. It doesn't happen overnight.

Brenton Gowland: 30:48

Yeah. And sometimes I think the thing to encourage people with when we talk about multi year strategy, some people go well, I need to win work. Now, important thing to understand is that if you've got your BD people out there, and you've, if you're doing all the things we're talking about, there are going to be some clients that you're in with a very short lead time because the stars align. And there'll be some clients that will be longer term plays, and they might be much bigger clients. But you need to have back to managing your pipeline clients or potential clients at several different points in the business development cycle.

Ron Tomlian: 31:20

And there is always now I've got to get customers now always. So think of your now in two years time or three years time, when you're saying that in three years, we're going to win customers. Now. If you've done the work beforehand, yes, it's that much more likely to get

Brenton Gowland: 31:36

excellent. So look, that's our series wrapped up for driving business development. But in the next couple of episodes, we'll be interviewing a couple of BD professionals to get their take on how we put this all into action, just to round things out. So I'm looking forward to that. Indeed. So if you've been listening and enjoying this series, we would ask you to rate us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or whatever your listening platform is. We really enjoy your feedback when we get it and we really enjoy you writing us not those five star ratings. Even even a four and a half star and you do that you do a fool but anyway, if you're out there and listening we hope you have a great couple of weeks

Ron Tomlian: 32:20

reset a business development pitch I'm not quite sure that was a support

Brenton Gowland: 32:24

your local podcasters pitch wasn't it? And if you're listening internationally and we can see you because we get all the stats we know there's a bunch of you please give us a rating. We would love to hear your feedback as well. See you

Unknown: 32:36

next time Brenton bye for now on