Business Development Skills - 3 Skills You Must Have To Succeed In Business Development

In this video, you're gonna learn the top three essential skills you must have if you wanna be successful in business development. And you wanna make sure you watch this video until the end because if you're just missing one of these three critical skills, then it's gonna be very difficult for you to succeed in this role. What's going on, everybody? My name is Patrick Dang. And before we get started, make sure to give this video a like, subscribe, and turn on notifications if you wanna see more business development and sales videos like this. And so with that said, let's go ahead and get started. All right, so the first skill that you gotta have when it comes to succeeding in business development is creativity. Now, if you watch a lot of YouTube videos about sales and business development, you won't hear too many people talking about this. But from my experience working at Oracle, working at a Y Combinator-backed startup, and owning my own business now, creativity is one of the most important parts of business development. So when you are, let's say, selling a product or service, or you want to reach out to other companies who you wanna do business with, creativity plays a big part because you have to find creative use cases on how to take your product and services and pitch it to other people. Because if you don't pitch it the right way, whether it's finding the right people, or writing the right email or LinkedIn message that really resonates with your audience, well, nobody is gonna take a meeting with you, and you don't have any meetings, well, you don't close any deals. And the truth is, when you are doing business development, whether you own your own business or you're working at another company as an employee, your boss or manager may not always give you creative ideas on who you should target. And a lot of times, you're actually just left on your own to do the work and go on your computer, go on LinkedIn, or go on different websites and try to figure out who exactly you should even reach out to. But without creativity and understanding people's pain points and how you can solve those pains in creative ways, well, you're just gonna be out of luck and you're not gonna get any meetings. So for example, if you, let's say, were selling software to media companies and you just closed a big deal with, let's say, a movie production agency, well, how can you take that information and find more people who are likely to buy? Can you find more movie production companies in your area or around the nation? Or maybe you can see why they use that specific product or service that you're selling, and maybe go into different divisions, let's say like education, finance, real estate. Do they have the same problems that you can solve that were similar to the first person that you sold to, right? And even if it's a completely different industry, if they have the same pain points and you kind of find a creative way to pitch it, well, suddenly you can expand your products and services to other industries that people have never even thought about. But that takes creativity and that really just means connecting the dots. You know, when some person buys over here, can you find another person that will buy over here that kind of matches those same characteristics and match those pain points? And this is something not everybody can do, right? Because a lot of sales and business development people, they're just waiting for someone to tell them what to do. But if you wanna be successful and you wanna thrive in any type of environment, or if you wanna be successful as an entrepreneur, you've gotta have this creativity to connect the dots and see the links that people are not seeing. Now, speaking of connecting dots, the next step that we have to talk about when it comes to the second skill for business development is listening, all right? So listening is one of the most critical factors of business development because, you know, contrary to popular belief, selling, whether it's BD or sales, it's not about just talking and pitching. It's actually 90 or 80% listening to your customer and understanding what they want because if you don't understand your customer and you don't have empathy to, you know, their pains, well, it doesn't matter how great or product or service you are because if you don't know what they want and why they want it, you know, you're just kind of knocking door to door seeing if somebody will buy, but you're not understanding why exactly they will buy. You gotta ask questions, listen to their problems, understand aspirations. You know, where is it that they wanna go? What's stopping them from getting there? And how does your product or service help them break through their mental barriers or break through any barriers that they have and really push them to their goals that they want to achieve? Because when you do that, you're not even pushing a sale, right? You're not forcing anything on somebody. You're actually just listening to what they already want. This is something they're already gonna do and you're aligning your product or service in a way that clearly demonstrates on how that if they purchase this product or service, it's gonna be a lot easier for them to achieve the goal that they were already looking to accomplish. And again, it's about using your creativity. You know, how exactly can you position your product and service in a way where people make that connection and they think, oh, if I buy this person's product, I can get what I want. So you know what? I think I should buy this guy's product, right? So it's like they're making the decision to invest in you. You're not pushing them to buy. You're not forcing them to do anything. They are making an investment in you and really making an investment in themselves to achieve their goals. And the last skill that you gotta have if you wanna be successful in business development is grit, right? Sales and business development is not necessarily an easy job. You basically face some type of rejection almost every single day, whether it's prospecting or you're on the phone, you're pitching and the client says no. It happens all the time. And the majority of the people that you talk to are not going to buy your product and service, right? Because they may not be a good fit. And there's gonna be random moments of bad situations that happen. I remember for me, back in my sales career, I was doing quite a big deal and I was working with a customer for about two months. And then all of a sudden, the customer's like, you know what, Patrick? We really like you. We like your product and service. You've been really good to us but we're gonna go with your competitor, right? And just like that, I lost the deal and I didn't even know the competitor was involved. Probably my fault for not asking if they were talking to anybody else. I assumed they were just talking to me but they weren't and they went with the competitor and that really struck a blow because it took me, it takes a lot of work to do those long type of deals. Now, when it comes to grit, those things happen, right? Those things happen all the time, right? You just learn from it, understand what you could have done better. Like I could have qualified better. I can see if either working with competitors, things like that, I could have done those things better but I didn't and it's okay because moving forward, now I started doing those things. So no matter what you're selling, whatever your product and service is, know that you're gonna face rejection, know that you're gonna fail a lot and know that a lot of things are not gonna work but you have to have the grit to continue through it and you have to be okay with accepting rejection because that's part of the game of business sales and business development. So ask yourself, are you coming into work every day with that mentality and dealing with these things and accepting them? Can you keep your mental health in check so that when somebody says no, do you feel emotionally hurt or do you just let it slide off your back? Can you control your emotions, whether it's at work or controlling your emotions and not thinking about the problems when you're living your personal everyday life because you don't want your problems in work to bleed in your personal life because it will affect the overall quality of the results you can produce. If you wanna be successful in business development, you gotta have the grit to keep pushing forward, strengthen your emotional intelligence, strengthen your emotional stability so that when things get bad, you don't crack under pressure and you can continue to move on. And so with that said, those are gonna be the three skills when it comes to being successful in business development. And again, if you're missing one of these skills, it's gonna be very difficult for you to thrive in this type of role. So if you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a like, subscribe, turn on notifications and let me know in the comments what's your number one takeaway that you got from this video. And if you wanna see more business development videos like this, make sure to check out my other videos. And so with that said, hope you guys learned a little something and I will see you guys in the next one.