Business Development

It's All About Timing

Business development is all about three things -- relationships, value and timing. Today, we're going to discuss timing.

Deals have their own pace. To bring one to life, you have to figure out what that pace is, and match it. If you try to push it faster, you're going to alienate the person on the other side of the table. If you're too slow, or unresponsive, you're going to have the same result. The trick is to get it right.

There aren't any hard-and-fast rules for this. A lot of it is instinct, judgment and experience. That being said, however, almost everyone can figure out how fast to try to go. You simply have to pay attention, and more importantly, get your own ego out of the way. The deal is not about what you want. It's about what your opposite number wants, and whether/how what you're offering can deliver it. They're going to work at their own pace, and in their own way.

An example: I have been working on a large project that's been incubating for six months. The company we're in discussions with moves very slowly, very deliberately. They build consensus, and they're in a conservative industry. This project would be a big step forward for them, and would involve business models that are new to them.

Trying to get them to move quickly would be a mistake. It would also probably be impossible. However, it's also very possible for this project to sit and collect dust until it was institutionally forgotten. We need to gently remind them that we're out here without pushing them.

The solution? We're going to offer them some help. Because the technology and the business model at issue are new, and unfamiliar to them, they  're almost certainly having some challenges in analyzing the potential of this project, and the regulations and laws they need to be aware of. We're experts at this, and can help them think these issues through more quickly and more thoroughly.

This offer has two purposes. The first, of course, is to help them untie this know. The second, though, is to gently, politely remind them that we're out here. Nothing more aggressive than "Hey, don't forget about us." Anything more would be pushing too hard, but we cannot at this stage afford to to let them forget us.

Not too fast. Not too slow. Timing is everything.

Test them

The key to successful business development isn't simply hearing the word "yes". It's hearing it fast. You need to know, quickly, whether someone you're in discussions with is serious about doing business, or whether they're not. If they're not, you need to move on.

As an example, I recently spent over two months in discussions with someone at Yahoo!, the Internet company, about a project. We must have had five meetings, and endless discussions, emails and so on about it. I finally decided to try to pin them down -- what were they planning to do? What kind of budget did they have?

The answer turned out to be nothing, and nothing. My entire investment of time and effort had been a waste of time -- time I could have spent doing something a lot more productive.

As early as possible, try to get some tangible evidence of whether or not the person you're talking with is serious about working with you (or someone). The best way to do this is to inquire about their budget -- either their personal authority, or the process of getting something approved, paid for and in process. If they can, and will, commit to putting some real money into the project, keep talking. If they can't, or won't, move on -- politely.

A Great Site, Perfectly Executed, and a Great Site, Very Badly Executed

Take a look at these two sites:

www.mofo.com

The new Morrison & Foerster site. Beautifully designed (I'm amazed a big law firm let something so beautiful, striking, modern and designed actually get built), well-written, organized, everything. And, since the design IS simple, the site loads instantly, which makes it a real treat to navigate.

www.arnell.com

This site, for Peter Arnell's ad agency, is even more beautiful than the MoFo site. Well-written, designed, and so on. But -- and this drives me nuts:

Because the site is grossly overdesigned, the video stream keeps freezing, which completely ruins the effect of the site.

Why do people keep doing this?

I'm using a Comcast broadband connection -- around 12 megabits per second. Reasonably fast.

The "Overview" section of the Arnell site, which is the home page, features a gorgeous video introduction to the firm. Arnell is a filmmaker, among other things, so the thing is terrific. But whoever built and/or set up the site, either failed Usability 101 or is just unconcerned with the people who actually will use it. I'm sure the video stream works flawlessly when it's running off a server inside the firm's offices. But when it's viewed out here in the real world, it pauses. It freezes. All the careful, beautiful edits are completely beside the point. It hung three times in the first ninety seconds.

And then I clicked away from it.

Networking -- the balancing act

When I teach networking, or even discuss it with clients, something that keeps coming up again and again and again and again is the idea that it's kind of sleazy. Lawyers in particular absolutely despise the idea that they're developing or maintaining a relationship with someone simply to make money.

Well. I have been reading a book lately that addresses this issue. It's about behavioral economics, and it's called Predictably Irrational. It's written by Dan Ariely, who maintains a fascinating blog.

Behavioral economics is kind of the bastard child of psychology and economics, and deals with all the ways in which human behavior -- which frequently makes no sense at all -- affects economics, transactions and business in general. A lot of economics is based on the idea that people are rational when they buy things -- they figure out the logical reasons for buying what they buy, and they follow those reasons.

People of course, are not remotely rational, and by acknowledging that and studying how it influences transactions, you can shed a lot of light on how economics actually works in the real world -- the one we all happen to live in. For example, people tend to be incredibly influenced if something is free -- way, way more than logic would suggest.

As part of his discussion, Ariely spends a chapter talking about social norms vs. market norms. This is the networking issue. Social norms are, well, social norms. The way people behave as friends, the patterns of relationships, the expectations we have of our roles, responsibilities and so on. Social norms are very, very strong. Market norms are nowhere near so nice -- they're the rules of the market, where things are bought and sold, and people calculate prices and benefits.

When these things collide, you have trouble. For example, when you leap up at Thanksgiving dinner, and offer your mother-in-law, who made the dinner, $400 in payment for the great dinner, she will be deeply offended. You're injecting market norms into a social situation, where social norms ordinarily would dictate behaviors.

Networking is exactly this situation. Friendships are the ultimate social norm -- and they're very powerful. Because of this, people get extremely twitchy when anything remotely resembling a market norm is injected into the situation -- or appears to.

The point of this post isn't to provide an answer. It's to recommend, strongly, that you check out this book. The chapter on social and market norms is a tremendously useful, lucid and revealing one, and will do a great deal to show you how to think about this stuff -- and what to do.

Just. Do. It. Dammit

I am a huge fan of Robert Ringer. Ringer is an author, business strategist and semi self-help guy who's read a LOT of Ayn Rand, and whose basic outlook is a kind of hybrid between objectivism and serious, hard-core conservatism. He doesn't think much of Obama.

He's written several books, and one of them, with the unsubtle title Action: Nothing Happens Until Something Moves, really had an impact on me this week. The basis for this is pretty simple, and, like a lot of simple things, also unexpectedly profound.

The whole premise of the book is that the real magic, the real impact, in business, comes from what you actually do. What it doesn't come from -- and this was the real "Aha" for me -- is what goes on inside your head. It does not matter at all what you think, how you feel, what you remember, want, deserve or fear. None of these things are going to make any difference in the slightest to you or anyone else.

Picking up a phone and calling someone can make a difference, cause something to happen. Thinking about them probably won't. You can write the most brilliant memo in the world, but until you actually send it, it's as if it didn't exist. And so on.

Particularly when it comes to business development, success comes from the consistent, physics-like application of action to the world. You close a deal because you stick with it. You get the deal because you make the phone calls. And so on. 

On one hand, this is all ridiculously obvious. Yet, it also directly contradicts a lot of the habits and magical thinking human beings constantly indulge in. This stuff is, in my opinion, the single biggest barrier to successful business development for almost everyone. We think about it. We talk about it. We have various feelings about it. But usually, we would prefer, say, being set upon by fire ants to actually making anything happen. A few of the implications of this:

• A project that's 90% complete might as well have never existed. Unless you actually finish it and stand it up, you might as well have done nothing.
• Doing something reasonably well is almost always much better than waiting around for it to be just exactly perfect. The best really is the enemy of the good.
• Every single action has a consequence, and every single inaction has a consequence, too.

We are all infected by what psychiatrists call "magical thinking" which is really just a substitute for action. Revenge fantasies, dwelling on "fairness" or hoped-for outcomes, all of it. My favorite version of this is the alleged reason Julia Roberts (or any actress) is so successful -- because all the men in the audience, watching the movie, are thinking "You know, if she met me, she'd kind of like me." Uh, she's never going to meet you. And you have absolutely no reason to think she'd like you. And unless you, you know, travel to New Mexico or wherever she lives, and actually find her, this is pure theory. And highly destructive theory, too, because it takes time and effort away from the women you actually could (and do) know.

Descartes was dead wrong. You do not exist because you think -- you exist because you do. If the tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, then, nope, it didn't actually fall.

All that matters is what you do.

Marketing is Storytelling

A client sent me this yesterday. It's a single, six-minute shot of a man walking along a road in what looks like Scotland, telling the story behind a brand. This clip is instructive on two levels. First, it's technically really impressive -- the timing is perfect, the delivery is terrific, and it's a masterful work of film making.

Equally impressive, however, is the demonstration of the importance of storytelling in marketing. Steve Jobs' presentations are brilliant at this. Too many marketers just announce things, or spew out facts and assume people will notice and/or care. They won't. People need stories -- characters, plot, a beginning, middle and end, and a certain amount of showmanship. That's what this piece has in spades. The subtitles, by the way, are annoying, but definitely help Americans process the Scottish accent. Enjoy. 

Dunbar's Law, Your Brain, and The Limits of Social Media Marketing

Seth Godin just wrote a really interesting post about the size of one's network, or as he refers to it, the "tribe". The magic number, apparently, is 150 and it's known as Dunbar's Law or Dunbar's Number. Dunbar based this number on the processing power of the human brain -- he theorized that we just don't have the brainpower, as a species, to handle a larger number.

Here's a quote from Seth's post:

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren't cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That's why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It's why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building)...

Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar's number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn't scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can't effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician's glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity's empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.

I can tell when this happens. I'm guessing you can too.

A few thoughts about this:

• First, I'm willing to bet that the vast, vast majority of professionals, even those who pride themselves on being effective networkers, have nowhere near 150 real contacts. My take on this, which is more than a little biased, is that unless you have that many, you really have no excuse not to work on growing your network. You can do it.

• Second, this concept nicely illustrates the difference between, say, LinkedIn contacts or Facebook friends, and networking contacts. It's very possible to manage thousands of people on Facebook, but the relationship you have with them is broader and shallower than a true networking connection. That doesn't mean it's better or worse, but it does mean that it's a different kind of relationship.

• 150 is about the size of a standard law-school section. Interesting.

Some Lessons in Gratitude

I am spending the week in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia.  It’s fall here, the air is cool and the trees are changing color.  As I walked along, my destination was Curtis Arboretum, which was donated to the county by the family that founded and published The Saturday Evening Post.  On the way, I passed several incredible houses.  This area was extremely prosperous a century ago, and many of the houses are enormous, built of stone, and have broad, sweeping lawns.  If these houses were located where I live in California they would be several million dollars each. Here’s an example:

As I stood on the sidewalk contemplating this incredible house, the owner came down the driveway towards me.  A long, long driveway.  She was at least 70 years old.  She was wearing a wool cap and a jacket, was at least 100 pounds overweight, and hobbling slowly down to the end of the driveway to put something in the recycling box with the aid of a cane.  It must have taken her at least two minutes to walk the length of her own driveway.  Given the fact that I was walking along at a pretty good clip listening to music on my headphones, the difference between our conditions really struck me.  I am absolutely sure she would be happy to trade her huge, beautiful house for the ability to just effortlessly walk. I am incredibly lucky.  I’ll bet you are, too.    As I entered the Arboretum, I passed by a plaque set in stone next to a pond.  The plaque listed the names of township residents who had been killed in World War II.  Here is a picture of it:
As you can see, around 71 residents of this small town (population today around 37,000) never came back from the war.  To put that into perspective, it’s equivalent, roughly, to New York City having two 9/11-sized events every year for four years. I am incredibly lucky, and you probably are too.    I spent the rest of the hour on a brisk walk through the Arboretum.  It is incredibly beautiful, in the way that only East Coast parks like this can be.  Huge, open lawns with carefully planted rows of trees in the distance – something like a painting of an English country home. The park, it turned out, was laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead himself, perhaps the most famous landscape architect in history.  It is extraordinarily beautiful, and I got to walk through it for free.  Here's a picture of part of it:
I am incredibly lucky.  I’ll bet you are, too.   

Every once in a while, I think it’s important to be reminded of this.

The Secret of Simplicity

I'm reading (or rather listening to, on my iPod) a fascinating new book, entitled Power of Less, by Leo Babauta. Babauta also publishes a great blog, which is here. I think there's a very valuable lesson here for business development. It's all about simplicity.

Babauta's key idea seems to be that the route to success (and happiness) involves ruthlessly eliminating the non-essential, and focusing intensely on doing only the essential. This gets broken down into 6 basic principles:

1. Set limitations

2. Choose the essential

3. Simplify

4. Focus

5. Create habits

6. Start small

The last one, "Start small" was the one that really got my attention.

Starting to develop business is usually a significant change for many people. They often charge into it with heroic intentions, and then, a few weeks later, overwhelmed and frustrated, give up. The key is to start by doing one small, new thing every day until it becomes a habit. Make one phone call. Send one email. Spend ten minutes working on Biz Dev.

You're trying to install a habit, basically, which over time will grow into a full-throttle, effective business development program. However, Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will this. Start small.

Selling: Get Them To The White Board

During a conversation about sales this week with my extremely smart friend Chris, he told me about a sales idea that is both simple and brilliant. It's one of those "Why didn't I think of this?" concepts.

Chris sells extremely large, complex technical consulting projects. As part of this process, he makes very sure to use a whiteboard for any presenting he does, and insures that his prospective customers use it too. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what closes the sale.

Think about it. There's Chris, up at the front of the room. He is at a whiteboard, and he begins do diagram . . . something. It could be the architecture of the network itself. Or the business processes and logic behind it. Or the financial impact of the project. Whatever. Regardless of the subject, he is careful to start building a diagram on the whiteboard with lots of little boxes and circles and arrows and stuff.

And as he works away at this, at some point, he invites one of the prospects to come up to the whiteboard and contribute to the diagram.

This is the Big Moment. First of all, nobody ever says "no" to this. Second, once they're up there, and start adding little boxes and arrows of their own, the entire dynamic of the meeting changes. It is no longer Chris trying to convince them of something. It's Chris and the prospect, working together to solve a problem.

This is a huge shift. Suddenly, the prospect is invested in the situation, and in the proposed solution to the situation. It's now his solution, too.

Whatever you're selling, get the prospect to participate in both defining the problem and crafting the proposed solution. A white board is an excellent way to do this. Once they do, the entire dialogue goes from whether they should work with you to how.