Five Things They Don’t Tell You About Working in Business Development
By: Deya Bhattacharya
Tags: B2B, Business Development, Client Management, Client Relationship, B2b Sales

So you’ve rid yourself of any delusions of glamour about your role and accepted your place as a salesperson with a fancier job title. You saunter forth, business cards and brochures in hand, confident that you’ll snag five grade-A clients on the day and set a new company record. That’s great — attitude goes a long way in functions like BD. As someone who’s picked up the trade from scratch, though, I’ve learnt certain things along the way — things your manager is unlikely to tell you when you start out. So here’s some candid inside info on what it’s like to work in business development — and why your super-confident attitude could get some serious checks as you go along.

Getting new clients can be a tremendous pain.

If you have a readymade list of clients to handle, lucky you. Relatively. (There’s still the mega hassle of getting them to know, recognise and recall you — more on that in a later post.) If you need to build one up from scratch, I wish you a thick skin and an insane level of patience. You’ll often have nothing more than Google Search to rely on, especially if you’re in a new company — and calling receptionist after receptionist in an attempt to get the names and numbers of your desired contacts is as much fun as it sounds like. And once you finally get through to the contact, he/she couldn’t care less about your existence and puts off your polite opening lines with an “I’ll call you back”. Surprise, surprise — they hardly ever do.

You simply won’t have all the answers.

No matter how perfectly you memorise your product details and FAQs, there will almost always be some question that you won’t know how to answer, and that’s because every client has different needs and expectations. While this can lead to some awkward moments, however, it’s also an excellent opportunity for you to identify new questions for which your company needs to come up with answers. And if you can find a good answer by yourself, bingo! You just added value to the company.

For every planned closure you need to have at least ten in the pipeline.

Forget scouring the Augean Stables, Hercules should have had to follow up with a client who’s been promising to close the deal “ASAP” for the last five months or so. It gets to a point where And just when you’ve been promising your boss for the fifth time that you’ll get the closure done by this week, the client calls and says that he’s decided to go with another brand. Client drops the mic, your boss drops your rating. Which is why any BD executive worth his or her salt needs to follow up with around ten such clients simultaneously.

You have to have a near eidetic memory.

Sure, phones help with remembering numbers and email IDs, but remembering exactly what was discussed in each call or meeting is a pain — especially if your boss corners you all of a sudden and demands an update on how Client X is doing post Meeting Y. And good luck trying to take down “minutes” while appearing polite and engaged before your client. Sooner or later, you’ll realise that you can either have a good talk or compose a fancy page of minutes. Not both.

It gets boring. Often.

You can divide your work life into two segments — attending calls, attending meetings and writing emails/proposals (25%); and waiting for clients to call back, waiting for email/proposal responses and travelling to and from meetings (75%). That leaves you with multiple chunks of “waiting time” throughout the day. If you’re good at multitasking, you can use that time to catch up on other activities like reading, listening to podcasts or blogging. But bosses have an uncanny way of appearing right when you’re engrossed in something else, and the very act of commuting in the heat of the day brings on headaches. So you end up spending most of that time fiddling with your pen, staring into space, making small talk with your colleagues and wishing time would go about thrice as fast.