The 3 qualities of a good Business Developer

Three essential qualities of a good Business Developer:

#1: Determination

Business Developer Is a job where you have to open as many doors as possible, being as creative as possible. Concretely, we design and execute intelligent prospecting sequences with the aim of obtaining appointments with decision-makers of a potential target.

We talk a lot about it on the Akimbo Bootcamp to become a Business Developer!

The job requires an excellent mind: in a day, a Business Developer is rejected a lot of times, often frustrating. Fortunately, there are also successes, but they are by nature rarer than rejections. It is necessary to have a reduced “mourning curve” and not to sentimentalize the results obtained. Putting your emotions aside (in front of prospects or customers) is a real quality and allows you to form a winning mind.

Especially since the Business Developer must not lose sight of the essential: his role is the most important in the company since it is he who reports the turnover. If you ask a lot of CEOs who are the most important employees on their team, they'll look at their sales teams. Sales is Life - Life is Sales!

#2: Listening

As one speaker at a Meetup we organized pointed out,”When I speak for more than 7 minutes on a 30-minute call, there is a problem”. A skill that goes hand in hand with a great sense of empathy.

An excellent Business Developer is just the opposite of the crocodile in the photo in this article: small ears and a big mouth. A Business Developer guides the conversation with relevant questions that reveal the extent of their knowledge. He puts his prospect in ideal conditions for him to explain all the challenges of his current organization. That's how persuasion starts!

Listening means being curious: on the one hand, you must know your product inside out to answer any question and, on the other hand, be sufficiently interested in the person you are talking to to to understand the challenges they face.

#3: Organization and rigor

A so-called “generalist” Business Developer and therefore in charge of the entire sales cycle must be a Organization pro.

On the one hand, he is the face and the voice of the company he works for. He therefore has no right to make mistakes because he is the first representative of the company. The ambassador in title. His missions and his typical day are also very varied, but that's another subject.

But above all: on a daily basis, he interacts with a multitude and an extraordinary variety of people. All his activities must therefore be recorded in his CRM, which allows him to visualize his real performance. He thus often manages prospects who have (almost) not yet heard of his solution, such as prospects close to “closing” or even existing customers in small startups when he is also in charge of loyalty. This variety of missions therefore requires great rigor.

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Are you made to be a Business Developer?

But beyond these qualities, how do you know if you are right for this job? It is not an easy challenge: there can be moments of doubt when your prospect is not convinced by your arguments, when the product you are promoting is imperfect or when the objectives are not being met.

So you have to be able to keep a cool head and Stay lucid to analyze the situation : “What is wrong? Is it the quality of my Leads (prospects), their expectations in relation to the current product, my sales techniques, the process put in place?” All of these questions require a genuine spirit of analysis and a keen sense of responsibility.

It is also important to ask yourself if you have all the skills you need to do your daily work. Indeed, digital business development is evolving very rapidly and Skills of a business developer today will be obsolete tomorrow. It is therefore important to be alert and curious.

This is why Business Developers are the essential cog in any startup. They are at heart of the strategy of the startup and their performance is monitored by management more than that of any other team. If it achieves its goals, developers of course get credit for the product, but Business Developers are responsible for even greater success: converting the potential value of the product into real added value, in cash.

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