Kevin Clem on Connections – Time To Get Great At Business Development

Mo asks Kevin Clem: When was the moment you realized growth is great and you wanted to focus on business development?

• Kevin has been doing business development for 20 years, but he didn’t always call it that.
• Kevin realized that he had a knack for business development after a repeat client said to him that they keep coming back to work with him, but they never felt sold. Eventually, the CEO offered to make that a formal role.
• Sales became a natural progression of Kevin’s career. Business development is an extension of helping clients solve their problems, and making connections with people allowed Kevin to transition into a more client-focused role.
• Finding ways to form the connection with a client is crucial. Connections are how relationships grow, and when relationships grow, revenue follows.
• Some of the connection effort is organic, but there is a lot of research involved. Kevin will always look for a point of connection that goes beyond the business transactional relationship. There is a goldmine of information on LinkedIn that you can bring up when it makes sense.
• The foundation of all good relationships is connection where you have alignment with someone or can build on their relationship with other people.
• Peppering in the details as your talking about what they are working on is the key to not coming in too strongly. It’s not about manipulating, it’s about organically connecting on some shared experience.
• Business development is like interviewing. It shouldn’t feel weird that you are doing a little homework on the other person.
• Thoughtful follow up questions on the other person’s written content is great.

Mentioned in this Episode:

GrowBIGPlaybook.com

linkedin.com/in/kevinclem

kclem@hbrconsulting.com

hbrconsulting.com