Essays and interviews on business development, partnerships, and the people who build them.
A business-minded lawyer can be a BD person's most-trusted colleague — someone who spots red flags, provides a sounding board, and does the yeoman's work of being ‘bad cop’ during a sensitive negotiation.
Read →A professional carpenter brings his own tools to the job. The tools of Business Development are relationships — and maintaining them in tip-top shape is the key to having that tool last a lifetime.
Read →When I was a young cub in my first job at Dow Chemical, the sales leadership had a phrase they were fond of saying about patience and timing in business development.
Read →Every medium of communication has its implicit level of intimacy. Getting to text takes a comfort level that few professional relationships rarely reach.
Read →Michael McNerney, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Performance Horizon, shares his unexpected journey from product management at McGraw-Hill to business development leadership.
Read →Molly Siems, Director of Business Development at Justworks, shares how she transitioned from practicing M&A law to building strategic partnerships.
Read →Kenny Herman, EVP of Strategy & Business Development at Slice, shares the story of how SinglePlatform almost failed — and how listening saved a $100 million exit.
Read →Many of the jobs of tomorrow don’t exist today. New and emerging careers lack the support structures that traditional careers have — which is why I started Firneo.
Read →There is no one single path that leads to a career in business development, but there are a few ways to navigate your course. Tactics to demonstrate the value you would bring to any BD role.
Read →To be truly great at business development, you need to maintain long-term relationships. That requires a natural curiosity and interest in other people — and knowing how to reheat connections gone cold.
Read →Few people pride themselves on going after the figurative low-hanging fruit. Instead, we look for the Big, Sexy Deals. But sometimes the lowest hanging fruit can become a most-satisfying pie.
Read →Just as “all politics is local,” so too must be the effort to sell an organization on your idea. To win the hearts, minds, and votes, you must appeal to the needs of the locals.
Read →You meet someone who strikes you as a great potential partner. You have a great chat. You follow up, and then… nothing. Ultimately, it comes down to one simple thing.
Read →Is it possible to automate the process of establishing genuine relationships based on a mutual exchange of value? Paul Graham’s famous dictum applies to BD too.
Read →I’ve started to back away from my reflexive disregard for going in cold. In fact, I’ve come to realize the dangers of relying too heavily on the warm introduction.
Read →When we think about pursuing partnerships, it’s easy for even the most ardent followers of Lean to lose sight of those guiding principles. Customer Development should extend to Partner Development.
Read →A conversation with Anthony Fraiser about the fundamental principles of business development — and why the partnership between Jay-Z and Samsung was the best deal in the history of deals.
Read →Closing is not a technique to be mastered. It is an outcome: closing occurs when the product of a deal creates so much value for both sides that moving forward becomes an inevitable next step.
Read →A way to navigate through the business development process: the Having Value stage, the Communicating Value stage, and the Delivering Value stage.
Read →A full day, fully interactive business development workshop. You’ll learn strategies and tactics for every BD opportunity — and test them in immersive simulations.
Read →In our daily lives we pitch emails like fastballs. There is a tool to throw off their timing and get your pitch across home plate: the Pattern Interrupt.
Read →Relationships take time to build, but there are ways to speed up the process. By demonstrating that you are already a member of their trusted social circle.
Read →The role of business development changes as a company grows because what is valuable in the long-term changes as the company grows.
Read →Admiral Motti underestimated Darth Vader, and that’s understandable: he wasn’t an admiral. So too do we put our BD efforts at risk when we put too much stock in job titles.
Read →Value is a subjective concept. Being able to prioritize growth opportunities requires a clearer, more objective way to think about the value you can create — from economic to brand to option value.
Read →Decisions at Big Companies are a team effort between two forces: the Organizational Mind and the Individual Mind. To succeed, you need to create alignment between both.
Read →We don’t have meetings with Microsoft. We have meetings with Sally from the Office product management team or Jim in the Windows Phone group.
Read →I didn’t set out on a course to build a career in business development; I wandered onto it by constantly searching for interesting problems to solve. The full story, from Long Island to American Express.
Read →My full talk from First Round Capital’s Business+Startup event on how startups can partner with Big Companies.
Read →Perhaps the 5 most dangerous words one can ask in the early stages of Business Development. What you should be asking instead is: why is this cool, what about this is valuable, and who will care?
Read →Just as a Full Stack Developer understands every level of a computer, a Full Stack BD person understands the complexities between every layer of long-term value.
Read →Like a marriage, the road to a successful partnership is a long, hard, and winding one. Of deals that die, most die on the vine and not in the minefield.
Read →Slides from my Skillshare class on how startups can navigate the complexities of partnering with much larger companies.
Read →Every time you propose a partnership, you are making a guess as to why they’d want to work with you. Your Value Hypothesis is a testable assumption about what’s in it for them.
Read →Once you’ve decided to move forward on an opportunity, which path should you take? Build, Buy, or Partner? Understanding the tradeoffs is a necessity for BD success.
Read →An updated version of the breakdown of what a business development professional actually does day-to-day, published in Forbes.
Read →The Grand Unified Theory of Business Development: the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships. The full framework explained.
Read →*Well, that’s not exactly true. But I have been selected by Forbes.com to be a Contributing Writer on the subject of business development.
Read →Too often, it’s easy to see things only from your own perspective while forgetting the vantage point of your prospective partner. Give them a reason to care.
Read →When it comes to business development, people want a “Hustler.” But the term does a disservice to the strategic role of Biz Dev. Don’t call me a Hustler. Call me a Biz Dev.
Read →At its core, a Biz Dev job is focused on 3 activities: finding new customers, figuring out where they live in new markets, and building relationships founded on trust.
Read →The very first post. What, exactly, is business development? The creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships.
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