When it comes to learning, teaching, training, and engaging in business development the best starting point is a series of guiding principles that will apply to all your client development activities:
- Ask before telling
- Listen before speaking
- Discover how you can help
And I would add one caveat:
Don’t fumble the follow-up.
These principles form the foundation for all my business development coaching and training.
Applying these principles opens up an approach to business development that is equally accessible to introverted and extroverted personality types. For example, at networking events the focus is not on talking about yourself, but on preparing ahead, asking great questions, learning important information about the people you are meeting, and following up after the event on what you have learned. To learn more about how these principles apply in practice please visit my article Networking for Introverts on the Canadian legal weblog Slaw.ca.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under Business Development, Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Start with getting the principles right”
Leave a Reply
February 4th, 2011 at 3:53 pm
[...] 4. Focus on listening. This is one skill that seems easy and yet is surprisingly difficult. The more our minds are filled with deadlines, the more our blackberry buzzes, the harder it gets to listen. In your business development meetings put the emphasis on listening and learning about what’s going on for your contact personally and professionally. What challenges are they facing? What are they most excited about? What’s most important to them? Seek out opportunities to help and to add value. Put your blackberry away so that you can turn your full attention to the conversation. A key step in business development is “discovery”. That means asking open ended questions and learning all that you can over the course of one meeting or many about your contact and his/her business. This is how you discover where the opportunities lie. [...]