If you’ve ever spent time with an enterprise sales team you’ll understand what a win/loss review is. For those who are unfamiliar, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Typically, when a deal you should have won didn’t close, you review back over the sales execution to see where you failed. This shouldn’t be applied to deals that were never appropriately qualified by your BD reps, but rather genuine qualified opportunities that fit your typical buyer profile. And inversely, you should also analyse why you have won deals instead of just drumming the gong and moving on. Continue reading →
Category / Business Development
Corporate Development vs. Exit Validation
If the first time you are speaking with a corp dev exec from a large potential acquirer is at the start of or during a sale process, it’s already too late. Hours of relationship building with the potential acquirers (corp dev AND relevant business unit execs) should already have been invested into prior to any formal sale process. This begs a few questions: 1) should you speak with corp dev teams? 2) when? 3) how much should you share with them? and ultimately 4) what is the difference in corporate development vs. exit validation?
Success in Business Development
Business development is one of the most common titles at a startup for the first non-technical hires. It’s also one of the least understood roles and in many cases results in wasted efforts and wasted burn.
BD can have many different meanings for many different companies. There are business development reps (BDR’s) at saas companies who prospect at the top of the funnel. There are BD execs at internet companies like Spotify who may only close one or two large partnerships a year when they are first getting started. There are BD execs at ecommerce companies who have a mix of growth, product and marketing responsibilities. Continue reading →