The BD School

I recently shared some of my personal journey and business insights with Lucia Piseddu, founder of The BD School. As we ended our chat, I reflected on some of the best, yet most simple advice I’ve ever received: “ask good questions.” Whether at home or work, we should never stop being curious and encouraging others to be curious about the world around us. While there’s a time for alignment and executing on a defined strategy or decision, I get concerned when I see leaders visibly frustrated and impatient when team members challenge their ideas by simply asking good questions. Asking good questions stimulates better thinking and creativity, enables learning, reenforces psychological safety and reduces bias. Ultimately it leads to better business outcomes However, some leaders and companies sadly see people who ask questions as not “aligned with strategy” or “troublemakers”. Instead they should be viewed as people who deeply care about outcomes - and as the thinkers, innovators and changemakers that business’ need right now. For any parents out there - we also need to encourage our kids to start/continue to ask more questions - and I’m not taking about a prompt on ChatGPT here:) To access the full episode on YouTube - click here: https://lnkd.in/emeWfPt9 #curiosity #innovation #criticalthinking #lifelonglearning

3 stupid simple ways to speed up your pipeline 🫨 Yesterday I shared a case study from one of our clients that shortened the sales cycle from 3 years to 6 months (link in the comments). That seems a crazy jump, but it wasn't that complicated to achieve. All we did was a good diagnosis of what was slowing things down and then FIX them. There were the 3 main problems we found: 🤖 THE WAS NO CRM The information was all with the PEOPLE, not TOOLS. But as the Queen said "Recollections may vary" and in business, you can't afford to rely only on people's memory! A lot of information was lost, follow-ups were missed, and there was no clear view of the sales pipeline. When we trained them, they just implemented a new CRM tool and that was great for organizing their interactions and managing their tasks more efficiently. ☎️ NOT ENOUGH FOLLOW-UP The BD wasn't contacting their leads as often as they should have. For example, some opportunities only received an email or a call once a quarter. All we did was schedule more regular follow-up activities that went beyond the simple call or email. It included personal meetings, resource sharing, gifts, updates on new offers, etc. They went from 4 yearly touchpoints to 12 (and more in some cases) and they also started working on nurturing strategy This consistent engagement kept prospects warm and moved them more quickly through the pipeline. ❌ WRONG PRIORITIES The BD team was spending too much time on pursuing leads that were unlikely to convert wasting a lot of time and resources. All we did was look at the specific opportunities, identify better qualification criteria, and then optimize this process. This enabled the team to focus on more promising leads and design a strategy to nurture the other ones. By addressing these three fundamental issues, our client was able to streamline their sales process, making it not only faster but also more efficient. Imagine what your team could achieve by taking a closer look at your current processes. ↳ Are there gaps where valuable information is getting lost? ↳ Are your follow-up efforts as consistent as they could be? ↳ Are you focusing your energy on the leads most likely to convert? If not, it's time to take action: Diagnose, Optimize, and Transform your pipeline. And if you don't have time to do it, we can help you with our hyper-customized business development training. Send me a message or book a call on my profile. 📩 #businessdevelopment #businessdevelopmenttraining #thebdschool

3 stupid simple ways to speed up your pipeline 🫨 Yesterday I shared a case study from one of our clients that shortened the sales cycle from 3 years to 6 months (link in the comments). That seems a crazy jump, but it wasn't that complicated to achieve. All we did was a good diagnosis of what was slowing things down and then FIX them. There were the 3 main problems we found: 🤖 THE WAS NO CRM The information was all with the PEOPLE, not TOOLS. But as the Queen said "Recollections may vary" and in business, you can't afford to rely only on people's memory! A lot of information was lost, follow-ups were missed, and there was no clear view of the sales pipeline. When we trained them, they just implemented a new CRM tool and that was great for organizing their interactions and managing their tasks more efficiently. ☎️ NOT ENOUGH FOLLOW-UP The BD wasn't contacting their leads as often as they should have. For example, some opportunities only received an email or a call once a quarter. All we did was schedule more regular follow-up activities that went beyond the simple call or email. It included personal meetings, resource sharing, gifts, updates on new offers, etc. They went from 4 yearly touchpoints to 12 (and more in some cases) and they also started working on nurturing strategy This consistent engagement kept prospects warm and moved them more quickly through the pipeline. ❌ WRONG PRIORITIES The BD team was spending too much time on pursuing leads that were unlikely to convert wasting a lot of time and resources. All we did was look at the specific opportunities, identify better qualification criteria, and then optimize this process. This enabled the team to focus on more promising leads and design a strategy to nurture the other ones. By addressing these three fundamental issues, our client was able to streamline their sales process, making it not only faster but also more efficient. Imagine what your team could achieve by taking a closer look at your current processes. ↳ Are there gaps where valuable information is getting lost? ↳ Are your follow-up efforts as consistent as they could be? ↳ Are you focusing your energy on the leads most likely to convert? If not, it's time to take action: Diagnose, Optimize, and Transform your pipeline. And if you don't have time to do it, we can help you with our hyper-customized business development training. Send me a message or book a call on my profile. 📩 #businessdevelopment #businessdevelopmenttraining #thebdschool

5 Tips to design a training your business development team will love 👇 In the early days of The BD School, I learned a hard truth: 💔 Employees don't care about training. You can be the best manager, the best company, and offer the best training in town. But your team will still be apathetic and not appreciate the training. That happened when we trained one of our first corporate clients too. Sure, all the employees were present BUT: ↳ Many didn't have their cameras on ↳ They didn't want to participate in roleplays and exercises ↳ They didn't do their homework In short....it was a bad experience for all of us. On a positive note, that gave us the chance to learn and improve the learning experience. These are 5 things that helped us make our training more engaging and that can help you too: 👉 Involve your team when creating the training: The biggest problem with training is that it's not perceived as relevant. Even though you know what the COMPANY needs as a manager, it's not said you know what your TEAM needs. After all, you haven't done the daily tasks yourself for a long time, so you might be distant from your team's real challenges. Involving your team will help you make your training more relevant, but most importantly, to get your team's buy-in. 👉 Choose short training options The best results we had with our clients were with short training. For example, 3 cycles or 2 days each or 1 cycle of 5 weeks for 2 hours a week. Your BD team can't afford to take too much time off, besides, it gets very boring if it's too long. 👉 Make it as practical as you can It's pointless to give hours of knowledge if they can't use it. Whether you create your own training or buy one, make sure it's immediately applicable to your team's day-to-day work. Include roleplays, exercises, and tasks they have to execute on the spot. 👉 Ask for feedback ALL the time Involve your team in each step. Ask them what they expect from the training on your first day. Then ask them every day if they enjoyed the training and what they found most valuable. Of course, ask for their feedback at the end and improve your training based on their answers. 👉 Recognize your team's progress One thing employees love about training is certificates and knowing their manager sees their progress. Don't be shy with your feedback and recognize your team's progress when they implement items from your team. It will help you keep your team motivated but also increase the likelihood they will take your future training more seriously. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm Lucia founder of The BD School and #BusinessDevelopmentTrainer We are the leading educational platform entirely dedicated to #businessdevelopment Do you want a higher-performing business development team? 🤩 Send me a DM and let's talk about your customized business development training

What concrete steps can you take to scale up a business? As a designer, I had very little knowledge on business development, but I was willing to try 🤸♀️ However, I had no idea where to start. I assumed I'd need to set up a strategy, but I didn't know which steps to include, in which order, and which activities could potentially work best for Rhite 🏵 I could have improvised, but a trial-and-error approach would have been such a waste of time and resources 😅 So instead, I joined the Business Development Certification Program of The BD School, which helped me exactly with what I needed. Following the guidance of my wise and passionate trainer Lucia Piseddu , to whom I'd like to send a warm thank you, I learnt about: ✅️ The mindset of a successful business developer ✅️ How to define the company vision and identity ✅️ How to effectively perform market and customer research, stakeholder mapping, and competitor analysis ✅️ How to ideate and develop activities that will help the business grow ✅️ And much more... I am very grateful for this opportunity and ready to start applying all my learnings at Rhite ! ➡️ Stay tuned on the Rhite page to witness our growth journey from the start!