Hernan Marcovecchio

Over the years, I ve learnt as business developer the crucial need to switch between performance and learning. You just cannot perform in business if you don't understand it. In order to understand something you need to get under the very skin of it. In my last role, I ve learnt so much from the world's most talented, skillfull and knowledgeable yet humble group of barista Ambassadors. All of them, champions at heart and in the real world. They gave birth to coffee as we know it today. But, as much as I learnt from them, they learnt from me. So for me soon to become a Barista Professional certified SCA, I could not have envision the future of Van Houten expertly crafted beverages without switching from barista to Business developer.

Always a business developer must be true to its own values. Aligning them with those of the organization can and will certainly deliver strong progress. Now, if despite the endless efforts, hard work and passion put in advocating for achieving the best results for the business, you should consider a) understanding your options. Why you want to achieve that grand vision? Can I achieve it in a different way? B) What persuasion methods you can use, think about the REDUCE model, how can you remove reactance or opposition?, how can you breakthrough endowment?, how can you work on asking for less so you can bring the distance shorter?, how to reduce uncertainty?, and how you can bring corroborating evidence to support your position.

A business developer purpose is that to challenge the status-quo hindering the development of the business it's part of and also customers' businesses. By pushing the boundaries, identying the transformative forces of the industry and market, design bold strategies, plans and set goals but not only tied to the business alone but also your own. By doing that, when encountering barriers from management you know that if these barriers are hindering both your and the business progress, you can identify opportunities for your own growth and pursue them.

Just like it's crucial to understand the reason for the existence of business development which it's ultimately that of dynamically adapting to change to ensure that holistic value is created for partners, stakeholders and customers alike. Now, it's equally crucial, and almost always underrated, moving from performance to learning. It's in this shift that learning is enabled, allowing business developers to develop new skills, combining them in new creative ways, fostering new innovative ways of thinking and fostering bold actions to elevate a solution, business model, strategy, and or creating a new worthwhile in the market. Learning new skills is something all organizations should encourage business developers to do, investing heavily.

The first contribution of this article should be understanding not what business development but why is strategic and sine-qua-non for developing a business. The reason for the existence of business development is that linked to change and adaptation. Businesses are too often treated and managed statically. However, business development existence is to ensure that organizations are fit for adapting to change and acting upon it to create and deliver more value to customers, partners and stakeholders. Then, we should discuss what it is. It identifies opportunies for growth and value creation through the definition of new strategies, business models comprising solutions, services, processes and RTM is flawless.

Actually, the greatest barriers to effective innovation driven value creation is human bias, risk aversion and endowment, in other words, path dependencies. The only way to breakthrough those barriers is team calibration through a common shared vision, clear innovation OKRs and having the bravery to take the leap towards the uncertain path of disruption and creating a new worwhile market, solution or business.