Be your own Business Development Manager
Managing your career is a lot like being a Business Development Manager. I'm curious to know if you have you done a BD role in your organisation? I've worked in pure BD roles in banking as well as client relationship management roles. And it's a key part of running my business!
Typcally BD is about acquiring new clients or increasing the number of services used by existing clients. There are a lot of parallels between this skill set and proactively managing our careers:
Building a network to get quality introductions
Keeping up a regular contact strategy
Creating a positive first impression, and then maintaining that reputation
Being open to feedback to refine and iterate
Communicating effectively what you can and can't do
Behaving professionally
And the big one? Knowing that no one else can do this for you. It will happen because of an action you've taken to build the right skills, be in the right place and be talking to the right people. You are your own best advocate.
Using this mindset is a good method for when you feel like you don't know where to start your job search. Put yourself in BD mode and ask yourself what you would do first.
Here's an example of some career development steps you could take with a BD mindset:
Identify your core skills and competencies that you'd like to market ('sell')
Look at your existing network and make a list of the people who could be excellent introducers, either to other interesting people or people with live vacancies
Create a pitch - what can you say to your network that's compelling, interesting or helpful to them? What Can you say that could influence them to help you?
Use public information to research businesses you're interested in working for and swot up for interviews
Get the right team around you - whether that's a support network, a career coach, mentors, a CV specialist. You'd rarely go pitch for a BD gig without involving anyone else.
These are just a few ideas to get you thinking differently about how to approach your next career move. Let me know how you get on!
P.S. This weeks blog was inspired by a friend who's doing a great job of leveraging their BD skills to work on their next career move :)
P.P.S. There's 2 ways you can currently work with me:
1) A two hour breakthrough NLP session
2) A one-to-one-coaching programme over 4 weeks. All phone based.
When you're ready, email me and we'll agree which approach best serves your goal.
