Hey, I wanted to tell you that part of our business offering, here at Growth Dynamics, is to support the best possible outcomes in hiring talent. For our clients out in the marketplace, we work with a lot of different people to help them find the best available talent to add to their business development teams, sometimes to their executive teams. We use a lot of science to do that, and we do a lot of testing. We get involved in the interviewing, and as a part of that interviewing process, we ask people a lot of questions that they've never heard of before, and that they haven't practiced off some Google site or some kind of, hey, this is what you should be saying in an interview. We try to outsmart that and create some pressure and tension in the process.
One of the things we do, is we ask people to make a selection from word choices. One of the most important word choice options we give any candidate that's looking for a position on someone's sales team, is to ask them, which is more important, closing or opening?
The number of times that people immediately snap off, "well of course, it's closing." And they're just so excited to tell you, "That's what you get paid for. You close it, you win, you get the sale, you collect the commission, you get the business", and all that. They're like, "that's what I'm really in the business to do, is to close?"
Well, I want to turn that on its head and tell you, you should be celebrating the day that you prospected the opportunity, the day that you created the conversation, to go in and sit down with a decision maker and say, "what would it take to do business?". So in our world, when we're looking for the best talent, the best talent always seems to understand, "I'll never get to closing if I don't do enough opening". So when you wake up on next Monday, and you decide what you're going to focus on, sure, I want you to take the decisions that you have pending, and get them done, either kill them or close them.
I want you to wake up and know that at the end of the week, your most successful week is the one in which you create the most opportunities, you open the business conversations that will lead to the opportunity to do business. The week that you should say, "You know what, I've earned a little celebration," is the week that you've put enough things in the top of your pipeline, to make sure that there's enough to come out of the bottom with the revenue results that you're looking for.
So, get your head out of the "I got to close this" and get focused on "I need to open more." When you open more, your pipeline and your mental state is much more abundant. And when you're much more abundant, you're much more relaxed, you're much more comfortable, you seem much less desperate than the sales person that's trying to close everything, because they can't close anything. So do your best to change your mindset.
Celebrate opening the first step of the journey, and you'll find that closing becomes a lot more comfortable and a lot more predictable. Get your language straight, focus on opening, trust that you'll do enough closing, and that's what you should be doing to manage your success most consistently in business development.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend. Start next week with an opening mindset and create the success you want in your business development career. Take care.
