Rainmaking Secrets

Talented business development professionals are always in scarce supply.

In The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent Into Strategic Impact (2010) authors Brian Becker, Mark Huselid and Richard Beatty urge companies to manage their strategic talent like a share portfolio.

So, which business development positions are strategic?

Here are some key questions to remember when assessing whether a business development position is strategic.

1. Strategic business development staff are those who significantly enhance the probability of achieving your business strategy.
2. Strategic positions have major revenue enhancing or cost reducing impact on the firm.
3. Strategic positions have a strategic impact on the firm’s customers.
4. Poor performance is immediately detected.
5. The selection of a wrong person is extremely costly.

Virtually all senior business development professionals I meet, who hold positions in their firm’s senior hierarchy believe they are ‘strategic’. But that is not the case.

As a first step, you need to identify your strategic capabilities.

1. Identify and review your capability criteria
2. List possible strategic capabilities
3. Assess each for present wealth creation impact
4. Determine the most important three to five business development strategic capabilities for your business.

The Differentiated Workforce will end up, well thumbed, on most HR professional’s book shelves. The smartest Business Development Leaders I work with have already read it.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I can’t think of any company better than Harrah’s Entertainment – the Casino Operator – at using customer analytics to segment their customer base. Harrah’s analytics allows it to estimate the potential life time of millions of individual customers.

• Diamond customers have a prospective lifetime value of $100,000.
• Platinum customers have a prospective lifetime value of $20,000.
• Gold customers have a prospective lifetime value of $2,000.

Recently, Harrah’s added a new category Seven Star. Seven Star customers are reward members with a yearly value of $50,000 or more.

Seven Star and Diamond customers have lifetime values of at least fifty times those of Gold customers.

James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser and Joe Wheeler in The Ownership Quotient report that Seven Star and Diamond customers made 20 percent more recommendations to friend to visit Harrah’s properties that Gold customers the previous year Further, their recommendations to friends recruited customers that were 73 percent greater than those recommended by Gold customers.

The Ownership Quotient is a remarkable book which shows you how to put the Service Profit Chain to work for competitive advantage.

Popularity: 12% [?]