Since business development is made up of so many different tasks, it’s important that those who want to work in biz dev come prepared with the necessary skills to succeed. Here are some that you’ll need to develop in order to excel as a business developer:
1. Strong leadership and management skills
Since your goal is to help the company grow and be more profitable, you’ll need to create new ways to accomplish that. The position requires you to find and think outside of the box to improve business processes, increase sales, and make the company more valuable. Other departments will look to you for guidance and to set expectations, so you’ll need to possess entrepreneurial and leadership skills to design your own projects and manage them accordingly.
2. Goal setter
The ultimate goal is growth, but in order to get there, you’ll need to set a whole collection of smaller goals along the way. At Urban Roomie Upper management will help you set some goals in our Project Management System “ClickUp”, but ultimately, it’s up to you to organize your work.
3. Curiosity
You might not have expected this one, but being curious can open the door to so much more when you work in business development. A good business developer is inquisitive about everything, from how to improve the sales funnel to why some partnerships are stronger than others.
With curiosity comes a drive for research, which can help you understand your brand’s shortcomings and fix them so that it may grow. Curiosity also breeds creativity since you’ll be constantly looking for new solutions to ongoing challenges.
4. Acute attention to detail
Whether it’s a metric or a communication from a client or a potential partner, business developers require a lot of focus to pay attention to all the details, and there are a lot of them. When you’re working on a few different projects with various teams, it’s easy to let things fall through the cracks, but a good business developer will pay attention to small details to try and understand how they affect the big picture.
5. Boot-strapper
As a business developer, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves when it comes to breaking new ground. You’ll quickly find out that in order to grow a business, you’ll need to identify and bootstrap new paths to travel on.
Being a self-starter will get you far in business development and help you achieve bigger goals by nurturing your entrepreneurial drive. This sense of ownership can inspire you to take on more initiative, as well as study new concepts and do anything you can to bring more value to the business.
6. Team player
By now it seems like a cliche to see “team player” as a requirement on a job posting, but working in a team is an essential skill in business development. We’ve already seen how biz dev works hand-in-hand with other departments, so interpersonal skills and the ability to work collaboratively are necessary.
More than that, though, is having the understanding that in biz dev, there’s nearly nothing that comes across your desk that you can pass off or ignore. “That’s not my job” just doesn’t work when you’re working towards such large company goals and you need to have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in the entire business.
7. Self-motivated
If it wasn’t clear by now, business developers need to have a ton of motivation. Truckloads of motivation, in fact. It may seem like there’s too much work in business development to handle, but a successful business developer will know how to prioritize tasks while also self-motivating themselves to complete work and even seek out work.
It’s true, the workload can be a lot, but when you’re able to get your own projects off the ground and see the success of your team and your business as a result of your own hard work, then all the work is worth it and can motivate you to aim even higher.