58 min
Insights From the Habits of Kelley O'Hara - Three Crucial Skills Every Business Developer Needs to Create Tremendous Growth Real Relationships Real Revenue - Audio Edition
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- Marketing
Mo Bunnell breaks down the three most important lessons shared by Kelley O’Hara and applies them directly to growing your business and winning more engagements. Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset, create a powerful feedback system that steadily builds momentum, and why preparation is your ultimate confidence-building weapon.
There are three major pieces of content that Kelley O’Hara talked about in her interview that apply directly to business development: having a growth mindset, focusing on what you can control, and preparing to make progress. A common mistake that business developers make is in preparing to win engagements instead of preparing to make progress towards the goal. It can’t be said enough, business development can be learned. It doesn’t matter where you start or where you are now, there is always another level to grow to. Business development is such a complex skill that no one is born with it. Any complex skill is the roll up of dozens and dozens of skills, and because of that, no one is born with all of those. Nobody is born with everything they need. Business development is so in depth and requires so many hard and soft skills that it’s impossible to be excellent in all of them and there is always more to learn. Self-reflection is crucial to a growth mindset. For Kelley, the off season is when she really hones her craft. For business developers that want to get better at a skill, build in some time each week to decode how you did because your off season is in between meetings. Use a journal to track your progress and see where you are improving. Build in feedback loops for anything you want to become more skilled at. Any time something important happens and other people are around, ask them two key questions. When you frame a feedback loop in that way you will get really good information and it will help you improve. The problem with vague feedback is you will usually get positive feedback without the area to improve upon. Remember, asking better questions will give you better answers. Business development has less feedback than many other aspects of life, which can make it very difficult to know what to improve. Aim to disconnect yourself from the outcome so that you can keep moving forward. Perception, action, will. Whenever you’re in a moment that doesn’t seem to be going well, pull back and get some perspective, do something about it, and then keep at it. People often quit sooner than they should, don’t get discouraged. Track what you can control and use it as your motivation. Decode what you need to focus on to get results and develop a system to track what you can control to reach the goal. Even subjective measures are better than not tracking anything. Another common mistake business developers make is either tracking way too much and getting overburdened and burning out, or not tracking things that can move the needle because they’re too subjective. Start with simple tracking measures and build it out from there. There is no way that someone else can do the tracking for you. When you document what you do and your business starts to take off, you can go back and see what you were doing prior to the growth to connect the dots. Build in some time on a quarterly basis to do some deeper reflection and figure out what you need to prioritize in the next time period. Focus on preparation instead of perfection. If your bar is perfection, you will end up disappointed and in a negative thought loop. If you feel prepared going in, you are far more likely to perform better. Alternatively, if you feel unprepared, you will spend a large amount of time and energy just being stressed instead of performing at a high level. Do everything you can to prepare and walk in confidently. Do you know what your set pieces are? Think of a meeting as a bunch of set pieces that are put together in a random order. Prepare for those scenarios and you will be ready no matter what happens. There are several
Mo Bunnell breaks down the three most important lessons shared by Kelley O’Hara and applies them directly to growing your business and winning more engagements. Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset, create a powerful feedback system that steadily builds momentum, and why preparation is your ultimate confidence-building weapon.
There are three major pieces of content that Kelley O’Hara talked about in her interview that apply directly to business development: having a growth mindset, focusing on what you can control, and preparing to make progress. A common mistake that business developers make is in preparing to win engagements instead of preparing to make progress towards the goal. It can’t be said enough, business development can be learned. It doesn’t matter where you start or where you are now, there is always another level to grow to. Business development is such a complex skill that no one is born with it. Any complex skill is the roll up of dozens and dozens of skills, and because of that, no one is born with all of those. Nobody is born with everything they need. Business development is so in depth and requires so many hard and soft skills that it’s impossible to be excellent in all of them and there is always more to learn. Self-reflection is crucial to a growth mindset. For Kelley, the off season is when she really hones her craft. For business developers that want to get better at a skill, build in some time each week to decode how you did because your off season is in between meetings. Use a journal to track your progress and see where you are improving. Build in feedback loops for anything you want to become more skilled at. Any time something important happens and other people are around, ask them two key questions. When you frame a feedback loop in that way you will get really good information and it will help you improve. The problem with vague feedback is you will usually get positive feedback without the area to improve upon. Remember, asking better questions will give you better answers. Business development has less feedback than many other aspects of life, which can make it very difficult to know what to improve. Aim to disconnect yourself from the outcome so that you can keep moving forward. Perception, action, will. Whenever you’re in a moment that doesn’t seem to be going well, pull back and get some perspective, do something about it, and then keep at it. People often quit sooner than they should, don’t get discouraged. Track what you can control and use it as your motivation. Decode what you need to focus on to get results and develop a system to track what you can control to reach the goal. Even subjective measures are better than not tracking anything. Another common mistake business developers make is either tracking way too much and getting overburdened and burning out, or not tracking things that can move the needle because they’re too subjective. Start with simple tracking measures and build it out from there. There is no way that someone else can do the tracking for you. When you document what you do and your business starts to take off, you can go back and see what you were doing prior to the growth to connect the dots. Build in some time on a quarterly basis to do some deeper reflection and figure out what you need to prioritize in the next time period. Focus on preparation instead of perfection. If your bar is perfection, you will end up disappointed and in a negative thought loop. If you feel prepared going in, you are far more likely to perform better. Alternatively, if you feel unprepared, you will spend a large amount of time and energy just being stressed instead of performing at a high level. Do everything you can to prepare and walk in confidently. Do you know what your set pieces are? Think of a meeting as a bunch of set pieces that are put together in a random order. Prepare for those scenarios and you will be ready no matter what happens. There are several
58 min