How To Hire Great Business Development People
Great business development (BD) people are hard to find. You may meet a smart, charismatic, articulate BD person who can't get anything done. Or a highly networked deal person who leaks value when they miss all the details of a deal and structure terrible terms. It can be hard to differentiate between what a deal person accomplished versus what they take credit for in terms of a product's success.
So what should you look for in a business person?
Great Business Development People
The best BD people have the following traits:
Smart / raw horse power. Smart, creative, and think well on their feet.
Articulate / good communicator. Needs to communicate well with both internal teams (engineers, PMs, lawyers, execs) as well as the customer or partner (which may include their legal, engineering, and deal people).
Creative / fearless in deal terms. Push the envelope on what is possible and are willing to make a crazy ask from the partner or client. You never know what someone will give away until you ask.
Get shit done. Have a history of closing multiple complex deals with creative or aggressive terms. One person who worked for me at Twitter closed 3-4 partnerships while a part time intern working remotely during their school year.
Structured / can run a deal process. Structure is under rated in deal people. You want someone great at shepherding all internal and external stakeholders through the various phases of a deal (ideation, pitching, negotiating, structuring, closing, implementing)[2]. You want people mining a list of prospects, aggressively framing a negotiation, and setting up internal prep meetings before calling external parties. Unstructured deal people create churn internally due to a lack of consensus on external gives or lack of planning for a negotiation.
Detail-oriented. Reid Hoffman once told me he expected his deal people to read every word of every contract including all the legal language. This allows you to catch all sorts of gotchas that are otherwise buried in unexpected ways and to think through the implications of what the contract says.
Part-lawyer. Pick up and grok key legal nuances, even without a legal background.
Good culture fit / put the company first. Like all employees, you want your business people to put the company first. There are all sorts of ways business people may benefit themselves rather then the company (more below)
Work well with others across the organization.
Pragmatic & keep big picture in mind. Figure out what is important, optimize for it (80:20 rule), and get the deal done. Don't optimize for little things that don't matter, except as a negotiation tactic. Similarly, some deals should not get done. Great deal people will take a step back and decide whether to walk away, or not try to force a deal to happen if it shouldn't. Some of the best "deals" are the ones that don't happen.
Understand partner and market needs. Understand what the partner really wants (versus claims they want), as well as trends in the marketplace that may impact both their company's, as well as the partner's, leverage and needs.
Have stamina. Deals can take a long time and a lot of back and forth. Bad deal people give up towards the very end to "just close the deal" and may leak enormous amounts of value that they didn't need to give up.
Relentless. Sometimes you need to keep knocking at a door over and over until someone finally answers.
Moral compass. Like all employees, you want people who will do the right thing even if it is uncomfortable or against self interest to do so.
Bad Business Development People
Bad business development people may exhibit the following:
Great at selling, bad on follow-through. Some BD people are charming, fun to talk to, and really smart. Unfortunately, they have terrible follow-through and can't seem to get anything closed. They may be full of incorrect excuses on why they had to give on a major term that is important to your company. The only way to screen these people out is reference checks as they are great at selling, poor on substance. Raw charisma is drastically over rated by technical founders. Dont be fooled just because someone is friendly and charming.
Disorganized / unstructured. Flying by the seat of their pants, not sending follow ups, or poor internal communication leading to needless meetings or internal churn often results.
Leak value. Often over-think what is "fair" for the other side. Make too many assumptions about what is important to the other side and just give a lot of terms away. Or, they just want to close the deal at all costs versus thinking through what is actually good for the company they work for.
Don't think like an owner. Bad deal people don't think like a business owner. They treat the company's money or resources as not a big deal to use and will give away extra value in a negotiation because it "doesn't matter, its within 20%" or the like.
Don't think the details matter. See above.
Outsource too much. Bad deal people become too dependent on other company function (e.g. not understanding a legal term that comes up over and over because "thats legal's problem"). Sometimes terms important to the business are buried or hidden as legalese or "technical specs". A great deal person will ferret these out.
Optimize for themselves and their network versus the company. As gate keepers to external parties, some business people may use this point of leverage to benefit themselves. They may build relationships at the expense of the company by being too easy on a deal so that the partner likes them. Or they are constantly networking at external boondoggles and on panels to build their own reputation, rather then working [1]
Cowboy mentality. Some deal people go off and strike a deal, or mention terms that you can't back away from to an external party, without any internal discussion or approval. They may act defensive when questioned about this and feel they are "getting it done".
Emotional. Deals have a lot of ups and downs - you need an even keel.
Spin things internally. Deal people need to be able to "turn it off" when it comes to sales. You need to hire people who won't BS or spin internally even if it is sometimes their job to do it externally.
How To Screen For a Great Business Development Person
History of deals. What deals have they themselves negotiated? How complex were the terms? What is an ask they received that no one else at the company believed they would get? What is a clever deal hack they pulled off? What impact did the deal actually have on the company?
References. Deal people often have lots of friends as their job is outwardly focused and they can be very charismatic. They may give you a long list of meaningless references (e.g. friends of theirs at their current company, who actually don't know much about their work but think they are a "great person"). Get references from people who worked with them directly on deals. Back channel more information on them. Ask about the specific deals they worked on, how relentless and creative they were, and the tangible impact the deal had on the company. Did the terms end up working out or backfiring? Were there edge cases they did not think about that came back to bite? Did they champion a radical position that paid off big?
Follow-through. How is their follow-through during the interview process? How structured are they? What approach do they take in negotiating comp?
Culture fit. What are they optimizing for? Title? Equity? Future growth? Something else? How do they fit in your culture? Business people will be different from technical or product people in a number of ways, but they should still hold to your core cultural values.
A Great Deal Person Is Not Usually A Great Partner Manager
Don't expect the people who are great at thinking of and executing deals to be great partner managers (post deal management). You will need to find both types of people eventually for your team.
Thanks to Marc Leibowitz , Clara Shih, Kim Malone Scott for feedback, ideas, and commenting on versions of this post.
Notes
[1] Some external speaking or networking events may be useful to your company, but the business person should chose the small handful of events that really matter, and have specific goals as to why they are doing them. Rather then just claiming "all exposure is good exposure".
[2] Thanks for Marc Leibowitz for spelling out the various stages as well as other ideas.
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