Ways to improve selling skills for Research and Development

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in this video you're going to learn the top three essential skills you must have if you want to be successful in business development and you want to make sure you watch this video into the end because if you're just missing one of these three critical skills then it's going to be very difficult for you to succeed in this role what's going on everybody my name is patrick dang and before we get started make sure to give this video a like subscribe and turn on notifications if you want to see more business development and sales videos like this and so with that said let's go ahead and get started alright so the first skill that you've got to have when it comes to succeeding in business development is creativity now if you watch a lot of youtube videos about sales and business development you won't hear too many people talking about this but from my experience working at oracle working at a y combinator back startup and owning my own business now creativity is one of the most important parts of business development so when you are let's say selling a product or service or you want to reach out to other companies who you want to do business with creativity plays a big part because you have to find creative use cases on how to take your product and services and pitch it to other people because if you don't pitch it the right way whether it's you know finding the right people or writing the right email or linkedin message that really resonates with your audience well nobody is going to take a meeting with you and you don't have any meetings well you don't close any deals and the truth is when you are doing business development whether you own your own business or you're working at another company as an employee your boss or manager may not always give you creative ideas on who you should target and a lot of times you're actually just left on your own to do the work and go on your computer go on linkedin or go on different websites and try to figure out who exactly you should even reach out to but without creativity and understanding people's pain points and how you can solve those pains in creative ways well you're just gonna be out of luck and you're not gonna get any meetings so for example if you let's say we're selling software to media companies and you just close the big deal with let's say a movie production agency well how can you take that information and find more people who are likely to buy can you find more movie production companies in your area or around the nation or maybe you can you know see why they use that specific product or service that you're selling and maybe go into different divisions let's say like education finance real estate you know do they have the same problems that you can solve that were similar to the first person that you sold to right and even if it's a completely different industry if they have the same pain points and you kind of find a creative way to pitch it well suddenly you can expand your products and services to other industries that people have never even thought about but that takes creativity and that really just means connecting the dots you know when some person buys over here can you find another person that will buy over here that kind of matches that's those same characteristics and match those pain points and this is something not everybody can do right because a lot of sales and business development people they're just waiting for someone to tell them what to do but if you want to be successful and you want to thrive in any type of environment or if you want to be successful as an entrepreneur you got to have this creativity to connect the dots and see the links that people are not seeing now speaking of connecting dots the next step that we have to talk about when it comes to the second skill for business development is listening all right so listening is one of the most critical factors of business development because you know contrary to popular belief selling whether it's bd or sales it's not about just talking and pitching it's actually 90 or 80 percent listening to your customer and understanding what they want because if you don't understand your customer and you don't have empathy to you know their pains well it doesn't matter how great a product or service you are because if you don't know what they want and why they want it you know you're just kind of knocking door-to-door seeing if somebody would buy it but you're not understanding why exactly they will buy you gotta ask questions listen to their problems understand aspirations you know where is it that they want to go what's stopping them from getting there and how does your product or service help them break through their mental barriers or break through any barriers that they have and really push them to their goals that they want to achieve because when you do that you're not even pushing a sale right you're not forcing anything on somebody you're actually just listening to what they already want this is something they're already gonna do and you're aligning your product or service in a way that clearly demonstrates on how that if they purchase this product or service it's gonna be a lot easier for them to achieve the goal that they were already looking to accomplish and again it's about using your creativity you know how exactly can you position your product and service in a way where people make that connection and they think oh if i buy this person's product i can get what i want so you know what i think i should buy this guy's product right so it's like they're making the decision to invest in you you're not pushing them to buy you're not forcing them to do anything they are making an investment in you and really making an investment in themselves to achieve their goals and the last skill that you got to have if you want to be successful in business development is grit right sales and business development is not necessarily an easy job you basically face some type of rejection almost every single day whether it's prospecting or you know you're on the phone you're pitching and the client says no it happens all the time and the majority of the people that you talk to are not going to buy your product and service right because they may not be a good fit and there's going to be like random moments of like you know bad situations that happen i remember for me uh back in my sales career i was you know doing quite a big deal and you know i was working with a customer for about two months and then all of a sudden the customer is like you know what patrick we really like you you're you we like your product and service you know you've been really good to us but you were going to go with your competitor right and just just like that you know yellow i lost the deal and i didn't even know the competitor was involved probably my thought for not asking if they were talking to anybody else i assume they were just talking to me but you know they weren't and they went with the competitor and you know that really struck a blow uh because it took me it takes a lot of work to do you know those long type of deals now when it comes to grit those things happen right those things happen all the time right you just learn from it understand what you could have done better like i could have qualified better i can see if either working for competitors things like that i could have those done those things better but i didn't and it's okay because moving forward now i start doing those things so no matter what you're selling whatever your product and services know that you're gonna face rejection know that you're gonna fail a lot and know that a lot of things are not to work but you have to have the grit to continue through it and you have to be okay with accepting rejection because that's part of the game of business sales and business development so ask yourself are you coming in to work every day with that mentality and dealing with these things and accepting them can you keep your mental health in check so that when somebody says no you know do you feel emotionally hurt or do you just let it slide off your back can you control your emotions whether it's at work or you're controlling your emotions and not thinking about the problems when you're living your personal everyday life because you don't want you know your problems and work to bleed in your personal life because it will affect the overall quality of the results you can produce if you want to be successful in business development you've got gotta have the grit to keep pushing forward you know strengthen your emotional intelligence strengthen your emotional stability so that when things get bad you don't you know crack under pressure and you can continue to move on and so with that said those are to be the three skills when it comes to being successful in business development and again if you're missing one of these skills it's going to be very difficult for you to thrive in this type of role so if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it a like subscribe turn on notifications and let me know in the comments what's your number one takeaway that you got from this video and if you want to see more business development videos like this make sure to check out my other videos and so with that said hope you guys learned a little something and i will see you guys in the next one