How can you tell if someone is a business development expert or if they're just full of crap? I'm going to give you the answer to that question and so much more on this edition of The Inside BS Show. Hey now, it's Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth and I am regularly asked for business development interview questions.

People are always asking me to share with them the questions that I can give them to detect whether somebody is really a business development expert or not. Here's the thing. This topic just came to me earlier today.

I was actually driving home from a volleyball tournament. That's right. Sunday afternoon, late in the day, Miami Hype, 13U girls, had a tournament today where they played really, really well.

They won six sets in a row. They took all three games that they played. This is just a points accruing tournament day for them, but sweeping today's matches was fantastic and they played absolutely phenomenal.

Driving home from that tournament, I got a call from a client on the West Coast and he was telling me that he had hired a business development expert. He met through LinkedIn. He had seen somebody on LinkedIn and thought they were an expert and he reached out to them.

They talked a good game and he hired them, paid them a lot of money and they didn't deliver. They just didn't get it done. He wanted to know how he could cut through the noise and get straight to the strategies that would help him grow his business.

This means he wanted to hire a business development person who knew what they were doing. The person on LinkedIn talked a good game. They had been on a couple of podcasts.

They had written a handful of articles that my friend had read on LinkedIn and he thought they were an expert, but he said, I just don't know how to evaluate these people. So I said to him, let me give you five questions that I ask business development people. Five questions that will help you get to the heart of the matter and will just cut through the crap and you can tell right away if somebody's full of crap or if they're really on the ball.

I'm going to share those five questions with you today. If you're looking to hire a business development expert, this is going to be great for you. If you're interviewing as a business development expert with somebody who's sharp, knowing the answers to these questions are really going to help you.

Question number one. Tell me about a time you built a business relationship from scratch that led to true revenue growth. How did you do it? Now this question matters because business development is all about creating relationships and opportunities and turning them into revenue.

If someone can't give a concrete example with specific steps and outcomes, it's a huge red flag. It's a telltale sign that they're full of crap. So tell me about a time you built a business relationship from scratch and that relationship led to measurable revenue growth.

How'd you do it? That's the question. And what you're listening for is if they met strategic relationship building deliverables. If they used really good tactics to build those relationships.

If those relationships were converted into dollars and cents, how did they do it? What did they do? Did they provide real numbers? Did they provide a compelling success story? If you want examples of some of these, in my book, The 60 Second Sale, I give at least 30 examples of these situations where I connected with people, built relationships, and they produced revenue. I tell the story at the beginning of the book of how I connected with a woman named Allie, short for Allison Bebo at Ann Taylor, and how I helped her become successful. And by helping her become successful, I developed a $5 million business relationship with that company.

I just, in one minute, gave you a specific example of a person at a company with dollars and cents related to the relationship. And if you want the details, I can tell them to you because I've told the story 100 times here on the podcast. I wrote the story in the book.

It is phenomenally impactful. That's the kind of thing you're looking for. That's the answer to question number one.

Question number two. Walk me through a deal or a partnership that didn't go as planned. What happened and what did you learn from it? Now, if you're talking to a real business development expert, they've had more deals that have blown up than they've had deals that have been successful.

And I'm going to say that again because it's certainly been true for me in my career. If you're talking to a real business development expert, they've had more deals that have blown up than deals that have been successful. And they can probably articulate, probably with some pretty good clarity, how they created a deal, they thought it was going to work out phenomenally well, and it blew up in their face.

I can tell you dozens and dozens of stories like that. When I was with Marriott and I worked in the corporate housing industry, we created a strategic alliance partnership with a consortium of foreign investors who were buying condos. And we subleased the condos.

That was the business we were in. We were in the corporate housing business. And I set up a deal with financial services industry clients to use over 300 of these apartments that were allegedly owned by this consortium.

And I sold the apartments with the promise that they were going to deliver these units to me by a specific date. Turns out, they didn't really own the units. And they were betting that they could get the units before I needed them.

Didn't work out that way. So it's not necessarily a business development failure, although I had to give the money back because we couldn't develop the business because we didn't have the product. But that's a specific example of a deal, a partnership that didn't go as planned.

I told you what happened. And you know what I learned from that? I learned that unless I build into the contract specific guarantees for performance, I am not going to get what I promised more than likely. That was a huge lesson and a very hard lesson to learn.

So what you're listening for in that answer, you're listening for the mistake or the setback. And you're listening to see if the person's really honest with you. And you're listening to how they adapted and improved their strategy.

And you're listening for resilience and problem solving skills. Question number three. If I gave you 90 days to generate new business for my company, what would be your first three steps? I love this question.

This is a great question because it gives you kind of a roadmap, gives you a window into who they are as a business development person and what they're going to do. Now, I take this a step further. And the last step in my interviewing process is I actually give them some leads and I make them develop relationships with the leads to see if they know what they're doing.

And I pay them when they do develop the relationships, I pay them the commission. But I hire people as contractors first before I make them full-time employees, especially in business development. So when they answer this question, do they start by understanding the business and the market before jumping to conclusions and setting strategies? Do they talk about strategic alliance partnerships or targeted outreach? What are the practical, measurable, actionable first steps they tell you they're going to take? And then if you're serious about hiring them and you say, okay, go ahead and take them and I'll pay you an 80% commission if you land any of the people that I'm going to give you as leads, do they jump all over that? If they don't, you should be suspicious.

Question number four, what key performance indicators do you track to measure business development success? What KPIs do you use? If someone is truly an expert, they always measure their impact, especially if they're a competitive person and you don't want a business development person unless they're highly competitive. And business development isn't about networking. It's about driving real results.

So you should be listening for pipeline metrics like conversion rates or deal velocity. You really want to hear about revenue growth and you want them to discuss relationship-based metrics like referrals and customer lifetime value. And then you want them to explain how they adjust their strategies based on the numbers.

Now question number five is one of my favorites. What's a common misconception about business development that you disagree with? So what do you hear about business development that is thought to be true, but really isn't? This question reveals depth of thinking and it tells you whether they have their own insight rather than just repeating industry jargon. Do they challenge the outdated or surface level ideas? Do they offer a fresh perspective backed by real experience? Can they articulate why their view is different and how it leads to better results? What I'm looking for here is I'm looking for them to talk about some of the common tried and true tactics and discuss how they think differently from the old school thinking.

And then I want them to back up that thinking with actual facts, with actual experience. These are behavioral interviewing questions because we're looking for specific examples from the people that we're interviewing. If you're a business development professional and you're interviewing for a job, every answer you have should start with an example, should start with something you've experienced in the past.

So there you have it, five powerful questions to determine if someone is a true business development expert. If you're hiring or looking for a partner or just trying to separate the contenders from the pretenders, these questions will be a great start for revealing the truth. If you found this episode valuable, make sure you share it with a friend because our show only grows when one entrepreneur shares it with another.

So if you're on Facebook or you're on LinkedIn and you're seeing all of these people tout their business development expertise, I want you to ask them these questions and dig deep into their answers and share these questions with all your friends who are entrepreneurs so that they know how to spot a true business development expert. My name is Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth and I thank you for listening today and I hope that you make a great living and live a great life.