What does a business development manager do? If you've got that question, I've got the answer for you today and so much more on this edition of the Inside BS Show. Hey now, my name is Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth and this is the Inside BS Show.

This is the show where we take you behind the scenes and give you the inside scoop on everything you wanted to know about business. Today, I'm sharing with you the answer to the question, what does a business development manager do? Now, I answered this question about five years ago on my YouTube channel and it blew up. This was one of the most popular videos I've made on my channel and I think the reason for it is because there are so many people out there who are searching for business development manager roles.

They want to know specifically what this person does and there are also a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners out there who are wondering how they can get certain tasks done in their business, certain sales tasks done in their business and the business development manager is the person who will do them. So, I'm going to share with you today five things that a business development manager does and this is not comprehensive. So, those of you who are out there thinking to yourself, well, I was a business development manager and I did this and I did this and I did this and he didn't talk about it.

This is not a comprehensive overview. These are the top five things that I rely on business development managers for in my businesses. So, if you're out there and you're looking to acquire a business development manager role, you're looking to go on an interview and you're going to get this job, good for you.

These are five things you can talk about doing in the role. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner and you're thinking to yourself, what are five things that I should be expecting my business development manager to do? These are the five things that you should start with. These are five roles or five tasks that need to be done and five things you should be asking your business development managers to do.

Now, many, many businesses, particularly in professional services, law firms, accounting firms, architecture firms, any type of professional service organization, they will substitute the word sales for business development. Why? For whatever reason and we can do a whole show on this, they have a stigma with sales. There's a stigma associated with selling and I hate that and I don't want to go into it here, but if you are seeking a role in professional services like a law firm or an accounting firm or an architecture firm or if you're in those businesses, you're going to refer to sales as business development, for better or for worse.

So, that encompasses everything in sales. For many other businesses, all other businesses aside from professional services, business development has a specific role and here are the five things that I have my business development manager do. First and foremost, a business development manager is responsible for strategic alliances.

Strategic alliances are the very first thing that a business development manager should do. What does this mean? Well, a strategic alliance is an opportunity for you and your business to get together with another business and you're targeting the same clients, but you're not competitive and you help one another succeed. You help each other succeed.

So, in a strategic alliance, you will sell to the other business's audience, they will sell to your audience and this combination of you selling to them, them selling to you is a great opportunity for both businesses. Business development managers seek out these strategic alliances. Business development managers are responsible for going out, connecting with the other business owners, making sure that you're in a non-competitive situation and doing what you can to start to develop a new relationship.

That's what a business development manager does from a strategic alliance perspective. In some companies, that's all the business development manager does, but in my company, this role, finding strategic alliances, developing them, expanding them, growing them, this is a really big deal and it's important, but it's only one of five things the business development manager will do. The second thing the business development manager does is connect with referral relationships.

Now, these are different than strategic alliance partnerships. A referral relationship is a relationship where we send work to them, they send work back to us. Now, this is not a strategic alliance because we're not doing events together, we're not putting each other on one another's websites as quote-unquote partnerships, but this is the opportunity for us to send work to somebody else who will help our clients.

In Exit Success Lab, the business that I own with Nikki G, with Nicola Gellarmino, we refer work out all the time. One of the places where we refer work out is for corporate entity formation. If a business is buying a property and they need help buying the property, we'll refer work out to set up the corporate structure and to handle the real estate purchase for our client.

That's a referral. We're not in a strategic alliance, we're just referring that work out straightforward. So that's what we do from a referral standpoint.

The third thing a business development manager will do is a business development manager will create educational content and the educational content is incredibly valuable and the reason the educational content is incredibly valuable is because this is our lead generation opportunity. So with the educational content, what we're talking about is we're talking about putting together topics like this that we would cover in a podcast, topics that we would cover in a video or a webinar, topics that we'd cover in a live seminar or an event, speech topics that I could go out and deliver that people are looking for. All of that is considered educational content and the business development manager doesn't put the content together necessarily but sources the ideas and then I sit down with them, do an outline and they take the outline and market the outline so that I can get speaking engagements or so that we can put together a webinar and see who's interested.

So the educational content, ideas for it and where we can place it, all of that is part of the process of being a business development manager and it's valuable as a business development manager for them to create that. And then the fourth thing that a business development manager will do in our business is event marketing. So the business development manager goes to our list and invites people to come to our events.

They don't necessarily go out and find new people to come to the events. They go through our current list of people who've demonstrated an interest and they invite them to attend our events. They may invite strategic alliance partners and referral sources to come to our events because they want them to see how the events work and they want to deepen relationships with them.

Business development managers focus on relationships. It's all about relationships for them. So event marketing from a business development manager's perspective is about bringing people who they've already started to cultivate a relationship with to our events to continue to deepen those relationships.

And then the fifth and final thing I've seen business development managers do over the years and this is particularly true in businesses that are going out looking for mergers is the business development manager may be responsible for identifying acquisition targets and initiating those conversations. So you can think to yourself well why would you want a business development manager to do that? This is a particularly specialized individual who will have the title of a business development manager. So if you're in a business development role and you're in sales this is probably not going to be something that you would do.

This would typically fall in the mergers and acquisitions department but these people do have the title of business development manager as well. So this person will be responsible for identifying new relationships and initiating the new relationships so that the acquisition can be made. When you think about growth there's two ways to grow a business.

There's organic growth which is through sales and marketing and then there's growth through acquisition. So sometimes the acquisitions people will have the title of business development manager. Those are the five things that I have our business development managers do.

If you're looking for a job as a business development manager you can use this as a guide. Use it when you're on an interview. If you're an entrepreneur and you're a business owner and you're looking to hire a business development manager, send them this first.

Send them this inside BS show. Send them this audio. Send them this video first and let them see the different things that business development managers do in different companies even if you don't want them to do these things.

These five things are really good guides for what great business development managers do in other companies. My name is Dave Lorenzo. This is the Inside BS Show.

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