Building an Elite BD Team
You’ve done it! Years of honing an idea, followed by months of tinkering in the garage has resulted in that incredible eureka moment! With mile-wide smiles on your faces, you and your cofounder high-five each other exuberantly and open up the dusty bottle of champagne. You’ve just built the product that is going to change the world! Businesses will no longer operate the same after they get your marvelous widget in their hands. The Beta testers of the MVP are already clamoring for more, more more! But wait…you are going to need a team to bring this product to the market. It works wonders — but it’s going to take some explaining and convincing to get new users to adopt it. And you are already realizing that the product needs to adapt to new customers’ needs. You are going to need a business development (BD) team, and you are going to need one stat! But, before you go hiring salespeople willy-nilly, what type of BD team do you want to hire and foster? Do you just want a bunch of zombie-robocallers that will halfheartedly aim for the quota, risking self-inflicted wounds along the way? Or, do you want an Elite BD team…the Tier 1 Special Forces pack of hungry wolves that also win pro sports championships? I thought so. Read on my friend…
Attracting Top Talent
These days, with unemployment rates hovering at all-time lows, the tight labor market means that companies are in fierce competition to hire the best-of-the-best. Seasoned salespeople with established track records are going to have their pick of employers and are going to take a hard look at companies and potential offers. There are many frameworks used to understand why employees choose companies, but I will simplify it with four main elements. The descriptions for each of these elements are when both the company and the employee are in a healthy relationship:
Consequential: The work that the company is doing is important or impactful. It is solving some problem that the employee can understand and agrees that it needs to be solved.
Compelling: The work that the company is doing is exciting, stimulating, and challenging. When Monday rolls around, the employee looks forward to tackling the next set of problems in order to propel the company closer to meeting its vision.
Compensation: The company rewards its people, either with money or other incentives.
Culture: The employee doesn’t feel like they are alone in the fight. They are sharpened or challenged by others who are similarly united in achieving both the goals of the company and the employees, which may include work-life balance, remote work, or social impact.
In this framework, the first two elements — being a compelling and consequential company — is largely derivative of the product or services that the company is offering (albeit effective communication and messaging is critical to having employees or prospective employees internalize and align with the company’s vision). However, the last two elements — compensation and culture — are largely variable levers that can be set and modified by the company leadership. It is also where companies can misstep or limit their growth, even with compelling and consequential products, and therefore we will focus on compensation and culture through the lens of hiring and fostering Elite BD teams.
I’ll cut to the chase here with the bottom-line up front: an Elite BD team is a peer-approved team with generous uncapped and shared commissions. It’s really that simple. If you want to take your product and company to astronomical heights, you remove the commission caps, split the pot, and let the team determine who stays and who goes. Let’s dig a bit deeper…
No Commission Caps
In Season 7 of The Office, Jim Halpert is on a hot sales streak and crushing it for SABRE, which just recently acquired the Dunder Mifflin paper company. The only problem is that Jim’s paycheck isn’t reflecting his high sales. There seems to be an accounting glitch with the commissions. Only upon further investigation does he find that SABRE recently instituted a cap on commissions. Despite being encouraged by company management to keep working hard, Jim’s incentives have literally been stripped away. Instead of continuing the sales streak, he spends the rest of the episode playing games and pranks on his coworkers.
It astounds me that there are still companies that cap commissions. Capping commissions is capping growth. In a healthy relationship between the company and the employee, the incentives must be aligned. If the company makes more money, then the BD team should make more money. If a BD employee sees unlimited upside, they should never stop hustling.
Commissions Shared Equally
While many may have been nodding their heads with regards to no commission caps, now everyone is getting a bit uneasy about pooling commissions. Isn’t that how communism failed?? We’ll cover how this can be done responsibly in the next section, but for now let’s focus on why it should be done.
Lionel Messi is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, soccer players of all-time. He has won the coveted Ballon d’Or award, denoting the World’s Best Player, a record seven-times. He has established himself as both the top goal scorer ever for both Barcelona and the Argentina National Team. It is very likely that he will finish his career as the top goal scorer of all time in the history of professional soccer. But do you know who has the all-time record for the most assists in professional soccer? Lionel Messi.
Messi’s assist record is astounding. He has a commanding lead in the record books with nearly 30% more assists than the second-place record holder. For every two times that Messi has scored, he has set up a teammate to bask in the glory of a goal. And this style of team-play has produced amazing results: During Messi’s nearly two-decade tenure at Barcelona the team has won 35 championship trophies. During the 2009 season, Barcelona achieved an unprecedented ‘sextuple’ by winning six championships in a single year. In 2015, they became the first European team to win the treble twice after they took the trophies in La Liga, Copa del Rey, and the Champions League. The Barcelona team from 2008–2012 is widely considered to be the greatest team of all-time, during which Messi also helped lead the Argentine National team to an Olympic gold medal. Despite being the top goal scorer of all-time, Messi understood a key concept: set others up for success, and the team wins.
Similar stories are rife across other sports. John Stockton and Karl Malone are considered to be the best pick-and-roll duo of all-time in basketball. Malone would set a pick, Stockton would drive the ball, brushing shoulders, and then dish the ball to Malone for the easy layup. John Stockton was an excellent shooter himself (ranking 51st on the all-time scoring records), but it was his deft passing that he is best known for. This repetitive action helped John Stockton establish himself as the NBA’s all-time assist leader, with 30% more assists than anyone else. Passing the ball helped propel the Utah Jazz into the playoffs during each of his 19 seasons, and helped keep Stockton and Malone (the NBA’s third all-time scorer, thanks to Stockton) as inseparable and indispensable teammates.
Early in my career, I failed at being a team player. Big time. I was working in an office where individual accomplishments were praised and for a boss whose mantra was “you eat what you kill!” Closing deals was the pathway to promotion, and the more you closed the higher you rose in the organization. We were responsible for sourcing our own leads, cultivating the relationships, and pushing them over the line. As both the youngest and newest member of the office, I hustled like crazy. I was the first in every day and the last to leave. Soon, I found that I had grown my funnel of qualified leads larger than anyone else. In fact, I had grown it too large, and there was no way I could convert all of them before the year closed. What would have been best for the team was for me to pass off some of the leads to others — especially the coworkers that I knew were closers. But what was best for me was to hoard the leads. I incorrectly viewed the situation as a zero-sum game. In retrospect, the incentives led me to this conclusion. If I passed off a qualified lead and they converted, I didn’t get rewarded. In fact, I just helped my coworker be more competitive for the promotion than myself. We weren’t playing team ball. We weren’t hunting like a pack of wolves. We were in lone wolf territory. And, as a result, we killed less prey and reaped copious amounts of resentment, distrust, and anger.
Being a lone wolf is for the birds. Hunting as a pack of wolves is way better. In fact, lone wolves in nature are often yearning to find a mate and start their own pack to hunt as a team and cover a larger territory. Speaking of territories, I’ve never been a fan in the BD context. If there are territories, people will be territorial. There may be a time and place to break accounts down by sector or geography, but do so knowing that there will never be perfect equality of opportunity in these ‘territories.’ To this end, it is even more vital that the BD team hunt as a pack and pool commissions. This also allows people to play to their strengths. Some may be amazing at uncovering new leads. Others may be incredible closers. As long as everyone feels like each of their teammates are pulling their own weight, then folks will understand that some are closing more than others — either due to lopsided accounts, or because they are incredible as passing the ball to others!
Peer Reviews
Within the US Army, Delta Force operators are the best of the best. Highly trained and in impeccable shape, the Unit has been responsible for some of the highest profile US military operations, ranging from the capture of Manuel Noriega, to Saddam Hussein, and the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The selection process to become a Delta operator is long and grueling, culminating in the ‘Long Walk’ a circa 40-mile march under heavy ruck with no announced end time and no help from others. Between starting the grueling selection process and the culminating ‘Long Walk’, 80% of the recruits will wash out. The remaining 20% are truly marvels of men and would, by all accounts, be terrifying lone commandos. But Delta operators don’t operate alone. They operate as a team — with each soldier fulfilling a specific role and their ability to do fill that role, and fill it well, could be the difference of life and death for the whole squadron. For this reason, even after completing the ‘Long Walk’, the remaining men go before a peer selection board. Each is making the decision about whether they can trust their life to the man on their left or right. And it is at this point that those who aren’t the right fit for the Unit make their final departure. Those that remain have been chosen to remain by their peers. And this forges a bond of trust and camaraderie that elevates their teamwork to even higher levels.
How do you ensure pooling commissions doesn’t lead to the same fate as communism? You let the employees vote who stays or goes. You employ a true 360-degree review program that actually has teeth.
High performers want to work with other high performers — especially high performers that understand the value of playing team ball or hunting as a pack. There is an incalculable energy that ensues whenever high performers know that they are working with fellow high performers that have each other’s’ backs in the pursuit of unlimited upside potential. This is where the magic happens. As new employees join the team, they either need to grab a shovel and start tossing coal into that engine, or they need to get off the train.
The exact particulars of a peer review system may differ from company to company, but in general I would favor a 360-degree review every six months or so. If two-thirds of a BD team indicate a fellow employee needs to go — well, that employee needs to go.
Some reading this may worry that such a system of peer review could lead to distrust or resentment. I would argue quite the opposite. Resentment among high performers ensues when a lackluster employee is allowed to remain or, even worse, rewarded. This will, in turn, cause distrust of the company and its leadership. But if an elite BD team is given the tools to succeed, an uncapped commission pool to flourish, and the mechanism to remove dead weight, then you’ll have other high performers beating down your door to join your company!
Boom.
And there you have it. The recipe for attracting and building an Elite BD team; a crew of world-class operators that hunt as a pack and bring your company to new heights that you could never have imagined. It all boils down to pooling uncapped generous commissions with the ability to vote the weak or selfish ones out. So, take one last sip of that champagne, a deep breath, and then get to work. You have a product to sell!
