What is a Business Developer today?

What is Business Development?

Founder Led Growth seems all the rage on LinkedIn.

It's actually a farce for some.

What is FLG?

See, Avishai Sam Bitton's explainer in comments.

Founders, Adam Robinson, Chris Walker, and Charlotte Lloyd are examples.

Adam went from startup to $5.4M ARR in 4 months!!!

It's not just startup entrepreneurs and solopreneurs crushing it with FLG,

Chris Zook's Harvard Business Review article shows founder led S&P 500 companies outperform their peers by 3X!!!

Some debate whether FLG is actually a real thing.

I argue they're something way bigger than FLG.

They’re actually great business developers.

It’s a farce for some founders to play the FLG role...

Some don’t want to do it…why force it?
Some don’t have the time to do it
Some don’t have the skills for it...

So, is it absolutely critical a founder play this role?

Ben Scandlen's study showed only 4% of SaaS founders doing FLG.

Could the same results still be achieved by someone else on the team?

What if you had a team of people like Rob, Chris, and Charlotte?

Enter the modern business developer.

Old business developers used to be hired for their rolodex.

Presumably, their rolodex was a roster of warm outbound leads...false BTW.

BD is, “Customer and Community advocacy that creates corporate growth.”

Modern business developers could be hired for their communities.

Rob and Chris’ inbound Demand Gen power is massive.

Charlotte leverages both Inbound and Outbound.

They are excellent modern BD role models.

Holly Allen at Passionfruit is a great non-founder example:

- Started as a BDR in 2019
- Now has 28,833 followers
- Unemployed a month ago
- Hired by Passionfruit 2 days ago
- 1 Day later, posted her post below
- 2 hours later, she had 122 Likes!!!

Imagine a team of modern business developers like Holly.

Now, imagine how you could compensate those BD people.

It won’t be on KPIs, like meetings booked!-)

Otherwise, they might leave to become…

Founders.

Tony Gray, BDP


P.S. learn more in the “Business Development Body of Knowledge”
Get your copy on Amazon today!

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