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Hi, this is Mo Bunnell at Bunnell Idea Group. I want to do this video on something that’s really important to your success. This is something I would have gotten horribly wrong 10 years ago when we started training groups of people at Bunnell Ideal Group. Here’s the deal.
If you would have asked me well over a decade ago who will sign up for my classes, I would have said it’s the people who need help, the people that are struggling with business development, the people who are just learning it. It turns out that’s not the case. What I see in training over 10,000 people is that the first people to line up are the people that are already great. Isn’t that interesting? That the best are always striving to get better. Here’s why this is important.
It appears that it’s human nature for us that the deeper we develop our own expertise, the more closed-minded we become about that. This comes from the research by Victor Ottati, a Ph.D. out of Loyola University. Dr. Ottati found that when we perceive our expertise gets higher, we tend to become more closed-minded about the subject at hand. That’s our human nature. We have to fight against that especially when it comes to a skill like business development. We have to fight against the idea that as we get better at it, we become more closed-minded. Instead, we need to continue to strive to get better and better and better.
Here’s an example. The person that I potentially respect more than anybody else out there that we have trained is a guy named Russ Richards. Russ is one of the preeminent advisors to corporate transactions, very large transactions in the United States. He’s a lawyer. He’s incredibly good at BD. He works for one of the fastest growing and largest law firms in the world and he chairs their firm’s business development committee.
This is a person that everybody across this multi-national law firm looks up to when it comes to business development. He sought us out through a friend of a friend, got introduced to us, and came to a public training. And in that class of 25 or 30 people, he politely interrupted the facilitator more than anybody else to get the exact wording of a phrase, to get the exact step in a technique, to dig in with an example and say, “Hey, has anybody out in the class ever heard of this before? This is a situation I’m dealing with? What would you do?”
He was striving to get better every single aspect of business development and yet here he was probably already at 99.9th percentile and probably better than anybody in the room, yet he was the person striving to get better. An expert at his craft, transactional work, and an expert at business development, yet he can’t help but get better every single day. That’s who we want to be. We want to be Russ.
As we get better at business development, we want to make sure we don’t get closed-minded and think we got it, because there is always something you can improve. As with all our videos, I hope that this one helps you help you clients succeed, and I hope you enjoyed watching it.