Hi, it’s Mo Bunnell, your business development expert and author of “The Snowball System”. Have you ever wondered what great leaders do when it comes to business development? Well I’m taping a four part series. This is the first one from Hong Kong on what I’ve seen over the past couple months that great business development leaders do that are different from those that are on the path to be great.

And this particular video is all about knowing who you’re for. This is one of the most critical things I see very highly effective leaders do early on in their tenure in a new leadership role, and stick around for the end of this video because I’m gonna teach you the number one mistake most leaders make when they do this.

So here’s the deal. Great leaders know with crystal clear clarity who they’re for. And here’s how you do it. You pick three to five very specific criteria that you think correlate to your perfect clients, your perfect prospects, your perfect customers. And when you’ve got these written down and you’ve got definitions for what makes a great version of each criteria versus a poor version. Then you’ve got a litmus test to say no to things and say yes to things and dial up your proactiveness around certain things. One of the commonalities I’m seeing across almost all our clients before they work with us is that people say yes to too many things.

What they say are words like “Gosh, we answer almost every RFP that comes our way even when we don’t have a chance to win it” or “We chase everything that comes in our inbox. We judge our success by how reactive we are. Well, when you’ve got a really crystal clear list of criteria – three to five – it lets you evaluate how you’re doing or where a potential opportunity stacks up. That lets you say no to things more easily, and think of what your world would be like if you were saying no to 20, 30, 40% of things that come your way. Helping those organizations find somebody who’s better suited for them, but you’re not chasing it. And then that frees up a massive amount of time to use “The Snowball System”, to do things like ‘give to gets’ and other proactive ways of deepening relationships with those that are your perfect criteria.

This is a big deal. It’s hard to do. But when you get with your team and you figure out what those criteria are and you define them, you are well on your way to winning. And then that allows the entire team to say no to the wrong things, and then free up time to be proactive about the great opportunities that you want to go out and create using our lead generation tools, our ability to get in the door, to create demand, to become likable, to proactively help those that need your help, but they just don’t know it yet.

Here’s the number one thing to avoid that I promised. The number one thing to worry about here is to not only pick criteria that you can easily find on the internet. What most organizations do on the first pass is they feel like they can only pick criteria that they can measure very easily.

Maybe through internet searches or through Hoovers or other databases they subscribe to. Typically some of your best criteria, those that are a bit more subjective, those that it takes getting in and meeting somebody and asking some questions to figure out if that criteria is true or not, or if it’s at a high level or low level.

As an example, I recently worked with a really high unbelievable expert that is transitioning his career to start a nonprofit. And this is what he wants his legacy to be. And we came up with about four criteria, three of which are pretty easy to identify in the internet and through databases he can subscribe through for development work, but one is really critical.

And that is that he needs somebody that’s a very innovative thinker. This is a new nonprofit. This is a change the world kind of thing. If somebody’s an extremely conservative thinker, they’re not gonna want to donate a big part of their net worth to something that’s new that hasn’t been proven yet. So he has to find people that are innovative. People that wanna take that risk and potentially have massive upside for every dollar that they invest, in every hour that they invest in his cause, which is an amazing cause. So while he’s got three criteria that he can sort through and sift and rank organizations and people that he might go to, he’s got one that’s really critical that he’ll have to craft some really great questions to ask once he gets in the door that first time. So that’s your tip of what to avoid. Have a nice mixture of easily quantifiable, publicly available data. And also typically some things that you get to go in and ask people about.

So that’s your tip for today. Leaders know who they’re for. They write it down, they document it, they build this with their team. So everybody’s crystal clear on what they’re chasing and what they’ll say no to.

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Well, that’s it for today. Thank you so much for watching. For more content like this, check out my most recent video and be sure to like them so other people can find out about us, but make sure you subscribe. That’s how you’ll be automatically alerted to the great content that we put out. And if you want access to a comprehensive system for business development, then just buy my book.

“The Snowball System” at Amazon. The link is in the description below. Thanks again.