Business development

This may serve us to create opportunities for new projects to emerge.

Business development can be understood as conversations: it’s about shaping partner engagements by asking the right questions and listening carefully.

Ideally we would be collaborative and curious to genuinely enjoy connecting with potential partners and be committed to understanding their needs. There’s always an opportunity of reshaping many of our partners’ organizations, unlocking their creative potential and creating value with them for planetary societies.

For that purpose, it’s important to be business-minded, professional and creatively represent the collective, remain calm under pressure while juggling multiple conversations.

Here are some guiding prompts and tools to support us during the process.

Prep work

• Understand and communicate the collective's unique value proposition, looking also for novel opportunities in order to advance our thinking and practice

• Take the lead in keeping track in Trello of the source of leads, progress, and outcome, and periodically provide a synthesis of learnings in order to improve our Business Development process

• Curate a bank of assets that showcase the collective's value proposition and actively sharing these with colleagues, partners, and clients

• Gather robust market intelligence on the opportunity, and finding the appropriate person or persons to team up with

Lead creation and pre-proposal work

• What organisations and/or projects would we like to bring forward based on the current year (ask Admin Circle's lead if in doubt)?

• What methods for engaging collaboratively with partners in an entrepreneurial way could we carry on? For example:

  • Initiate communication with potential partners by asking the right questions to determine valuable opportunities to collaborate on

  • Take part in the creation and facilitation of memorable and valuable events to support existing and attract new partner relationships and partnerships

  • Help coordinate with partners who are learning the collective's worldview, methodologies and best practices

  • Take part in the creation and facilitation of delivering educational engagements around holon’s approach

• In case we’ve got an organisation, reflect and open up the conversation in #proposals' channel about

  • how does the organisation relates to the partner evaluation criteria?

  • how does it relates to this year business development strategy

    • (ask Admin Circle's lead if in doubt)

  • or what are the opportunities to open up new areas and why it’s relevant.

• What’s the balance between potential gain and effort, both proposal setting and project wise (it helps if you write down the time & effort you are putting into the creation of the proposal)?