What I’ve Learned From 32 Years In Business Development
I started in telesales with a telephone, a business directory and a card system. Thirty-two years later we have laptops, smartphones, live data, CRM systems and AI. Almost everything around business development has changed. The fundamentals have not.
When I look back at my career, one of the strangest things is remembering what we once considered normal.
My first sales job was telesales. There was no computer sitting in front of me. I telephoned businesses from a directory and used a card system to keep track of new prospects.
Looking back now, I genuinely do not know how we did it.
But that is also one of the most important business development lessons I have learned. At the time, we adapted to the tools we had, found a way to make them work and thought what we were doing was perfectly normal.
Then technology changed. We changed with it. And we became better at the job because of it.
That is why I am not frightened by the next change. We have adapted before. We will adapt again.
From A Telephone Directory To AI
The first big change I saw in business development was not a new sales theory. It was technology slowly entering everyday working life and giving us something we had never really had before: more usable time.
I started with directories and cards.
Then mobile phones started becoming part of business life.
Laptops became more useful and more involved in the day-to-day job.
Even getting to an appointment changed completely.
Before satnav, I had a map book. If I was working in an area I did not know, I could find myself checking that map again and again throughout the day.
Then mapping moved onto laptops. I can remember having a laptop on the passenger seat with a mapping system running on it. After that came dedicated satnavs. I had a TomTom plugged into the cigarette lighter in the car.
They were nowhere near as good as the navigation we have today. I lost count of the number of times an early satnav confidently delivered me somewhere that appeared to be a field full of cows rather than the business I was supposed to be visiting.
But even imperfect technology changed the job.
It Removed Friction
Less time was wasted finding addresses, searching through paper records and repeating simple administrative tasks.
It Organised The Day
Better tools made it easier to structure territories, appointments, prospects and the work that needed to happen next.
It Created Space To Try
Once routine work became easier, there was more opportunity to try new approaches, improve processes and develop the role.
We Grew With It
None of these technologies arrived fully formed. We learned what they could do, worked around their weaknesses and gradually made them part of the job.
The biggest difference technology made to me was structure.
And when you become more structured, something else happens. You start thinking differently.
You have time to test new things. You have time to adapt. You have time to grow.
That is why, after seeing computers, mobiles, laptops, satnavs and countless other technologies arrive during my career, I do not believe the core of business development has changed at all.
It has been enhanced.
The fundamentals of business development have never changed. Technology gives you more time and more information. The opportunity is to use both to work more strategically.
That is also how I see AI.
I have heard dramatic predictions around technology before. Every major change creates excitement, fear and people telling us that work will never be the same again.
Yet my experience has been much less dramatic.
Technology arrives. We learn it. We adapt. The people who use it well become more capable.
AI should give a modern business developer more time to think, more time to be patient and more ability to target the right business directly.
If all we use that extra capability for is doing more activity, I think we have missed the point.
Business Development Is Still A People Business
If technology was the biggest thing that changed around me, people were the thing I learned most about. Thirty-two years of business development teaches you very quickly that no two buyers are exactly the same.
I left school with no grades.
My parents split up when I was 15 and I struggled with it. Even before that, school was never somewhere I felt particularly comfortable.
I was a dreamer.
I liked imagining things, creating things and working things out in my own way. I could sit on my own with toy soldiers or a Subbuteo football set and build entire stories around them. I liked computers early on as well.
What school did not really show me was what would eventually become one of my strongest commercial skills: I was good with people.
I had personality. I could talk to people. Over time, that developed into something much more useful.
I learned how to read body language.
I learned how to read a room.
I became good at recognising different personality types and understanding how somebody wanted to communicate.
One of the most important skills a business developer can have is the ability to adapt their communication style to the person in front of them.
If I was speaking with a factory manager who was direct, informal and straight to the point, I could work comfortably in that environment.
If the next appointment was with a highly professional managing director who expected a completely different style of conversation, I could adapt again.
That is not about being fake. It is about understanding people well enough to communicate in a way that works for them rather than expecting everybody to work around you.
Pay Attention To People
You can learn to listen, observe body language, recognise communication styles and become more aware of how another person is responding to you.
Experience Makes It Instinctive
Knowing the theory is different from having years of meetings, mistakes, objections and difficult personalities behind you. Over time the judgement becomes much more natural.
I absolutely believe those people skills can be learned.
But I think mastering them takes time.
I was never particularly mindful of developing them. I did not wake up one day and decide I needed to learn how to read a room. It happened naturally through years of doing the job.
It was evolution.
And I still got people wrong.
Some buyers were extremely difficult to read. Sometimes I misjudged somebody completely.
Oddly, those could become the people I enjoyed dealing with most because they were a challenge. You were trying to understand them, build the relationship and earn their trust without becoming desperate or forcing the situation.
That last part matters.
You should never force it.
I have seen plenty of business developers become desperate. They push, then push again, and then push some more.
Does that sometimes win business? Of course it does.
It was never my way.
My way was personality, rapport and relationship building.
And I think that is one of the reasons that, when I won a client, I tended to keep them for a long time — sometimes for as long as I was in a position to work with them.
The relationship is the most important part of business development. Why work so hard to win somebody for three months when you can build something designed to last for years?
A long-term relationship does something else as well.
It creates a stronger base to build the next piece of growth on top of.
That influenced the way I thought about account mix too.
I never liked the idea of bringing in one or two enormous accounts simply to cover the annual revenue target.
I had seen too many business developers put all their eggs in one basket, only to be told that the account was leaving. Suddenly a huge part of the number disappeared and there was nothing underneath it.
I preferred a broader base of customers.
If, for example, I had 30 clients each contributing meaningful monthly revenue, losing one or two was painful but manageable. I could replace that business without the whole year falling apart.
For me, relationship building and risk management were not separate things. They were both part of building a business development base that could last.
A Pipeline Full Of Nothings Means Nothing
I did not always work this way. Earlier in my career I did the volume approach too. The biggest change came when I joined a major global business and was taught to think about business development very differently.
This is important because it would be easy for me to look back now and pretend I always believed in strategic targeting.
I did not.
I changed because somebody showed me a better way.
When I moved into a large global organisation, the expectations were different. The training was different. The way we thought about prospects was different.
We were taught to target.
We were taught that a pipeline with hundreds of weak names in it was not a strong pipeline. It was just a large list.
The objective was to have strong prospects that genuinely aligned with what we were offering.
Qualification was key.
That changed the way I looked at activity completely.
I still hear people today insisting that sales is simply a volume game. Make more calls. Send more messages. Fill the top of the funnel and something will eventually fall out of the bottom.
I do not agree.
Especially now, when businesses have access to better information, better research and better technology, indiscriminate volume makes even less sense to me.
Target
Decide deliberately which businesses are worth spending time on rather than treating every name as an equal opportunity.
Qualify
Establish whether there is real alignment between the business, the need, the timing and what you can genuinely offer.
Slow Down
Stop confusing urgency with effectiveness. Give yourself enough space to think about the commercial situation properly.
Build Strategically
Use better judgement, stronger relationships and better positioning to create growth that can actually be sustained.
A Strong Brand Changes The Conversation Before The Salesperson Arrives
There was another lesson I took from working for large organisations: the importance of having a strong brand behind you.
It makes a huge difference.
When you represent a business with credibility, recognition and a clear position in the market, you sell differently because the buyer sees you differently before you have even begun making your case.
That is why I think smaller businesses should take brand building much more seriously. A strong brand does not replace a good business developer. It makes the good business developer more effective.
In that environment I became hugely successful. In my final two years before moving into developing systems, I was in the top 15 salespeople out of roughly 250 sales professionals.
The important point is not the ranking itself.
It is what changed before those results came.
I stopped worrying so much about having a massive pipeline.
I slowed myself down.
I started thinking much more strategically about how the business was actually going to be won.
Of course the company still wanted revenue. Of course it wanted more of it.
The difference was that the training was teaching us how to get it rather than simply demanding more activity.
Hundreds of prospects that do not align with your offer are not a pipeline. A smaller number of genuinely qualified businesses can be far more valuable.
Fear Is Not A Sales Strategy
Patience sounds easy when everything is going well.
It becomes much harder when things tighten up.
Can we pay the bills? Can we hit the number? Can we get this deal over the line? Do I need more prospects?
I still catch myself falling back into that fear mindset sometimes.
The challenge is recognising it before it starts controlling the decisions you make.
Because fear encourages exactly the behaviours that often make business development worse: rushing, chasing, filling the pipeline with weak prospects and trying to force deals that are not ready.
This is also why sales leadership matters so much.
One of the best mentors I had was Richard Fishwick.
He wanted results, but he understood how difficult business development could be because he had done the job himself. He was a perfectionist and his standards were extremely high, but he did not lead by constantly putting the fear of God into people.
He was an exceptional people manager. People liked him, wanted to work for him and responded to the way he dealt with them.
That taught me another lesson I still believe strongly today: most salespeople already put pressure on themselves.
You do not need to manufacture fear to make them care.
And if somebody consistently cannot or will not do the job, business development has a way of revealing that eventually. The results expose it.
Manage The Person
Understand what helps that individual perform. Some people need reassurance, some need challenge and some perform best when they are trusted and left alone.
Manage Everybody The Same
Treating every salesperson with the same pressure, the same style and the same intervention ignores the very human differences that drive performance.
I think of it a little like football management.
A good manager does not treat every player exactly the same.
One person needs an arm around the shoulder. Another needs tough love. Another needs to be trusted and left to get on with the job.
The ability to recognise those differences is really the same people skill that matters when you are sitting opposite a buyer.
Thirty-Two Years Later, The Tools Are Different. The Fundamentals Are Not.
When I started in business development, I telephoned businesses from a directory and recorded prospects on cards.
I drove around with a map book.
Then came mobile phones.
Laptops.
Digital maps.
Satnavs that occasionally sent me into fields.
CRM systems, better data and increasingly connected ways of working followed.
Now we have AI.
Every one of those changes altered how I could do the job.
None of them changed why the job exists.
Business development is still about finding the right opportunity, understanding the people involved, earning trust and creating commercial value. Technology should make you better at those things, not distract you from them.
If I had to pull together the business development lessons from 32 years of experience, I would not start with scripts, hacks or the number of calls somebody should make in a day.
I would start with adaptation.
Use new technology when it makes you more capable, but do not confuse a new tool with a new purpose.
I would talk about people.
Learn to listen. Learn to read the room. Learn that different people need different conversations. Do not force every prospect through the same approach simply because it is easier for you.
I would talk about relationships.
Do not think only about winning a customer. Think about creating the kind of relationship that makes them want to stay.
I would talk about targeting and qualification.
Stop being impressed by a CRM full of names. A pipeline is only valuable when the businesses inside it have a genuine reason to buy what you are offering.
I would talk about patience.
More technology should give us more time to think, yet too often we use it simply to create more activity. I believe the modern business developer should be more strategic than at any point in the history of the role — because we finally have the tools to be.
And I would talk about people management.
Business developers already put pressure on themselves. Good leaders still demand standards and results, but they understand that different people need different things to perform at their best.
That brings me back to AI.
I do not see it as the end of business development.
I see it as the next technology in a very long line of technologies that can remove friction, save time and allow good people to work at a deeper strategic level.
We adapted when computers arrived.
We adapted when mobile phones changed how reachable we were.
We adapted when laptops, mapping software and satnavs changed how we organised our days.
We will adapt to AI as well.
The important question is not whether business development will survive the technology.
It is whether we will use the technology to become more thoughtful, more patient, more targeted and ultimately better at the human part of the job.