Cracking the Code: How to Make Business Development Actually Work

Cracking the Code: How to Make Business Development Actually Work

Tim Fitzpatrick
You're building a growth-focused business, and you know strong relationships drive revenue. But business development often gets lumped in with sales, misunderstood, or worse, ignore it altogether. In this episode, we're digging into what business development really is, how it connects to sales, biggest mistakes companies make, and what it takes to build meaningful partnerships that fuel long term growth. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and it definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Luke Voivoda from Ace Business Development with me today. Luke, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Luke Voivoda
Tim, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, we're going to have a great conversation, man. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid questions to help people get to know you. Are you ready to jump in with both feet?

Luke Voivoda
Lay it on me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, man. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Luke Voivoda
I love to be active. Sports are the name of the game for me. Tennis, pickleball, golf, all of those are huge for me. I'll see anyone on the field. But then also outside of those, I love weight lifting. That's my one passion.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. I love it, man. You're getting You're getting cardio and you're getting the strength training, right?

Luke Voivoda
Exactly. You make your cardio fun. It's not nearly as much of a chore, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's your hidden talent?

Luke Voivoda
This one's always fun to talk about. I am actually quite a gardener. I have quite the green thumb. My wife and I have an array of different indoor plants that we take care of. On the regular, we'll have to trade off for who has a schedule that makes sense to take care of them for the week. She always jokes that the weeks that I end up taking care of them, that they just a lot happier.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, cool. I love it, man. All indoor or do you have any outdoor?

Luke Voivoda
Right now, all indoor, but we recently actually moved to a place that has an outdoor balcony, so we might have to start testing our look.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, awesome. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Luke Voivoda
I think the best piece of advice I'd ever been given was that you cannot inject yourself with experience. The only way that you can get experience is by putting yourself out there attempting something new. And so to that end, in that same vein, that same individual told me, never waste a rep when an opportunity to gain experience is presented to you because you should take every single possibility that you can to get experience because there's really no other way to be able to add it into your repertoire.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That is a great piece of advice. I love that, man. I've never had anybody share something in that vein before. So I love that. So you can't inject yourself with experience.

Luke Voivoda
Yeah, exactly.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You got to take action, got to get the reps.

Luke Voivoda
Yeah, got to take action, got to get the reps, and then don't waste the reps, right? Even if you don't know how to do something 100%, try to do what you can do. And then next time, you'll probably be able to do it in a better spot than you did the first time.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Luke Voivoda
While I love sports and I've played a lot of sports, I am not really a fan of the pop culture of sports. I have one or two sports teams that I care about. But beyond that, I appreciate the drive of professional athletes, and I respect the game and the match and the rules, and I love competition. But as far as fantasy league or who has certain brand deals, just not really something that I track. I'm actually barely even conversational with it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you watch a lot of sports?

Luke Voivoda
A little bit, but even then, yeah, I honestly make a conscious effort to watch sports so that I can be a little bit more in... I like sports. I do. I love the game, but I just don't really care about the culture as much around it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, sitting there watching. There's some sports that I just cannot sit down and watch on TV.

Luke Voivoda
Yeah, I have to agree with you. I have to agree with you on that. I would say that capitals and hockey are where I can get my butt in a chair the longest amount of time for.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, and I'll tell you, man, I am not a huge hockey fan, but hockey is by far the most exciting sport I have ever watched live.

Luke Voivoda
Absolutely.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Live hockey, it doesn't... Watching it on TV is not the same. I'll just throw that in there. What success mean to you?

Luke Voivoda
Success is the steady achievement of meaningful progress towards an already previously conceived goal. I think that that's how I view it. Then to expand on a little bit, I think that it can be improved performance against one of those predefined goals or metrics, or it can be expanded knowledge. But again, it's the steady achievement of progress towards one of those goals.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, Luke, normally I don't expand on these rapid fire questions. But you're given some really good stuff here. So mission of success is much similar to mine, right? Most people, when I ask them this, and it's not that this is wrong, I just view it a little bit differently, but most people it's achieving a certain goal, right? And the thing that I don't like about that is until you achieve it, you're not successful, right? But when you redefine it as steady achievement of progress, for me, it's very similar where it's just it is continually getting better. It's that journey. And because of that definition, you can be successful every day.

Luke Voivoda
Absolutely. In fact, Tim, just to jump on a little bit more on this, even though I know you're out of fire. But I say this to a lot of people, actually, and I think it drives into exactly the same mentality that you and I are talking about, which is that I truly strive to be 1% better every day. I think that you can have that in a lot of different areas. If you think about a video game stack card, maybe something along those lines, you can be 1% better in a lot of different things. If you go to the gym that day, then you're 1% better physically. If you can't go to the gym, but you were able to spend two hours reading something and really understanding a concept that you didn't know, now you're a 1% better intellectually. You know what? Even if you couldn't do anything and you ended up going to a social event and you got to see your friends and build rapport there, then you're 1% better there. I think it's that continuous effort to be just a little bit better daily that then makes it so that it's not as daunting, but then that it compounds over time. You just do that 1% over and over and over again, and you're taking leaps more strides than people who aren't doing that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Have you ever read The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson?

Luke Voivoda
I have not. Oh, I have not.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Great book, which really talks about that. It's the small things that we do daily make all the difference in the world. They can put us on an upward trajectory. They can put us on a downward spiral. But it's just those little things that seem almost meaningless throughout the day, but they compound.

Luke Voivoda
Right. Absolutely. I could not agree more.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So where's your happy place?

Luke Voivoda
It's odd, but I would say it's Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It's just a cute little northern beach town up here over on the East Coast. I've been going there with my family since I was born, and I got to take my girlfriend there who is now my loving wife. I've been able to take her through the process of going there over and over. I go there every year, and it's like a home away from home for me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Rehobish Beach?

Luke Voivoda
Rehoboth. It's about an hour away from Ocean City, Maryland, but it's an hour north, and it's a great spot to go to. I highly recommend.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Luke Voivoda
Now, that's a good question. I think one of them is loyalty, just because... I'll give a quick breakdown of the language here. Is loyalty because I think I'm a very busy individual. In fact, I know I'm a very busy individual, and I know a lot of my friends are as well. And so to me, I don't need to see everyone or someone every single day or talk to them every single day for me to say that I'm still good friends with that person or that I want to spend time with them. So to me, loyalty, because it's more or less the fact that you can just pick off where you left off. So that's one of them. I think another one is thoughtfulness, just because I always appreciate people who, again, are putting thought into their actions. And again, it doesn't need to necessarily thoughtfulness equate to kind in this sense. But again, someone who is thoughtful, deliberate, meaningful with their actions and the things they're doing, I really appreciate that and I really respect it. Then I would say if I had to throw one last one in there to the last point of third, I would say curiosity. I think that ties in to that thoughtfulness one, maybe even a little bit loyalty. But I always appreciate when someone likes to question something, when someone is looking at something a little bit differently, because I feel like that's how I like to look at life. I feel like that's how I carry out my job half the time is by flipping something on its head. And so people who can bring that curiosity to the table, even if it's for a basic happy hour conversation. I always respect that and really appreciate it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Tell us more about what you're doing at Ace Business Development.

Luke Voivoda
Absolutely, Tim. Here at Ace Business Development, what we really do is help business owners that want to invest in their growth, but we help them do it by enabling them to pursue a strategic direction. In more layman's terms, what that really does is we are working with them to understand what is an ideal opportunity, what does an ideal deal look like for them, and how can we back up and reverse engineer how to find those early enough that we can gain intelligence to strengthen the deal life cycle. We work with people in a fractional capacity to enable them to really understand, if I want to get here, what are all the steps I'm going to need to take to get there, especially in a business development lens?

Tim Fitzpatrick
You're helping business owners that know they need to do business development, they don't have the time. They're not ready to hire somebody full-time to do it. They can hire Ace as an outsource business development arm for their company.

Luke Voivoda
Correct. Exactly. No, you're right on the money, Tim. You're right on the money. I think a way to maybe elaborate on that a little bit is the sales funnel is a mysterious and fickle creature. It is in whatever industry that you find yourself in, whether that be more government-focused sales, whether that be more industry focus sales, what have you. The sales funnel is interesting, and there's a lot of different steps to the sales funnel. Not only is each one of those steps nuanced and intricate, but all of them play into one another. And so the way I see it is sometimes people don't have a grasp on what their sales funnel looks like. So what people do is they bring me, my team, Ace business development into the fold, and we help them understand the actions within their sales funnel a little bit better. We help them understand what is it that you need to do to take a deal successfully from identification to close. And then not only that, but are there things that you're doing today that could be better? Again, I think that when I'm working with groups, there's two really use cases or reasons why I'm brought in. One is because they just have a very infantile business development or sales process. It's more side of desk. It's something that someone's thinking about as an afterthought, which is fair, but they don't have a standardized structured process to bring deals through. And so then I come in and start helping them develop that. Or on the flip side, maybe it's a bit of a larger small company or a mid-size company, and they have a sales funnel and a sales process that's working for them, but they understand that there's hiccups and that there's just a couple of creases that need to be ironed out. So I come in and I'm strategically pointed at one function within the sales funnel to figure out how we can make that work better for the rest of the process.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I think a lot of people would love it if the sales process was linear, but it's not. It goes all over the place, right? And I think a lot of the problems people run into, well, one, a lot of people just don't have a process, but a lot of people will put in a process that assumes it's linear and it's not. And because of that, their process doesn't accommodate things going right or going left. We're going to dig into this, man. You touched on this, right?

The Difference Between Business Development and Sales

Tim Fitzpatrick

We've talked about business development, we've talked about sales. What's the difference? How do you view the difference between sales and business development? And how are they connected? Because they are intertwined.

Luke Voivoda
Yeah, absolutely. They are intertwined. And I think that's something that I work with my clients to uncover and to discuss with them day in and day out, which is what are some of the activities you're doing in sales? What are some of them that you're doing with business development? How are they overlapping? How is one impacting the other Again, to your point, they are connected, but they are a bit less, again, one to one than you would necessarily think. I think to really answer the root of the question here, what's the difference between business development sales? I think business development is much more relationship-driven and relationship-building-focused than sales is. Sales is a little bit more transactional. I don't want to go as straightforward to say this in a blanket statement, but for For simple terms, business development is more chess, where sales can be more checkers. You understand what someone wants in sales. It's a bit more direct. It is a bit more one-to-one. And just by nature, you have the best product or service that is going to address someone's need, help them meet profit goals, help them execute a mission, and you're figuring out how you can plug and play, fitting a round peg in a round hole. Whereas business development isn't quite as straightforward It's flipping something. As I said earlier, it's flipping something on its head over and over and over again to figure out how you can view it that's going to benefit you all the most. Business development can be on many topics. It can span the sales process like we talked about. It can span partnerships and go-to-market strategies in a more corporate-level sense. You can be talking to firms about new offerings. It can even have some component of operational impact on this, such as an M&A talk. Business development at the the end of the day is about building relationships and understanding what keeps someone else up at night, and then being able to take that knowledge, again, maybe noodle it around, jumble it around a little bit, and then figure out how can I do something? What is in my power that I can take this knowledge that I've gathered, I can work on this relationship and leverage this relationship to, again, find a win that makes sense for everyone.

Tim Fitzpatrick
When I think about business development, I think about more of a strategic focus and a long term focus. You're identifying relationships that are important to the growth of the company, and you are taking the time to build those relationships. And from that, sales opportunities come up.

Luke Voivoda
Exactly. But you're looking at things a little bit more like, I think two things to say to one of that is, one is I like how you said it on the timeline I would always equate business development activities to being more left on the timeline. Well, sales activities are more right on the timeline. I think just from a timeline sense, that's one good way to draw the line in the sand for you. But exactly, I think to drive it a little bit further and maybe to drive into something that's a little bit closer to home for me is I run a lot of government sales. I support a lot of my clients at Ace Business Development and being able to execute sales strategies and ink deals within either state, local, or federal government entities. With that, maybe we can bring the business development into a quick example there. You want to go into the Department of Defense. Well, that's great. But the Department of Defense has a whole bunch of different branches within it. We aren't going to sell per se to the DOD. We will sell to a DOD entity, but we're going to sell to someone that's much lower down from that 50,000-foot viewpoint than the DOD. So business developers will be able to go in and start saying, Okay, well, we have the greatest thing in the jig. Who needs that in the DOD? And it's not just as simple as going into a DOD conference and asking people to raise their hands. You have to start looking at data. You have to start understanding strategic initiatives. You need to be able to start understanding, again, what is it that this other group is trying to accomplish? Then you can come in, build rapport, gather intelligence, understand what's going on, and then start recognizing where there are sales opportunities. Again, maybe you go from DOD over to army, over to a basic command there that really needs AI tools, and what you had is an AI tool that's the next latest and greatest thing. Well, now you have a sales opportunity. But it took a lot of steps before that via business development for you to understand that an opportunity did really exist there.

The Biggest Mistake in Developing a Business

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. What's the biggest mistake that you see businesses making when it comes to business development?

Luke Voivoda
You know, Tim, I truly think that the biggest mistake businesses, individuals make when conducting business development is thinking that they need to be the smartest ones in the room and going in to a conversation, pretending they already know everything. I think a lot of the time, a lot of folks are under the notion that individuals only want to talk to individuals that are experts. Well, I have found, personally, that individuals like to talk to other people that listen more than talking to someone that's just an expert. And when you go into a conversation and you are just saying, Yes, I know that, and I understand that, you're ill-prepared, you're ill-informed, and you're making assumptions that may or may not be valid. A lot of the times, groups come in, they get that meeting at the army command that I just talked about, and they think, We had so many meetings and actions that it took to get us to this point today that we need to be experts going in. But I have found that individuals, in fact, do not mind explaining what they do, what it is their group is, especially if you do come in with some due diligence and you're asking more pointed third-level questions. I have always found that people are never opposed to explain something granular in their space, especially if you come at it from a point of humbleness and a point of saying, Hey, I don't really understand that acronym, that process, that division that you just brought up, but I'd really like to. Would it be possible for you to explain that in more detail to me?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Interesting because it just shows that you're interested and you're curious. Before you start talking, you want to really understand the lay of the land, which I think shows that you care. I'm guessing, but when we think about this question, one of the first things that came to my mind as a big mistake, which I see marketing all the time, so I'm curious to see your thoughts on this, but I would think that another big mistake is just a lack of patience. These are short-term thinking, but you can't think short-term when you're doing something that is long-term, and building relationships doesn't happen overnight.

Luke Voivoda
Yes. I think for sake of brevity, wholeheartedly agree. Ditto to everything you said. Because I'm a sales and business development guy, I have to be a little bit long-winded in every one of my answers. I think it's in my job description. But I've talked folks that they say exactly this, and I think it goes back to, again, maybe the first question you were asking, which is what's the difference between sales and business development? As a founder and principal here at Ace Business Development, I've been talking with other firms that started their businesses and other C-suite executives and asking them if they would share any tips and tricks about bringing on folks. When I was talking to them, they even talk about hiring sales for folks versus business development folks and saying that for them, they need to think about success in very different terms. And they always talk about it, again, in terms of a timeline where they say, a salesperson, I'm hoping that they're going to have a monthly, a quarterly, an annual quota, and based on if they're able to obtain it or not, I'm going to be able to gage success. Business development, it is a little bit harder to gear towards tangible success right in the beginning. You need to put very specific metrics in. And a lot of the time when I'm talking to these folks, they say, I'm bringing in business development folks and expecting a one and a half, two year timeline before I really start seeing some of the benefits can start reaping the rewards of what they're sowing. I completely agree with you. Is that a lot of the time, you want, again, back to what I was saying, you want a one to one investment to revenue with the dollars you spend in BD. Unfortunately, That's just usually not how it works. But you have to understand that a lot of this work, it's getting compounded on tenfold on the back end once you do have the patience to wait for the proper timing. I think you have to be in the right place at the right time, and you got to have a little bit of luck.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Do you think too that... When I think of business development efforts, I think of not just one-off sales. I think of sales that come over and over and over again, right? You make the right connection in the Department of Defense, and that person brings you into multiple opportunities, right? Is that a strong way of thinking about it?

Luke Voivoda
Yeah. No, I would say it would because, again, I think it goes back to what I was saying before, which is that business development is incredibly relationship-driven, and it's not as transactional as solving the problem right in front of you. I think a lot of people don't ask questions that I like to call them onion questions. It's the second layer. It's the third layer. As you peel back layers of the onion, you get to even better questions. Then when people, again, you're asking those questions, it goes back to saying, I don't know everything. I don't know stuff. I want to explain it to me. You're building that trust, you're building that rapport, and you're learning things, again, at a higher level than you would before. If you were just brought in to that one army command within the DOD to solve their one backlog issue, well, then great, you did something very transactional. But if that whole sales opportunity stemmed from the fact that I had built great relationships with someone at the army level, and I had learned from them that it was a real priority to get rid of as much hands-on work and that they're doing a larger AI initiative to, again, streamline X, Y, and Z processes. Well, now I helped them solve this in this one command or in this one program office, but now I'm talking to my contact that's sitting a little bit higher saying, We can do exactly this, but for another group. Or it's possible that we do something along these same lines, but for a different process, but it's still going to equate to that overarching goal that you told me was interesting and something that's good, like something that you have success metrics tied against. I think it does come back to that where you're building a relationship at a higher level than just a transactional deal. You're trying to help solve a pain point. You're trying to help execute a mission. You are trying to do work that, again, is going to support them further than just the hurdle in front of them, but to the end of goal. And that's where I think business development, again, it's harder to put into a one-to-one tangible results metric what's getting executed there.

The Role of Due Diligence in Business Development

Tim Fitzpatrick
So what do you... When we think... This next question is an interesting one because I don't think a lot of people think about due diligence when they're thinking about business development. What role does due diligence play in business development? Break this down for us a little bit.

Luke Voivoda
So really in business development, the most informed wins, the most informed and best informed wins. And the way that that happens is by conducting due diligence across all of the different areas that you can that are going to be impactful to an opportunity. And so really taking a step back and looking at the term due diligence. Again, it's looking at any information that's going to be impactful in the competitive landscape that you're trying to play within. There's a couple of different things you're going to want to think of right off the bat. You want to do due diligence about the buyer, about the customer. How do these groups buy? Where are they buying from currently? Have they bought previous iterations of what it is I'm trying to sell them and how did those look? You want to look at the competition. Is there going to be someone that's going to be vying immediately for this deal as well? Is there a way that maybe we can come at it as a team together and I can reduce the competitive landscape and maybe I lose a little bit of work, but it makes it so that it gives me a higher probability of winning. In the government space, there's things called contract vehicles, which is how you actually ink deals. And so a lot of the time there's due diligence into, can you access that contract vehicle? Which contract vehicle is this work going to come out on? You're looking at the actual statement of work itself. And again, in government, there's usually many iterations. So there's websites available that you can go and understand how these previous iterations of work looked, how they were composed, what the dollar value was. And again, between all of this, you start taking these disparate and siloed pieces of information and you start connecting dots with them and you start flipping it on its head again, over and over again. And start understanding, here is where we could come in stronger. Here is a potential weakness that we have to figure out how to hedge our bets against right now or else this could become an issue. And that due diligence really starts to let you understand, again, in a more holistic level, where am I strong in this opportunity? Where am I weak in this opportunity? What can I do here given what I have? And is there anything that now that I have this current state, now that I have done this benchmark, is there anything that I can do in the next couple of days, week, months to strengthen this opportunity, strengthen deal so that I could come at it as a better competitor than those around me?

Tim Fitzpatrick
I really like that. So the most informed wins.

Luke Voivoda
Yes.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Which, again, comes back to what you touched on earlier about being curious, listening, right? Asking the right questions allows you to continue to gather more information so that you understand the entire landscape. Because even if you're missing just little pieces here and there, some of those could be really important pieces to the puzzle. And so we've got to take the time to gather all the information that we need.

Luke Voivoda
I'll tell you one that sounds very simple, but again, with how much I just listed off there for due diligence, there's a lot of different metrics that go into you really evaluating the health or the composition of an opportunity. And so I think one that a lot of people forget about, which I always love to bring up as a point to show just to what you said, Tim, how there's so many things you need to be taking into account is like, let's talk about sentiment within a deal, right? Specifically, if we're talking about a government opportunity, let's say an IT team needs to modernize. Well, again, as we all know, regardless of your industry, there's usually key stakeholders across the map that are plugging into an initiative becoming executable that's coming to fruition, and that's more of a priority than others. And so in this example, let's say that this program office in the government wants to modernize their technology. Was that their decision or was that the IT team's decision or was that maybe someone else's in general? In that modernization, it said in the work, in the statement of work that you have in government that they wanted AI adoption in there and that they needed some AI tech. Is that program office requesting that or is that something that's now being told by the IT team that in this modernization, there needs to be AI? Because you're going to approach that very differently in the way that you're talking to folks about your solution and the way that you can help them, too. If they were voluntold, you're going to need to get an AI solution, then you're probably going to want to broach that a lot differently and say, We're going to do very iterative progression of AI. We're going to do a lot of training and a lot of user intimacy testing, user acceptance testing, going through everything for the UX, the UI, again, making sure that it makes sense to them, that they're adopting it, that the training makes sense. Whereas if they were the ones who said that they wanted AI and they're chomping at the bit to get their hands on it, then maybe you're talking about more of it in a roadmap sense. Like, Hey, we're going to get this very baseline chatbot in effect right now, and then we're going to use that as our MVP. But within the next two years before we exit, we are going to have just one of the darntest AI systems for you to execute X, Y, and Z tasks underneath. And then now you're being a lot more bullish in the way you're proposing your solution to them versus being a little bit more, again, I wouldn't say timid, but just being a little bit more cautious with your rollout. And so that right there is, I think, a perfect example of something that's not your probability of winning or not your what's the total contract value or even who should we team with? And those are all really important piece of due diligence. But this is going to understand the sentiment of the customer. And this is the type of stuff that, again, really enables you to come at it from a different level than someone else.

Fundamental Business Development Metrics

Tim Fitzpatrick
Are there some fundamental business development metrics that would be helpful for people to know? When I think of marketing metrics, it can get so complex and you can track all kinds of stuff that doesn't mean a whole lot. When you so on the marketing side, I always come back to, how many leads have you generated? Where did they come from? And how many new clients did you get? At a base level, you have to know those. You can expand out from there. Are there similar metrics that people should be aware of on the business development side?

Luke Voivoda
Yes and no. I think that the way that I would equate it on the business development side is I'd use the term, instead of maybe more reactive metrics or lagging indicator type metrics, which it sounds like maybe is a little bit more in the marketing world, I would almost use them as forward-looking qualification metrics. I'm very bullish on that in saying that you need to have some non-negotiable type qualifiers in place when you're even looking at an opportunity to figure out what's a non-negotiable for you. Do you only want new requirement type work, or are you willing to take on the 14th, 15th, 16th iteration of an ongoing contract? Because that's something that's going to be important. Are you okay with taking on a statement of work where you're going to have to bring teaming partners in? I would be so bold as to say yes, but some firms don't like that. They want to be able to handle the entire statement of work or not. That's going to be something. Some people, I've worked with a couple of firms that have ethos qualifiers. They want to support the mission that they care about. There are certain agencies or certain groups that they're not as interested in supporting, where other ones, to them, it doesn't even really matter the subject matter quite as much. They just want to be able to support it. I would care to wager that there might not be as many metrics on the back end that you can look at. I think there are, and again, it's very dependent on the group. But as far as every group, what they should be doing for some type of metrics, they should really putting in some type of baseline qualifiers to say, These are non-negotiables. As long as the deal hits these requirements, then it's at least worth a conversation. If they don't hit these requirements, then there's going to be another opportunity for us to catch in the next 5, 10 minutes.

Tim Fitzpatrick
From an activity standpoint, because business development is so long term, do you think that it makes sense to have metrics that you track from an activity standpoint? I don't know, whatever. I'm going to connect with X amount of people on LinkedIn this month, or I'm going to go to X amount of in-person events. Is tracking that type of stuff with business development helpful, do you think?

Luke Voivoda
I do. I do think that that's helpful, and I think it's helpful for two reasons. One is because if you're putting your best foot forward every darn time that you're doing something, then one of those things is going to pan out. One of those cold calls is going to make sense One of those events you have found that you attended is going to yield through. One of those cold emails you shot off is going to get a response. I think having metrics tied to something enables you, the business developer, to stay honest throughout the business development process. I honestly am a big advocate for metrics. We put metrics on ourselves at Ace Business Development when we're conducting statements of work for our clients, whether it be for the amount of outbound touches that we're going to get done, the amount of events we're going to attend on their the number of meetings we are going to generate with government personnel. We have a lot of metrics and goals tied to those. But I think another way to look at it is, again, in this angle, the historical sense, which is how many touches, emails, cold calls did it take for us to be successful in this one opportunity? And I think that that enables you to, again, look back at things in a holistic manner to say, Okay, well, if we were successful within this opportunity, How did it compose? What was the composition of it? And then that enables you to go back to what I was just talking about and refine your corporate qualifier metrics so that you understand, you know what? Every time we want a deal, it was off of this contract vehicle. So our pricing here must be a little bit better than somewhere else's. Or every time that we've lost an opportunity, it was because we were trying to attack it in this next code or this competition landscape. Maybe we can't do that anymore. Or if we do, we need to come at it as a teammate and not a prime contractor. So it does enable you to get a little bit more insights. I just would say that in business development, a lot of what you're trying to do, it's hard to commit to output-driven metrics. So it's easier to commit to input-driven metrics and then really start to understand, well, am I getting the outputs that I'm looking for? If so, these input metrics are good. If not, we're going to need to start testing our input metrics.

The Most Effective Ways to Build Relationships

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. Thanks for breaking that down. So I've made a connection, right? What are some of the most effective ways you found to take that connection and build the relationship?

Luke Voivoda
Well, I've talked about it a little bit. I didn't mean to go giving away some of my secret sauce and some of the previous questions to it. But I think to dive into it right off the bat is you got to listen to them. But you got to listen to them. You got to showcase active listening. But even more about that, ask about them, talk I think a lot of people forget that everyone's favorite topic is themselves. Let's just be honest. Everyone's favorite topic is themselves. If you are asking someone about their favorite topic, they are just going to be more excited to have a conversation with you. But I will caveat that with saying that you can't just ask them basic questions like, Hey, what's your title and what's your role and what did you have for breakfast today? It needs to be a bit more pointed in what we were talking talking about. Again, to keep running back to our example Hey, Mr. Or Mrs. Army individual, I took a look at DOD proper and I see that right now this much money is going towards it. I see that per guidance coming out of the administration today, that you all are taking a more pointed look at workflows inside of these following topics. I was just curious with you and your role as program manager, what steps are you taking right now to ensure that your processes are now adhering to this administration's new guidance? Wow. Well, thank you so much for the insightful question. I'm so excited about the work I'm doing there. And you just let them talk about it because they're excited about what they're doing. They're proud of what they're doing. And you sit there and you be quiet and you learn about what they're up to and you actually listen. And then to that end, again, by demonstrating active listening, by following along, you can then start doing those second, third-tier, onion-level questioning. Oh, well, that's fantastic that you're executing all of that. So what happens when all of that is no doubt inevitably successful? Oh, well, let me just tell you what's going to be great for me. And you start understanding that I'm going to be able to get this data over to my contracting office so much quicker now because of X, Y, and Z. Okay, well, what happens because that data... What's happening with that data that's getting sent over quicker now? What's the benefit of the fact that you just cut down on the time between this handoff? And so now you have another question to ask, and you're asking them all of these things that's keeping them up at night that they own. I think that that's one really great way to build relationships. And then I think the only other one that I would call out in this is, I think too much in this world, everyone's looking for value and trying to understand value and where can they get their next bit of value out of. I think everyone falls trapped to it, even when you're evaluating a networking event. Hey, are there going to be people here that I'm going to that are going to provide me value? But I think if you don't go into every conversation just expecting that the only way that the encounter can be successful is if you walk away with value. Instead, just think about having a successful encounter by meeting a new person and making a new friend, that the value is going to come back on the back-end. You'll see when you take a look at my LinkedIn that I dub myself the professional friend maker. And the reason I do that is not for any corny reason. It's because I actually feel that the individuals that I meet and bring along on my journey and I work with, I believe that the people that align with me are my friends. And I am always trying to bring my friends value, whether we grew up on the same cul-de-sac together or we met in freshman year dorms, or I met someone at a conference and now we are teaming partners together. It doesn't matter where that relationship stems from. Everyone who's in my network is a friend, and why would I want to do wrong by my friends? So instead, it's thinking about how can you bring someone else value that you care about. And then down the line, it's going to be a reciprocator.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I feel like another important thing to keep in mind when building relationships, unlike a broken record sometimes, you got to think long term. You can't force this. It's like going on a first date and being like, Hey, let's get married. It doesn't work that way. And it takes time for relationships relationships to unfold. There are people that I have connected with initially where I was like, Where this is going to go? I didn't know enough information at that point to really be able to identify all the potential opportunities. But as I stayed in front of that person and continued to build that relationship, some of these things that weren't visible before started coming the surface. Do you find that happens?

Luke Voivoda
I do. I would like to implore anyone who just watched this to just rewind the past little bit. And what Tim just said is business development. You found someone that you thought they were a good person. You thought it made sense. You were aligned through probably some baseline qualifiers. You had similar ethics, you had similar morals, you guys could talk together well, and you had some type of connection as to why it made sense to talk together. You liked each other. You built good rapport. You listened. And while you didn't think there was an immediate opportunity, you felt as though there was some value there. So you started to get to know one another better. And then through questioning, learning. I love what you just said. You even just said you didn't know where the opportunity was at that point. That's really business development. You think there is an opportunity, but it's really just an assumption. And so you start building that relationship and that's validated. And now there's an opportunity. And then you get to something in the end that has an I think exactly what you just said, Tim, is I think it's accurate. I think it's right on the money. But I think that honestly, I really recommend anyone who just was listening to this podcast to just relisten to what Tim said because he did a great job of explaining in practice how business development honestly generates opportunities or rolls into sales.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's hard because you got to be patient, which for all of us is so challenging. But even I'm finding there are people that I am working with from a referral partner standpoint, where the more I work with them, the more I see additional opportunities. But I couldn't see those opportunities six months ago or twelve months ago because the relationship wasn't there, right? And so the other thing, too, is I think If we try to force something too quickly, that ruins the relationship.

Luke Voivoda
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that... Again, I personally don't view relationships as something that need to have agendas. I am a big advocate of, again, just going to meet someone, going to have a conversation, and getting to know someone, and then down the line, figuring out where the value can drive from. Because again, as we talked about, the concept of due diligence, regardless of the industry that you're in, it's a bear. It is hard to not only understand all of the data points that you should be looking at when looking at something in the holistic manner, like what is the composition of something successful, a successful opportunity, but going about and collecting all of those data points is just as difficult as identifying them in the first place. And so I think you can't come in with an agenda. You have to come in with an open mind. And then as data points start to fall into place, you start understanding, Oh, well, maybe I should lean a little bit more than right here. Or maybe with this person, I should bring up this conversation topic, or maybe I'll just wait another meeting and see if they bring it up first because it might be more relevant to them and it might make a lot more sense for them to bring it up. Anyone who thinks that you need to go to a happy hour and there must be an ROI for it to be successful, I think, looks at things a bit too myopic in just my personal opinion. I would recommend, again, taking a step back and thinking about it more in business development terms than sales terms. It's okay if you don't go to a happy hour and walk away with an almost signed statement of work, and that's okay. But what is going to be potentially really beneficial for you is if you go to a happy hour and you meet a new partner firm that has access to a contract vehicle that you don't have access to or has worked within the DOD when all you've ever done is work within United States Department of Agriculture, USDA. You just being able to start figuring out where potential alignment even is coming in, I think, showcases that that's the type of stuff that shows that business development is making tangible progress forward every day. It's just not quite as black and white as did it happen today or did it happen yesterday. Sometimes it's just all of a sudden you take a look at the record that you're continually updating and you're like, eureka, I figured out what I can do here.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Awesome. Any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with?

Luke Voivoda
I think the last thing I would want to leave with the viewers today and with you, Tim, is analysis paralysis, just as the topic. I wanted to talk about that for a second. In business development, there is a lot that can constantly be happening, as we've been talking about over and over. I think a theme of our conversation today has showcased that there's a lot to be thinking about in sales, but there's an awful lot to be thinking about in terms of business development as well and how to keep your mindset open, how to keep it always shifting so that you can see if you can be doing something better, greater, than someone else. But with that all being said, do not fall trapped to the decision or to the fallacy that you need to make a perfect decision. I think that a lot of people forget this. A yes is a decision, a no is a decision, indecision is a decision. A lot of times people are so hung up on wanting to make sure they don't select yes or no incorrectly that they forget that by omission, they're selecting the third option. And while they're doing that, other people are selecting yes and no. And you know what? Some of those people who selected yes when they should have selected no won't do as well. I'm sure the same will be true for the people who selected no when they should have selected yes. But The fact that you made a decision and you are working with what you got and you tried an MVP iteration in a sense, I am a big advocate that it's better to do something than nothing any day of the week because what you're able to do is figure out what worked, what didn't, and figure out what can be taken away, what can be built upon, and what can be improvised. So especially in a space when you're constantly trying to figure out, Oh, my goodness, there are 15 different federal agencies I can target. Within each one of those, they have 15 different program offices, and I'm looking at their forecast, and each one of them has 15 different opportunities for me to run with. You can't go after all of those by just those numbers alone. But you should at least try to go after something. And if you lose it, that is a bummer. But I bet you you're not going to make that same mistake the next time. And you might have made that same mistake if you had just stuck with indecision.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You wrapped it all the way back around to, you can't inject yourself with experience, right? Just take action. Get out there. Do it. It's going to be imperfect, but you're going to learn from it and you're going to constantly get better. And that's going to open up opportunities. So I love it, man. Luke, Thank you so much for taking the time. Where can people connect with you?

Luke Voivoda
You can find me on LinkedIn, Luke Voivoda. Absolutely a great way to connect with me. I connect with anyone who reaches out to me on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to have any conversation with you there. On top of that, I think you'll throw Ace Business Development's website in the show notes. There's a way for you to reach out to us there as well. If anyone has any interest with working with Ace Business Development, either, again, we support fractional business development and sales efforts in both the industry side of the house and also the government contracting side of the house. If you have any questions, there's a couple of different ways you can reach us on the website, but via my LinkedIn, via the website, and then also if you end up doing a little bit of poking around, you'll find the Ace business development LinkedIn somewhere in there as well. Those are all three great places to reach out to me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. Thank you for taking the time. We will make sure that those links are in the show notes. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate you. If you want to connect with us at Rialto Marketing, you can do that at rialto marketing. Com, which is RIALTOmarketing.com. The other resource we have for you is over at RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com. We help clients build their marketing engine. We look at nine key areas. If you want to know which of those nine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. It takes less than five minutes. Take advantage of it. And until next time, take care.