We are shaping the future of business development! Read the story of how we are changing business development through education and knowledge sharing!
What, exactly, is business development? This is something I was wondering too. Pretty much since I first started in this role 10 years ago. What I learned is that there isn’t one way to do it. And not even one way to define it.
Yet, every company in the world starts doing business development at one point. This for me was always a bit confusing. How are these companies supposed to do business development, if there isn’t even a general definition of what it actually means?
About 3 years ago, I decided to learn more about it. I started researching. Googling everything I could about it. I learned so much, but still, it was very confusing.
I didn’t have only one version. Instead, I had plenty of sources, saying everything and the contrary of everything.
This is when I realized we needed a safe place to share our stories, learn from each other, and slowly start formalizing the definition of business development.
My drive to improve pushed me to connect with more business developers and together find out how to shape the future of business development.
A safe place for business developers
In May 2018 I created Business Developers United. An online community where business development professionals can share, learn and improve together.
This community quickly became a big family where we continuously contribute to making each other more successful.
One thing was clear: I was not the only one to be confused and frustrated.
We all wanted to have someone else, with more experience, that could help us better understand business development. Therefore, what started as a way to fix my own frustrations, turned out to be something bigger, that many people around the world needed.
So I collected some brilliant professionals to help me realize a very big idea:
Creating the very first platform entirely dedicated to business development.
So, a couple of months later, Roy, Bea, Alessandra, and Robi were brainstorming ways to make this happen.
A platform from the bottom
By August 2018 our team was fully operative. In order to better understand how professionals around Europe defined business development, we launched our first survey.
Our team worked hard to build a website, and shortly after that, we published the first practical articles to help more professionals.
Together with the community, we brainstormed, shared our stories and asked for advice. Together, with Business Developers United, we started formalizing the knowledge around our field. Everyone contributed by asking questions, sharing cases and providing help whenever necessary.
And this, ultimately, is what makes The BD School such a special place:
It comes from people working on the field every day!
One central place for business development
From the very beginning, we embraced an ambitious vision:
Creating the new generation of business developers and founders using the power of education!
It’s quite big for a small team, right? Yet, we kept our motivation high to provide everyone with one central platform for anything related to business development.
Starting with articles, was a way to immediately give back to the hundreds of professionals that put their trust in us from the very beginning. However, we had to do a lot more!
Creating the new generation of business developers
We had clear ideas from the very beginning. Our goal is to help individuals and companies acquire skills to be more successful in our field.
And we believe we could achieve our mission by putting a strong focus on educating business development professionals and entrepreneurs. We had to create a journey that could put structure around such a confusing topic.
Therefore we created the very first business development course focused on creating a modern approach to business development. We don’t teach how to get clients. Instead, we teach how to create a new mindset to help you spot opportunities and create sustainable growth.
And we do so by combining knowledge from different fields and skills to supercharge business development teams and individuals.
We are on a mission to build a new generation of business developers!
Solid foundations for a stable growth
Obviously, individuals can’t change an entire field alone. The revolution had to start before that. It has to start within ambitious companies that don’t want to limit themselves and desire to take full advantage of what business development has to offer.
To support them, we collected experts in different business development fields. Their experience, combined with the ability to find creative solutions creates the perfect synergy to build success stories.
And of course, even the more ambitious idea is nothing without a great team to make it real. That’s why we decided to support companies and to connect them with the right talent, that perfectly matches their identity and goals.
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Join the movement!
We believe it’s time to fix the mess around business development and make it accessible to everyone. And we think that the only way to do so is by sharing knowledge and formalize our experiences to help each other.
Join the movement and let’s shape the future of business development, together!
