5 Qualities to Look For When Hiring a Business Development Consultant

Hiring a business development consultant isn’t a task to take lightly. For many business owners, turning to business development consulting or coaching may be a risky, expensive, even scary move. One easy way to reduce risk is to get educated on what qualities separate an incredible investment in business coaching from a mediocre or average experience. So how do you know you’ve found the right company, consultant, or coach to hire? Here’s what you need to look for.

1) Listening

One of the most undervalued skills on the planet is the ability to listen actively — to truly understand where someone is coming from. Hire a coach who can really understand your situation so that they meet your company’s needs by delivering the most relevant, effective ideas. Even better, a phenomenal business coach is highly skilled at picking up on what’s really stopping you (which is not usually what you say is stopping you). That way, they can help you get to the heart of the issue, and you can get the results you really want.

2) Empathy

It’s easy to stop caring about your clients when you hide behind a veneer of professionalism and self-interest. Make sure the business development consultants you’re working with care about you, and that they are truly invested in your success on an emotional level. You want to collaborate over the long haul; why do that with someone who’s only marginally interested in you and what’s important to you? Frankly, why collaborate with any consultant who’s anything less than 100% interested in you achieving your goals?

3) Principles

At first, this section was titled “System” or “Plan” because it is important that a business coach comes in with a structure that empowers the client (that’s you) to take action. Yet, to some degree, business development consulting is ad hoc. The kind of work it takes to grow a company to the next level differs across businesses and even across time. So you may have one expansion strategy. Later on you may have another. Your competition may have a different plan. At the same time, there are basic principles to apply in every situation, and it’s by applying those fundamental principles that you see breakthroughs in communication, expansion, reliability, sales — you name it. Ask your business development firm what principles underlie its approach and make sure you resonate with them.

4) Trust

Anyone, literally anyone, can slap a title onto a business card and start a company in this field. That might not be such a bad thing, since it brings a broad array of styles and experience to the table. However, what it means to you is to simply make sure you’re working with a team you can count on in two ways: first, to do what they say they’re going to do, and second, to empower you to achieve your desired business results.

5) Accountability

Many business development consultants or companies evaluate your enterprise and deliver a laundry list of features to integrate into your current process. They tend to give you the answers and then look to you to implement all their recommendations. In fact, that’s a very common practice. There’s also nothing wrong with it, if you’re going to do what they tell you to do. See, advice is cheap. Will you actually take action to follow all of their suggestions? Or will you just implement what’s easy instead of what has the most potential to generate the highest revenue? If there’s no accountability structure in place, many people will gravitate towards easy, safe, busy work instead of doing what will make the most difference in your business. Make sure the business development coach you hire knows how to hold you accountable effectively, so that they can empower you to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of effective performance in the areas that will make the most difference, not just the areas that are easy.