Having What It Takes, Part 2

Back in 2020, I wrote a column called "The Strategist" for Madame Architect. As I started writing new pieces recently, I went back to the archives and thought, "hey, these still hold true!"

This two-part piece is important to me, as I often come back to this theme of who gets to do business development and why. Any business--whether it's a professional services firm or a company selling widgets--would benefit from developing the mindset that everyone contributes to business development and client satisfaction.

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In Part 1 of this column, I challenged the common assumption that being good at business development means being charismatic, extroverted, or aggressive, and instead offered that self-awareness and preparedness are two of the four essential traits. In Part 2, I’m going to dive into the final two: curiosity and patience.?

Trait #3: Curiosity

In our industry, we focus a lot of energy on “the pitch.” We all love a good TED Talk, where the speaker tells a thought-provoking and inspiring story about the work she does. We work hard on storytelling (which is definitely important!) and on picking the right projects to show. But in focusing so much on this, it is easy to forget that there is someone else in the room: your potential client. Being effective at business development doesn’t mean rattling off the list of awards your project has won or bragging about where you went to school. It’s about approaching a client with a genuine curiosity about their background, their needs, and their desires—to approach them as whole people who are interesting to you beyond simply their ability to pay you. This means being a good listener, and not taking all the airtime to talk about you.?

When I work with clients now, I often encourage them to go into any potential pitch with two separate but related goals:

1. Tell them about you and your work?
2. Listen to them talk about themselves and their industry

One of my clients was recently preparing for one such meeting, with a person who helps cultural institutions engage architecture firms (let’s call her Barbara). We all read the heartbreaking news about how museums and other institutions are struggling these days and facing layoffs themselves. Would Barbara simply tell my client that there is no work? That is certainly a possibility. So instead, I urged my client to talk about their capabilities, but also to ask questions. Barbara has all sorts of interesting insights into what is happening in that sector. Use this time with her to see what else you can learn. Maybe she’ll mention a few institutions that are still hiring architects—people to reach out to. Or maybe she’ll say that it looks like museums will start hiring again in Q1 2021—file that away for future reference. Basically, there is always something to learn, even if Barbara can’t hire you right now.?

Being guided by a spirit of curiosity can also take you to unexpected places. About seven years ago, when I was still at BIG, I went to an event where Mary Ann Tighe was the keynote speaker. For those of you who haven’t read MA’s wonderful interview with her, she is the CEO of CBRE’s Tri-States Region, someone who is deeply involved with and trusted in the NYC real estate scene. When I heard her talk, I just remember thinking “this woman is fascinating,” and the more I read, the more I wanted to get to know her. She studied art history, worked for the National Endowment for the Arts, then moved into the world of brokerage--a world she took by storm. Someone introduced us, and I asked her if she would ever consider coming to our office to give a talk about what she and her team does, as part of BIG’s in-house lecture series. We always made a point of bringing in interesting people, to help us learn more about how the built environment is shaped. It was clear that someone like Mary Ann thought about real estate and architecture differently, and I wanted to hear, and for my colleagues to hear it too. Wonderfully, she agreed and, a few months later, gave an incredible talk. This led quite naturally to us showing her a few of our projects, and she and Bjarke struck up a rapport. It was probably a year later when she called and asked me if we would be interested in being on a longlist that she was putting together for a major media company (yes!). Six months later, BIG was designing 2 World Trade Center as a new headquarters for 21st Century Fox--quite the coup for us!?

I didn’t go into building that relationship with the mindset of “what can Mary Ann Tighe do for me and for BIG.” Instead, I was thinking: she is interesting; I would like to get to know her; and (more than anything) I want to learn from her. Which leads me to the final trait...

Trait #4: Patience

Say you go into the world now, self-aware, prepared, and curious. One week goes by… Two weeks go by… No one is hiring you! What are you doing wrong? Nothing. You’re doing it exactly right, except you’re forgetting that the world does not live by your schedule. One of the hardest things to teach about business development is patience. I am not, by nature, a patient person, as anyone in my family can tell you. But I work very hard to be more patient in my work, because it is hard to predict which relationships will turn into projects and when that will happen.?

At one firm where I worked, the partners had become very excited by the idea of “design sprints” and wanted to bring the sprint mentality to business development. I was all for it, in the sense that we would be focused and have clear goals. But what I had to remind them is that our potential university clients don’t care if we’re doing an outreach sprint to them. They aren’t going to say “Oh, they’re doing a sprint, so we should hire them now!” They have their own timelines and their own needs. It’s generally assumed that, at any given moment, only 3-5% of your potential clients are ready to buy your services. So it’s highly unlikely that your outreach email will arrive in their inbox at the precise moment that they are ready to hire an architect.?

There is another reason that patience is important, and this one is more about you. It’s very easy to get discouraged when you’ve reached out to people and gotten zero responses. I hear this all the time from clients: “we did this, it didn’t work.” But when I dig in a bit deeper with them, I often find they did something once. They wrote a potential client one email, or they pitched a lecture to a conference once. I will be the first to admit that I don’t have a 100% conversion rate when it comes to BD, because no one does. So if you can keep that in mind, you can lessen your chances for becoming demoralized.

At the risk of using a trite metaphor, doing effective business development is a lot like gardening. You plant seeds, water, watch where the little green buds sprout, weed around them, clear space, build a trellis. Some plants will flourish, and you’ll be eating fresh tomatoes all summer. Others wither, and you might never know why. But it isn’t automatic, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Similarly, by approaching relationship-building with openness and curiosity, having done your homework, and taking your time, you are well on your way to developing an authentic and robust business development style with a high likelihood for success.??