How to survive GDPR as a Business Developer

Ever since GDPR has been brought to public attention, marketing and sales professionals started wondering how this is gonna impact their daily activities and eventually, outcomes.

When it comes to business development and outbound sales in the specific, the situation is even more critical. How are we supposed to get customers if we can’t interact with them in the first place?

Whatever we decide to do, there is only one certainty and it’s that we need to adhere to the new data security regulations and comply with them as quickly as possible.

So instead of complaining about the huge opportunities we will miss out because of GDPR, we can better spend our energy on getting creative and focus on the quality of our work.

Let’s see what GDPR is and how we can get along with it!

What is GDPR?

GDPR - as we all should know by now - stands for General Data Protection Regulation and will be enforced starting today May 25th.

It will replace the Data Protection Directive from 1995 that in substance stated that personal data should not be processed at all, except when certain conditions are met (transparency, legitimate purpose, and proportionality).

GDPR is, therefore, an upgrade of this law that will provide EU citizens with more control over their personal data as they will now be able to choose how their data is handled, who handles it and they will be able to easily opt-out from any marketing campaigns if they want to.

GDPR is based on 6 key principles that must be followed by anyone who handles EU citizen data and these are:

• Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency: data must be cessed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject;
• Purpose limitation: data must be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes;
• Data minimization: data must be adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed;
• Accuracy: data must be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay;
• Storage limitation: data must be kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed;
• Integrity and confidentiality: data must be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorized or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organizational measures;

What does this mean for business development professionals?

Now, part of our job is to connect with as many relevant prospects as possible and convince them to, at least, listen to our pitches. Up until this point, we were pretty much allowed to send messages to everyone in our message list, regardless if they wanted to read them or not. But with the GDPR we need to be a little careful unless we want to end up costing up to 20+ million Euro or 4% turnover to our companies.

By nature business developers are hunters and what do we do when we have an obstacle? We find a way to overcome it. GDPR is exactly the same and what we need to do is just to adjust our current strategy.

First and foremost, we need to get permission from each person we would like to contact.

Then, we have to make sure to inform them about how we are going to use their data.

Last, even though for sales emails it’s usually better not to include an opt-out, we will need to adapt and include a way for prospects to easily get rid of us in all our emails.

So, how do we get sales prospects and still retain GDPR compliance?

Let’s jump to the fun part and see how we can do a great job, by being fully GDPR compliant at the same time:

• Social selling: go personal and connect with your prospects on social media. Using Linkedin for example it’s compliant and will help you get to know your prospects even better. Make sure to ask clearly for their permission to send them an email or call them in a direct message. This will constitute a proof of their opt-in;
• Networking: conferences and other social events are great to connect with prospects. The main advantage here is that you can meet them in person and directly establish a relationship with them. Plus, they’ll be happy to give you their business cards which ultimately will allow you to get in touch whenever you need to. Make sure to store a record of this meeting and, just in case, save their business cards with a note on them;
• Referrals: this is a very good way to connect with your prospects. Not only you will be compliant, but you’ll also have way higher engagement and possibilities to close a deal as they will come directly from someone that is already happy with your solution;
• Inbound marketing: get closer to your colleagues in marketing and build landing pages, lead magnets and content that are very relevant to your prospects. Inbound marketing can take longer, but eventually, you’ll have higher quality leads.

Now the genius idea...what if I move my company outside EU? Great, except that GDPR will most likely still apply to your business as long as you deal with even just 1 single European citizen.

To sum up, GDPR is definitely challenging, but I like to see it as an opportunity to be more focused and eventually have more meaningful conversations that will help my business grow.

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Disclaimer:

I’m not a lawyer neither a GDPR consultant. I informed myself, talked to professionals and used some common sense. Make sure to get a professional to help you out and find out more about GDPR and how you can be compliant in your work. In the meantime, go ahead and check the resources I consulted to write this article:

• https://gdpr-info.eu/
• https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG
• https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection_en
• https://www.hubspot.com/data-privacy/gdpr-checklist
• https://recruit.ee/bl-gdpr-lin-lp
• https://recruitee.com/hiring-resources/gdpr