Join Ken Lorenz as he sits down with Tony Gray, a veteran business development leader and founder of the Global Business Development Association, to unpack the evolution of modern business development. From exploring the critical role of trust in BD to examining how technology enables human connection, this episode dives deep into what makes successful business development tick in today’s digital age. Tony shares invaluable insights on resource allocation across business growth phases and delivers practical wisdom for both newcomers and seasoned professionals in the field.
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Ken Lorenz: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you’re listening from. My name is Ken Lorenz. I’m the Vice President of Global sales here at Riva. I’m happy to welcome Tony Gray to our podcast today. Tony, I know you’re business development officer in a top 10 U.S. Bank. You’re the founder of the Global Business Development Association. You’re also an author and we’ll talk a little bit about your book as well. But welcome to the show.
Tony Gray: Thank you, Ken. It’s great to be here.
Ken Lorenz: Awesome. So tell me a little bit about your career trajectory. Right. That’s an area we would like to start with, is help me understand, coming out of school, coming into the industry, what’s prepared you for what you’re doing now?
Tony Gray: Yeah, sure. Well, you’re setting up a perfect joke for every business developer. Because if you ask a room of six business developers how they started in business development, you’ll probably get eight different answers. Because there is, up to this point, there’s been no traditional trajectory for folks to move into business development. And that’s by virtue of the fact that the profession is relatively young. It didn’t start until 1923 when the first director of business development was hired by the San Francisco Stock Exchange. And marketing and sales have been around for centuries. And so my path was no different than a lot of others where they just kind of fumbled their way into business development. And it took me from the time that I started working in 1992 after I graduated college.
Tony Gray: It wasn’t until 2011 that I finally landed my business development role that I sought for probably 10 years. I kept trying to get into the profession and each time people would tell me, well, you don’t have the training or you don’t have the Rolodex, or they would come up with these different reasons as to why I could not be a business developer. And finally, I started in 2011 at a mid sized corporation in business development and then worked for a small business as a director of business development as well. And then for seven years I had my own business development consulting business. And in the past four years, I focused on writing the business development body of knowledge and forming the Global Business development association, a 501c6 nonprofit trade association.
Ken Lorenz: Wow, that’s an interesting ride, for sure.
Tony Gray: Yeah, it’s been a fantastic ride. It’s been a lot of fun. And the most fun has been helping new business developers enter the profession. And that’s really why I started GBDA about four years ago, is because the path was so difficult for so many folks to get into business development that I wanted to standardize the profession so that we could enable highly talented folks, innately talented folks that have high iq, folks that have high EQ emotional quotient, be able to enter the profession and not be limited by some pre existing misconception as to what defines a business developer. So and I actually came up with this idea when I earned my Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute. And Ken, I’m sure you’ve heard of the PMP certification many times before.
Tony Gray: And so I based the Business development Professional certification off of the same type of structure of the PMP and many other world class industry standards for certifications so that anyone that has high iq, high EQ and a drive to succeed as a business developer can enter the profession.
Ken Lorenz: Well, that’s fantastic. So I noticed we’ve got a couple of folks in common though. The one that I wanted to point out in particular that I’m hoping my LinkedIn creepiness isn’t going to be a failure here, but how well do you know Justin, Michael and Tony Hughes?
Tony Gray: Oh yeah, well I was listening to their episodes that you recorded with them just yesterday and they were significant impacts on the business development professional certification and understanding how technology and a business developer’s technology quotient TQ enables them to succeed as a business developer. And Tony and Justin are constantly at the forefront trying to understand where is the profession going.
Ken Lorenz: Absolutely. I know. So I’ve known Tony for probably 15 years now. We were counterparts at Sugar CRM back in the day and then he went off on his coaching and authorship route and I went a different route. But yeah, I mean those guys are fantastic to work with. I think their whole thought process around technology and creating business development cyborgs is. Justin likes to talk about. It is very interesting. Talk a little bit about technology fusion with the human quotient.
Tony Gray: Sure. Well you know, you talk about Justin and Tony and the business development cyborg or the sales cyborg, which kind of conveys to the audience a lack of emotion, a lack of humanity. But in actuality, the tools that are evolving so quickly for our profession actually promote the humanity. They enable the business developer to focus on the humanity more and the inhumane activities, the administrative activities, the high volume activities, those are now being taken care of by automation. So I like to think as business developers as hyper enabled by technology and we’re seeing that hyper enablement exponentially increase. Of course with artificial intelligence and tools like yours that are primarily designed to deliver value to your prospects and to your customers. And so that draws forth the question of, well, what is value? How do we define that?
Tony Gray: And value is what a customer measures, how you deliver trust to them. And so this is kind of the fundamental basis for the entire business development body of knowledge. I structured the entire book by basing it on a solid foundation of first principles. You know, whenever you address a very complicated situation, it helps to break it down into first principles. So, and the first principle of any business development transaction is trust. Without trust, you cannot engage a prospect successfully and convert them into a client. It will just not happen. And that’s fundamentally human because humans are wired toward trust. We’re social animals. And the reason why, of course, that’s our survival because were unable back in prehistoric ages to defend ourselves individually from the saber toothed tiger. We needed to have a support infrastructure, we needed to be social.
Tony Gray: And the fundamental component of any social activity is trust. And if at any point the tribe thought you are not going to cover their back when they went up against that saber toothed tiger, forget it, you’re not in the tribe and you would be ejected from the tribe and you would be done. And that feeling, that emotion, that importance of trust is so baked into the DNA and our neuroscience that science has shown that rejection is the most powerful emotion any human can feel. It’s so powerful that it activates the same parts of your brain that feels physical pain. So if you take a painkiller, you take an aspirin, you take a Tylenol and take whatever, science shows that it will actually dull the feeling, dull the pain of rejection. And that’s why sales and business development professionals have this fear of rejection.
Tony Gray: And so that’s emotion. When you get down to what drives emotion, it only comes down to four fundamental activities in the brain. And it’s every biological organism in the world has a survive and thrive biological imperative. And to survive and thrive as humans, you have four fundamental responses. Fight, flight, freeze and fuse. Well, the fight, flight and freeze are all in response to some level of fear that you will be hurt in some way. Fuse means you actually trust and you’re willing to bond with whatever else is in your environment. And so that’s what we drive towards as business developers is we must deliver trust. And if we don’t deliver trust, then we’re not delivering value to our prospects and to our customers.
Ken Lorenz: So in a day and age where you’ve got, you know, a proliferation of martech stack tools and technology at the hands of, you know, novices all the way through Experts, how do you a cut through the noise and cut through the noise with a message of trust, you know, in today’s day and age, I mean, what do you, what do you teach in your classes?
Tony Gray: Sure, sure. Well, and this is where the technology really starts to become important because we’ve talked about, you hear a lot about Martech. Scott Brinker does a great job of analyzing Martech. I think Justin said in the episode that you recorded previously with him that there are 20,000 martech tools. I prefer to look at it as a BD tech stack. Marketing certainly is a component of that. Sales technology is a component of that. But business development persists throughout the entire customer journey. It starts at awareness phase, which is primarily driven by marketing getting the attention of the prospect, that quickly moves into the activation phase. Once the customer become, or the prospect, excuse me, becomes aware of your brand, then they enter the activation phase. And the activation phase is where the business developers operate. And that’s a subspecialty of prospect development.
Tony Gray: Once the prospect raises their hand and declares intent, that moves them into the conversion phase, where sales takes over. And sales is a noble profession. I don’t see it going away. I see it being optimized. And the entire role of sales is to convert that prospect as efficiently and effectively as you can into a customer. And then once they become a customer, that moves into the success phase. And then finally, the ultimate goal of business development is to create raving fans where you enter the growth phase, where your customers now become your best champions. They become de facto business developers for you. And those are the most powerful sources of revenue any company can generate. The conversion rate on a referral is 50% or more on average. Compare that to cold calls. Conversion rate typically sub 1%.
Tony Gray: So that’s our whole mission is to create these raving fans, wind back into the activation phase. That’s where the business developers engage. That’s where we deliver value. And this is where folks really start to get confused because a lot of people think business development is the same thing as marketing and sales, and that is so fundamentally wrong. Business development operates in the activation phase. Marketing operates in the awareness phase. Sales operates in the conversion phase. And the activation phase is where we deliver the value and the value creation. It can be outbound, it can be inbound. And there are multiple ways that we can do that with various tactics and the combination of technology to do that efficiently and effectively at scale.
Ken Lorenz: That’s, that’s. And listen, I couldn’t agree with you more. About the separation between marketing, business development and sales. You know, I think that some of the lines blur a little bit as you leverage ABM or ABX technologies and methodologies, but those roles are still very separate from each other. And you’re right, I mean, during that, excuse me, during that awareness phase, if you can’t get the customer to connect to value, nothing’s going to happen. Right. I mean, in my experience, typically at that phase they’re either in a state of latent pain where they’re not really sure, but maybe I’ll think about this a little bit, or they’re actively in a pain reduction cycle, if you will. And that awareness phase is what it takes to trigger them into an actual buying cycle.
Tony Gray: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And you know, I often use analogy. I say business developers are like lifeguards. My job is to find people in distress. I do not try to save people who are not in distress. I will educate people about where they should not swim, where they should not be, how they should survive at the beach. But at the end of the day, when somebody is in distress, I will swim to them. And my mission is to save their life. Now, I’m not the cops. They don’t have to come with me. If they want to stay out in the water, that’s perfectly fine. I’ll go and save other people. But I think that analogy helps really cement a solid understanding of this line of demarcation between marketing, business development and sales. Marketing is getting the attention with the whistle on the beach.
Tony Gray: Okay, you, I have your attention. You are in danger. And then we move into the life saving phase. And then sales is the EMTs, the paramedics that take you as quickly as possible to the hospital and take you to the customer success phase and get you patched up and back on your feet. So that analogy, I think helps really kind of cement this understanding of the lines of demarcation. Now it’s understandable why folks are confused because if you look at the history of business development, the first business developer was not hired until 1923. Marketing and sales were around much longer. And when you look at the progression of the business development profession, it really did not start to take off until the 1960s.
Tony Gray: And I went back and researched hundreds of newspaper issues to find jobs, posted jobs, job announcements to find this historical data on when was the first business developer hired, and then to look at when it really started to take off and exponentially increase. And that was in the 1960s. Well, what happened in the 1960s? You know, we’re talking about technology here. Technology really drove the evolution of the business developer. And Ken, you’ll remember this 1960s, we had telecommunications rapidly evolved, formed the Internet. It was first arpanet and then became the Internet. That’s when it was invented. In the late 1960s. You had telephone switching capabilities that enabled rapid outbound. And then you had, most importantly, you started to give a voice to the customer. If you remember the book that was written Dangerous at Any Speed, remember that.
Tony Gray: And I Remember watching the 60 Minutes report on this book about how Detroit was designing cars that were fundamentally dangerous. And the American population finally said enough, we’re not going to put up with that. And there was a massive uproar. And that really brought Detroit to their knees. And there was a major shift in the way that industry evolved and supported their customers. And so in the 1960s, the early 1970s, the customer became hyper empowered. Now fast forward multiple decades now, you could have one person with one post and one massive audience practically build. They could practically bring a company to their knees with one post of discontent with a product. And we’ve seen this multiple times already. And so that was the real wake up call for industry. It was that shift between the industrial age into the information age.
Tony Gray: The industrial age, a company created a product and as Henry Ford famously said, a customer can buy a car in any color they want, just as long as it’s black. Right? That was the industrial age mentality. Here’s what I built. You’re going to take it now shut up and give me your money. That was the mentality now where you have these hyper enabled customers, you say no. Now one voice could bring down an entire corporation or bring them to their knees. And so that’s when we started to see a shift in the profession of business development. We started to have a rapid increase in the number of business developers. That’s when we saw a lot of these sales tactics that were growing. And of course, you know, you had Shipwee, you had other sales methods that were growing right around.
Tony Gray: Xerox Corporation was one of the first to build these sales methodologies. And salespeople now had to use different tactics. They had to deliver value, they had to be empathetic, they had to understand the customer’s needs and both their extrinsic and their intrinsic needs. And that demands a certain emotional quotient, an emotional IQ if you will. And you needed the profession to do that, you needed the technology to do that. And you needed the tactics to evolve very rapidly. And so when you look at the business development profession, it really started to take off in the 70s and then 80s. And actually, if you compare it to marketing and sales, the rate of increase for market and sales started to be much less than the rate of increase for business development. The late 1990s and 1997, the first chief growth officer was hired.
Tony Gray: And so that really defined the profession. You could start off as a business development rep and become now a chief growth officer. And the technology and the tactics rapidly evolved around that.
Ken Lorenz: So, you know, I’ve been in sales for, let’s say, 120, 130 quarters in my career. You know, been around the block a little bit. My experience with business development folks over that time period is that they tend to stereotypically be young, new into a career, new into a profession. They do it for 12 months, 24 months, and then find themselves in an account manager or account executive position. Is that what you’re seeing with the folks that are coming through your program, or are you finding more career business development folks?
Tony Gray: Both. You know, it depends on the product. If you and I don’t define it in B2B or B2C, the C and the B, those are just firmographics demographics. Those are not good dictates for understanding what tactics you use. I prefer to address the market in the terms of low intent threshold and high intent threshold. If you have a low intent threshold, that’s essentially a commodity, a brick of gold. Well, a brick of gold is a brick of gold. There’s no need touch the. To somehow influence the perception of value. The customer trusts that the brick of gold is a brick of gold. You don’t have to deliver any extra value. The value is intrinsically in that brick of gold. But when you move to items now that are more complex, you move the products that require more trust.
Tony Gray: I define those as high intent threshold products. So a good example where that B2C and B2B model falls apart is, you know, people will say, well, B2C is typically a faster sales cycle. It doesn’t require as much deliberation. There are less people in the buying committee, if you will, B2B, much more complex, takes a lot more time. And there are a significant number of people in the buying committee. And I tell people, well, then obviously never bought a house, Right, okay, buy a house. It’s a very lengthy process. There’s a lot of stress. It’s very complex. And there are a lot of people in your Buying committee to include your mother in law. So you know that B2C and B2B model breaks down very quickly.
Tony Gray: But if you look at things in a low intent threshold versus a high intent threshold, that’s where you start to understand, okay, how much value, how much trust do I need to deliver? So going back to your original question, Ken, I would say for those products that are at the lower end of the intent threshold curve, you may need more junior people to be able to engage your prospects. Whereas when you move up the high intent threshold curve, well now you need more sophisticated, more evolved business developers. And as you move to the right, and I’m thinking, right, I’m talking about the phases of corporate growth, you know, your inbound and outbound resource requirements will start to shift as well.
Tony Gray: So I, so to answer your question, Ken, I see junior BDRs coming straight out of college and working for SAS companies because those are high volume engagements. The products are consistent across the board in quality when they’re delivered. But then you move into enterprise sales or enterprise business development and you have very experienced business developers. And that’s where I’ve operated. My career is in the enterprise business development area where I spent a lot of time in project management and operations for nearly 20 years before I became a business developer. Because the level of complexity and the amount of trust that has to be delivered is exceptionally high.
Ken Lorenz: No, I would agree with you. I’ll add something to the story for you a little bit and you can decide if you want to put this in your next book or not. But so I think there’s also a level of application of whatever the product or service is. Right. And so in the enterprise space, my experience has been the enterprise doesn’t take, let’s say, a piece of technology and try to make it do things it’s not meant to do. Right. Their, their goal is to keep things stable. They’re willing to spend a little more money for certainty, for trust, et cetera. Whereas the small business owner, their IT dollars around technology spend tend to be very limited. And so they’ve got to squeeze every last ounce out of it that they can. And so I’ve said over years, they treat it like saltwater taffy.
Ken Lorenz: Right? They’re going to take that taffy and they’re going to pull it and stretch it and make it do unnatural things until it eventually breaks and then they’re going to be really unhappy. And I think that is not just something that sales faces, but business development absolutely faces as well, and typically what I see is in an enterprise, if they’re looking at a piece of technology, the competition for that technology is similar. Technology. Right. We’re going to solve this problem. We’re going to pick one of these three vendors. In small business, my experience has been I’m going to make a decision between buying this technology, buying another forklift, or buying a bigger boat for my house, for my family. And so the competition level and value perception is totally different.
Tony Gray: Yeah, I like that taffy model. I may have to use that in the next book, Ken. And yeah, I agree. You know, the, and here’s the other thing too, kind of playing off of that concept is addressing your inbound and outbound resources that you dedicate based on where you are in your growth cycle. Because I would argue that in startup phase, you may be in a high intent threshold environment, enterprise business development type environment, if you will. In the startup phase, your buying strategy for technology will probably be just like that small business you just mentioned. You’re very limited in the amount of resources you have.
Tony Gray: And, and this is, this was one of the things as I was writing the book and I was listening to some brilliant folks and reading their studies and their works, and you have these individuals who are very passionate about their business development tactics. It’s, it’s either outbound is the best or inbound is the best. And you would hear these folks talk about, well, you know, outbound, demand gen, that whole battle between the two, which one is the best. And then you have these devout followers of, you know, outbound, and you listen to them talk and they get questions from the audience, from people at various phases of the business growth cycle. Right? There are the multiple phases of business growth cycle.
Tony Gray: There’s the startup phase, then there’s the growth phase where you enter that product market fit, hockey stick phase, and then you enter maturity and then you start to downslope on the back end. Well, your resource allocation will vary based on where you are in that process. So you may be a big fan of inbound, but you may not have the resources to do inbound during startup. You may be a big fan of outbound, and you may not have the resources to do that depending on where you are in your business growth phase. So that’s where in the book I spent a lot of time looking at how does resource allocation change and the effectiveness of tactics change as you move through the different phases. So for example, in startup, well, your inbound ability is zero. Nobody knows who you are.
Tony Gray: So the only available tactic you have is outbound. You must, whether you’re the founder or VP of sales or director of Business development, you must engage in outbound to generate that initial revenue from your clients. And at the same time, you can start to invest in the inbound. And with that kind of balance where you’re heavily focused on outbound in the beginning and slowly ramping up the inbound, you know, as you’re building those customers, they’re now generating word amount, they’re providing the social proof. That social proof then gets rolled right into the inbound curve. And so what happens is when you get to product market fit, your outbound resource requirement starts to decrease and your inbound resource and effectiveness starts to increase. And so that’s where you kind of have that match and then you can decide a product market fit.
Tony Gray: Okay, well, I have enough wind at my back from word of mouth from my customers who are raving fans telling everybody else I don’t need as many business developers making outbound calls. I can start to ratchet that down a little bit. And then on the inbound side, I can start to now increase even more resource allocation there. But you’re always going to need that inbound element because you’re always going to have to engage those prospects that will be coming in via the inbound channel and you’re still going to have to deliver value to them in the buying decision process.
Ken Lorenz: Excellent, excellent. So one area I wanted to go towards a little bit, a lot of our viewers or our audience comes from the fintech world, you know, primarily banking, insurance, et cetera. And I know you’re in that industry as well. When you think about the things we just talked about, how do you alter those a little bit or how is that different, let’s say, in banking and financial services?
Tony Gray: Yeah, sure. Well, you know, whether it’s banking or any other high trust, high intent threshold product area, because those are, you look at anything that’s financially related, nobody will give you any money unless they have a degree of trust in you. And so delivering that element of trust is absolutely critical in those types of product areas. Those are high intent thresholds engagements. Now, depending on your icp, your ideal customer profile, that could vary. It could be a high volume engagement, it could be a low volume engagement. And so the technology that you need will be influenced by the level of intent threshold. It will be impacted by the ICP that you have. So if you are high intent threshold, high volume, you will need tools that will allow you to scale. Without that, you Won’t be able to succeed.
Ken Lorenz: Excellent. Excellent. So I know we’re. We’re getting a little bit close to time, and I know that time has kind of flown by really quick. I always like to ask a couple fun questions. So I have what I call my speed round.
Tony Gray: Okay.
Ken Lorenz: And don’t think too much about these. Right. So coffee or tea?
Tony Gray: Tea.
Ken Lorenz: Ski slopes or beach?
Tony Gray: Beach, definitely beach.
Ken Lorenz: You’re what, you got to be a Washington fan, right? So baseball or football?
Tony Gray: Football.
Ken Lorenz: Well, and then see, rooting my bills on tonight, Monday night. Go Bills.
Tony Gray: Go Bills.
Ken Lorenz: Mac or PC?
Tony Gray: Oh, wow. I don’t know. That’s a dangerous question. Half the people are going to hate me for saying PC.
Ken Lorenz: Well, the other half hate you for saying Mac. So. And then last one, Star Trek or Star Wars?
Tony Gray: Oh, wow, that one. That one’s a deep one. Star Wars.
Ken Lorenz: Now, are you a original series kind of guy or more towards the newer stuff?
Tony Gray: Oh, original. I’m old school.
Ken Lorenz: Yeah, same here. Well, fantastic. So listen, I’ve got just a couple more questions for you, and we can have a little bit of fun with this. But if you were able to go back in time to when you got out of school and you started your first position, what advice would you give yourself now?
Tony Gray: Get your business development professional certification. Yeah, I mean, all kidding aside, that’s why I created it, to have that basis of knowledge. You know, I was just thinking the other day, you know, what was I doing to try and get into the business development professional and you’ll get a kick out of this. Ken, you remember Ziggler? Okay, yeah. He’s a paragon of the sales profession. And a buddy of mine let me borrow a stack of cassette tapes that I would listen on my old leather case. What’s that?
Ken Lorenz: They came in the old leather case.
Tony Gray: That’s right.
Ken Lorenz: Like 12 tapes and cassette tapes.
Tony Gray: Yeah, exactly. And that’s where I learned. I learned from Ziglar cassette tapes. And that was a pretty narrow knowledge set. Now, now you’re Just inundated with so much high quality knowledge about the business development profession, marketing, sales, all these ancillary professions where you really have, you really need alignment, and you can spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn and easily get overwhelmed. And it’s the same reason why black belts get beat up in street fights, because they build, they. They learn these tactics, and when they’re engaged in the heat of the moment of battle, their. Their cognitive brain is trying to think through, okay, what tactic do I use next? And that comes across as well, that’s a failure in a street fight.
Tony Gray: But when you’re engaged in business development and you’re engaging a prospect, you can’t be thinking through, oh, you know, here’s the next tactic I need to use with this prospect. It has to flow naturally. You have to use the force, Ken. And the force is this natural process of delivering trust and understanding the framework for how you deliver trust so that subconsciously you are building that emotional connection with your prospect. And your mission is to help them survive and thrive so that ultimately, at the end of the day, they become raving fans, they become your biggest champions, they become your de facto business developers to help you survive and thrive.
Ken Lorenz: Well, listen, Tony, it’s been great having you on the show. I wish you the best of luck. I know our paths will continue to cross. They always do in this industry. This has been, like I said, it’s been great to have a conversation with you.
Tony Gray: Same here. Thank you for having me, Ken.