 Okay. Thank you for having me. I'm gonna try a little bit of Japanese. So, um, Ohio, Guzaima, Matashima, Nemena desu, and I know one more thing which is Yoroshiku onegai mash. So you guys can forgive me, right? Um, if I got it a little bit wrong, I just wanted to show off what I spent the whole week doing, apart from karaoke. So, um, thank you all for coming and joining into the English talk. Today, as Shin already presented, I'm going to be talking about business development. So, client acquisition. Are you, does anyone here work in business development? Put your hand up? No? Yeah, a little bit. Oh, right there at the back. Okay, cool. Well, if you don't, that's totally fine, because, um, this talk is going to be applicable, even if you're a freelancer or a developer or you work in a big agency, and it's very much about acquiring new clients and looking at the big picture. So, try and understand how to go out there and get yourself new business. Okay? Great. Um, a quick thank you to the Simultaneous Team for following me very well, although I know I speak a little bit too fast. I will try and slow it down. All right. So, the first time I started doing business development was nine months ago when I joined HumanMate. And Asia is the first location, first process I have ever been a part of as a business developer. This work camp tagline is challenge. So, I wanted to share with you my talent and my story of coming to Japan. Okay? Great. So, this talk will cover two main things. The first thing, I'm going to explain how do you know if you should introduce business development to your company? How do you know if there is a need to acquire new clients? Because right now, you might be getting a lot of inbound leads. So, you might be getting clients coming to you. They might be coming through marketing or to your website or referrals. So, somebody might have said, ah, this person is great. You should work with them. But what happens when you have a slow month? What happens when you need to go out there and get more clients? And secondly, I'm going to run through a whole overview of the process we use today. Okay. So, let's get started. The first time that you should think about introducing business development to your company is when you feel the need to define an independent client acquisition channel. What does that mean? When you need to find a way to make sure you can get clients when you do this. So, if from one month you say, ah, I need two more clients, you have a process, you have a system in which you can go to and you get new clients. The second thing is if you want to break into new markets. For example, we are very strong at human aid in the US and in Europe, but Asia is a new market for us. So, we're here today looking and speaking to different clients to try and break into a new market. Likewise, if you want to break into a new industry. So, for example, you might be very strong in media, but you might want to speak to different pharmaceutical companies. What do you do? And finally, and this only applies if you have a large company, if you need support to your sales team. If you have a sales team that needs a little bit of help to get them, to get them new clients. And I'm sure John will verify this because I work with him every day in his sales. He can give us a little wave. There you go. There's John. Okay. So, I wanted to give you a quote from someone you probably know who speaks here quite often. And I think he's surprised as well. But the reason I'm giving you this quote is because when the need came at human aid to introduce business development, it wasn't me who made that decision. It was Noel, who's one of the partners. So, I'm just going to read this out so you get a translation. At human aid, we felt the need for outbound sales in order to reach new markets and expand our business across industries to become leading global digital experience providers. So, when you decide you want to do the free things I mentioned, that's when you have to introduce business development to your company. You guys following me? Yeah? Okay. I already mentioned I am quite new at human aid. It's my ninth month officially, this month. And from the start, we decided we're going to do Asia. We considered a couple of things like having people in this region. So, I already said that we have done. We also have Shin, who's sitting right here. And they are both situated in Asia the whole time. So, it's a good place to start when you have some people in that region. We also look at the competitor landscape. Essentially, seeing who are the other people who are doing the same thing as us in this region. Can we beat them? Are we better than them? Those are the kind of things you think about when you want to expand. And finally, we looked at the technological trends in Asia. Do people use WordPress? Is WordPress big in Asia? Is there a different CMS provider that's more popular? So, these are the kind of questions that you need to ask before you set yourself a timeline and an end goal. We tested and we knew that Asia would work well for us because we did tiny little tests before we got here today. So, we set ourselves a free month period with the end goal of having three or more client meetings. And this is what we started to work towards. This is step one of any process when you're acquiring a client. Set yourself a full timeline and end goal. Without it, you won't have a focused process. Okay, this is actually my favorite part. So, does anyone here know what the difference is between a lead and a prospect? No? Okay. I'll go through it very quickly. A lead is someone that you already spoke into or that you had some contact with. So, we had some leads here, right? So, Shin and John did the groundwork. They knew a couple of people. So, we had some leads and it was really good for us. A prospect is someone that you think would be a good lead. So, you don't know them. This person, you just want to talk to them and say, hey, I think we need to do business together. So, that's the difference between a lead and a prospect. And it's very hard to find leads and prospects because it's so important that you get into someone's head that you understand how they think. Why? Because otherwise, you're going to be pushing a product onto people that they don't want. And that's, there's a word for that and it's um, it's spamming and you don't want to do that with business development. You want to try and narrow down and find a way of getting into people's heads to know what they want, what they're looking for. And you create something which is called an ICP. Has anyone ever worked with an ICP? That's an ideal client profile. Okay. An ideal client profile is if you think of it like an outline of a person that you want to talk to. So, for us, we knew we wanted to talk to enterprises. We knew they had to make a certain amount of money. We knew they had to spend a certain amount of money on technology. We knew we wanted to talk to someone who was digital. So, for example, if Pascal was a CEO at a company, he's probably not the best person to talk to. I've probably talked to his digital advisor, Dominic, for example, in this scenario. So, we're playing, we're all playing. It's really important that you know who you're trying to talk to in these situations. It's very hard to find this. What I just described when I said, oh, I wouldn't probably speak to Pascal. I'd probably speak to Dominic. That's called finding your decision maker. Who is the person who's responsible to make a decision for your business in that situation? How do you find them? How do you get to this person? You do a lot of tests. You try, you try one line. You try another vertical. You try another vertical. And you test until you find out who your decision maker is. There is no quick fix and no trick. It's a lot of work. A lot of repetitive, repetitive work here. So, I'm sorry that I can't give you better advice on that. The third thing you need to do when you go to market. So, right now, we had a three month goal. Three meetings in Asia, right? We knew who we wanted to contact. We wanted to contact a lot of enterprises. We're right here. What do we bring? What do we come and we just show up at a meeting without materials? No. So, you need to come prepared. We created something which is called a business value brochure, which we even translated into Japanese so that we could show up with the appropriate materials. So, you're there to educate your client and to sell your value. So, why should they talk to you? I mean, all of you know when you go online and you're looking through Facebook or Instagram, your attention span is, well, one minute, no, 10 seconds. So, if you can't sell something in 10 seconds, if they can't see the value, you're probably not going to get into that meeting or you're probably not going to interest that person. So, it's really important that you have the materials with you. If you work in a large team, like a larger company like I do, if you have a marketing and a design team, you need to bring them in to the conversation right at the beginning. It's no point in organizing everything and then saying to your marketing team, hey, we need this very quickly. No. You need to bring them in right in the beginning so they're following you. So, you have this line and your teams are synced across. Does that make sense? Okay, everyone's ready. Communication tunnel. So, this is probably my favorite part because it's the trickiest one and also, it takes the most time and effort and finesse, so detail. How do you contact these people? So, we have these people, okay, so I've decided I'm not going to talk to Pascal, I'm going to talk to Dominic. So, he's the person I want to talk to. How do I know what Dominic likes? Does he want to be called on the phone? Does he want an email? How do I know how to approach him? Some things are less invasive and some things are more invasive. What's the line that you take? You make a decision. When we started nine months ago, we did a very small test where we through, we emailed about 500, 600 people in Asia and watched to see if they would reply, they would open the emails and we had above industry open rates. So, we had over 50 percent open rates, which is huge. So, 50 percent of the 600 people opened the emails and read them. We nearly even got our client the first time around but we didn't quite succeed. So, we knew the email was a good option, it was a good way forward but we needed something else. So, every time you take our channel of communication, you want to double down. What does that mean? That means that you need to be looking at more than one terminal communication. I'm just going to give you an example. For Asia, we did the five. Three emails in English coming from me. In the meantime, we used an API for LinkedIn and added the same people on LinkedIn. Then, we invited those people to a private group, then they get a Japanese email from shit. So, we had five or six touch points in the scenario and this is just one way of doing it. There are other ways of doing it. You can use paid marketing. So, you can select people, invest in paid marketing. So, you can contact them on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Twitter, whichever you use. Then, you take the same people and you email them. Then, you go back to LinkedIn. You go back to email. So, you have five or six touch points every single time before they respond. That's the way to do it. You need to be doubling down on all of your communication channels. Okay, budget. Does anyone here do any financials or anything like that? Because that's something that I'm terrible at. I can openly admit that I did not contain any of the budgeting for this for Asia. Somebody else did that for me. Normally, though, business developers need to take care of the budget as well. So, you need to be thinking how much money do I have? What is the absolute cost of acquiring a new client? How much is it going to cost me to get in a room with a person and talk to them and acquire them as a client, essentially? If you're a planner, I'm a planner. You know, it tends to be us that we were all the geeks that's cool. If you guys, you know, were bookworms, this is what I was. I tend to plan things way in advance. So, if you are, it's great if you're a business developer. Because what you can do is you can plan your budget by quarter, right? So, you can say, okay, even if you're even better than that, you can do it by year. So, you can say, okay, I've got this much money this year. What is my priority? Where do I want to invest the money? What areas of business I want to invest my money? And you need to be doing this before you go to market. You need to know how much is going to cost you and how much, at the end, the whole process came to. Does that make sense? Okay. Oh, everyone's nodding. Well, at least look back. This slide I added for you, especially, because this is the mistake that we made. It's not really a mistake, it's just something that we should have done, or as I like to call it, hashtag shoulda coulda woulda. I don't know if I'm sure the English people will understand what I meant by this. And I apologize for the translation. Okay. Medium PR. When you are entering a new industry, for example, this is the first time I've ever spoken of work in Tokyo. So, you don't know me, right? I don't work with you every day. We haven't contributed every day. It's the same thing when you're entering a new market. You could be the best person, but if they don't know who you are, if they haven't heard of your brand, if they don't know are human-made, human-made, if they don't know who it is, you're going to have some struggle to get into the market. So, this is what we're going to do next time. Contact media outlets and Shin's nodding because this is what he wanted to do. This is kind of Shin's idea. I'm just going to give credit where it's due. We're going to contact media outlets to try and get ourselves published on a media outlet. So, imagine this. If Dominic had read five articles about human-made, then he got an email, then I invited him on LinkedIn, then I talked to him on Facebook, then I emailed him again. He probably think I really liked him, but he would reply. So, I would have a meeting with Dominic, which is what we want. We want to get a room with him. So, this is a very good trick. Try getting yourself published on media, popular media in your industry. So, again, you're going for a certain clientile type. So, make sure you're published on the news outlet that they read. There's no point in you being published in Cosmopolitan because he probably doesn't read Cosmopolitan. Do you? No. Okay. So, you see what I mean. Okay. The summary, and this is the summary of the overall project, and this is the tricky part. Once you've gone through the whole process, you've done everything, you've looked at your timeline, you've got an end goal, you know who you want to contact, so you've got your leads and your prospects, you're in that head, you have your ICP, your ideal time profile, you have your channel of communication, so you have the whole flow. You've got all of that. You have your budget, you're in the media, you're there. But that's only for one target vertical. Just one. So, as soon as one thing changes, so as soon as, for example, Dominic is no longer my ICP, you have to do everything again. Right? As soon as I try and contact Shin, for example, a whole different story. Different culture, different way of thinking, different attitude, different response. You have to do everything. This is the trick with business development. This is actually the hard part. You see, people think the business developers are very smart, and we do all these smart things. But really, what we do is we're gritty, we're persistent. There is no secret, there is no trick. You have to keep going again and again and again. Right? You have to wake up every day, smile and send the emails. Call the people, follow them on Facebook, follow them on LinkedIn, show up in the country, contact them again, and then you do a whole write-up. And that, my friends, is a write-up that's around three to four thousand words. This is not something which you write in one paragraph. It's detailed to the last little tiny bit. If you think of it like this, girls will be able to relate more. When you wake up and you do all of your makeup and your clothes, you think about every single tiny bit, every hair on your head. It's like that. That's business development, and the best way of describing it. So, I already bought these cats from my whole family, so you should know that. But thank you so much for listening and for staying with me. And the one thing I want you to remember that really, it's very much all the details that make the difference when it comes to business development. Thank you very much. Questions? What's the easiest way to understand the difference between business development and sales? Can I use this? I think the easiest difference between business development and sales is that business development is very outbound, so a very front-end. So you're actively doing all of the research and the heavy lifting for sales. So when you have a prospect and the leaves, you've done the whole process, and you have a prospect and the leave, you give that to sales to close. So essentially, sales comes in as the next step. If you think of it like this as a funnel, so you think of our business as a funnel, business development is right at the top, and then there are sales. So they do all of the heavy lifting. That sounded like sales didn't do the heavy lifting. I meant they do all of the first top-end work and then sales comes in. Does that kind of answer your question? Thanks. More questions? I have a question. It's related to, I think I'm curious about the tools. Maybe you're using some tools because you mentioned about emailing your clients and maybe knowing more of the client. I'm curious whether you use some kind of CRM or perhaps you mentioned also about the links in using an API. So is it a custom script or like it's all in the end? Yeah, so I was going to say definitely asking about the tools at the end and I forgot to mention that, so thank you very much. We use Apollo. Have you ever heard of Apollo? Used to be ZEM prospect. It's a very clever CRM that has a database. So what you can do is you can, I could find Dominic's email without him telling me his email essentially. I think Dominic's never going to speak to me again. So I use Apollo. So it has a database and then it's a great way you can track and tag approaching a customer, replied or somebody when they reply back and say I don't want to be contacted anymore, you can tag them. You can also add different users. So I can email and I do this very often in someone else's name. So for example, I'll email as one of the partners. I'll pretend I'm one of the partners an email aisle. So you can do that. It's very clever. We also use Phantom Buster. Does anyone use Phantom Buster here? It's a, it's very easy. It's very easy. It's an API service if you're not a developer, because I'm not a developer. So it's an API service, which is very easy. You can connect. You can use their APIs and this is the LinkedIn API. So what it does is you basically input a cookie and a spreadsheet and it will automatically add me to whoever I've inputted. So I've scraped, I've used a scraper. So I use lots of tools for scraping like scrape.io, if you've ever used them, use scrape and then you input them into the API and every single day I'll add 5, 10, 15 people in LinkedIn or whichever API, whichever tool that you need to be using. And then the rest of the stuff, the research is very manual. Like you have to go in there and read and understand and being picky. I don't think there is any easy trick there. Would that help? Oh yeah. I can, I can write them down for you afterwards if you like. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Yeah. So you mentioned that you're you're developing clients through outbound. So you're going to they're not coming to you, you're going to them. Right. Okay. So they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily searching at the time that you contact them. And then you have to sit down. Of course, you have to start square one. So if they're not really looking for the benefit that you offer and they conceptually, they aren't there yet. They don't, I mean especially I would say in Japan that they're conceptually on a different side of the spectrum compared to what we're used to in terms of technology. So how do you bring them where they are to into a state of buying? So basically, when I try and contact clients I try and think that they would potentially need it. So if I, if somebody, if an enterprise has just got themselves a new DXB, I'm not going to contact them. And I can search through their data. So I know for a hundred percent they've just upgraded. There's no way we're going to convince them. So I look, at the first stage, I look for people who look for an upgrade, who are looking, who are big technology companies, for example, who want to go global or multilingual, right? Because a lot of the time, especially in Asia, people are trying, big companies are trying to be more global. To be global, you need a good CMX. You need a good enterprise solution for you, right? And so in my head, I know that they're potential clients. The first time I contact them, I don't say, let's sit down. Like, you need this. I introduce myself or I introduce one of the partners and I say, we're really impressed with your product. We really like what you're doing. We really love that you're going global. Can we help tell me more about your business? So I actually, the first couple of stages is saying, can you tell me more about what you need? What are you looking for? And people tend to like that. People like to talk about themselves, right? Even if it's in business personally. So we ask the questions and then they come to us saying, ah, yeah, we are looking for something. Oh, we're not sure. We don't really know what it means. And that's when you send some materials. You say, oh, hey, maybe we can help you with this. Maybe this can be really useful for you. Does that kind of make sense? So you don't come in full force? Yeah. No, that totally makes sense. Oh, okay. Did I not answer your question? It did. Actually, this conversation has grown a long time. Yeah. I want to hug the time for everyone else though at the moment. No, that's fine. That conversation goes on for a while. Yeah. So every outbound effort, so one like block, is at least three months. So and that's just before you get in a room with them, like before you even get them to say, yes, we'll see you. So if you're looking at a three month block to even contact them, then you sit down with them, then you need another three months to land them. So it's about six months. It's very long. I sympathise. Yeah. You're welcome. So, any other questions? Yes? Do I need the... Does it go in? Please? Okay. So just to repeat the question. When we make the... When we try and speak to someone, when we have the approach, how do we know if this customer is good? So if it's a bad prospect, what's the deterrent for us to understand if this is a bad prospect? Is that... Did I understand it correctly? Right. And a sign you detect like, oh, we shouldn't stop here. A sign. Right. Usually the easiest sign, the most obvious one, is they say, don't contact me. A little bit harsh, but you have to understand you get rejected a lot in business development. So you get used to the rejection. Another sign is, oh, this looks interesting. And I'll think about it. Then they go into a pile, maybe, and then we recontact them in three months. Usually the signs that they want business are more significant, so if you send them an email, you track the email open rates, for example, and view rates, so you can see if a person has forwarded that email around the company. So for example, some of the meetings we've had in Japan, the people look to the email over 40 times. So it's a good sign they want business. So usually, if they do something like that, it's a yes. If they don't, everything else is a no. So it's a more no than yes. Does that make sense? Now I'm feeling the pressure. It's something a lot of work. That's really expensive. So how does this compare to, as far as the company, like what's a good target for how much you should be spending on business development versus labor? Like actually, once you land a project, you're spending it on not actually building it in your business. So how much should you be spending on business development versus in the percentage of revenue? Well, I think no one's to know the answer to this question as well. Joe, I guess to give you a bit of a background there on the enterprise side, I think we did the math on last year and it cost us about $22,000 to acquire a client. But that's enterprise, yeah. Everything all in. Say LCD, everything. Yeah. I think yeah, dependent on if you're a freelancer, you take a percentage that you're comfortable with depending on how much inbound you have as well. So if you have a comfortable pipeline of clients so you know for the next five, six months you're going to be making a certain amount of money, take a percentage that you feel comfortable with and invest in business development. That's probably, I think that's probably what Noel did when he hired me, I assume, yeah. I am confident he makes these decisions. Any other questions? Now that I've already felt the pressure. No? Anyone else? Great. Thank you so much for listening guys, you were amazing. Thank you.