Lucia Piseddu is founder of The BD School, Europe’s first education platform dedicated to Business Development.
(AKA Sales Development, Account Development, Lead Development) – we get into naming conventions on the podcast!
Why focus on this area and start an entire school dedicated to this enterprise?
Lucia dives into the creation of the program, how it benefits students, and what’s next for training this generation of salespeople and marketers.
Learn her lessons of entrepreneurship, business development and being totally herself!
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Notable Quotes:
“We have very small classes every time…we try to keep them small, five to six people, mainly. And the reason is that we want people to learn from each other, too. We really believe in peer-to-peer learning, so we really wanted to facilitate that.”
– Lucia Piseddu
“Many junior business developers, they just go LinkedIn and start posting the most random stuff, namely the updates from their company page. And they think that’s good enough to be taken seriously, but the truth is when someone lands on your profile or when someone reads your email—which is a copy paste from another article—you just miss out. You don’t even get to talk to the person because you just don’t have the right authority.”
– Lucia Piseddu
Brief Summary
In this episode of the Sales Development Podcast, we’re talking to Lucia Piseddu, founder and head trainer for The BD School based in the Netherlands. The BD School aims to teach business development professionals all the ways they can better their craft and the multitude of ways they can apply their skills.
Today’s Guest: Lucia Piseddu
Lucia Piseddu has had years of business development experience under her belt when she felt the frustration of not being able to do enough to reach her KPI’s. After taking the time to learn the trade on her own, she saw that many others had the same concerns as her, which then led her to build out The BD School.
The episode touches on the following key topics and ideas:
- David introduces the episode’s guest, Lucia Piseddu (00:40)
- Lucia Piseddu and how she started the BD School in the Netherlands (01:30)
- The frustrations in business development (02:14)
- The multitude of students in the BD School (04:00)
- Taking the courses in the BD School (05:36)
- Guidance and added peer-to-peer learning with mentorship programs (07:44)
- What the BD School Mentorship Program looks like (08:20)
- Seeking out further opportunities from the BD School (09:35)
- Why Lucia thinks majority of the professionals aren’t given formal training (10:45)
- Financing the education in the BD School (14:10)
- Business development is seen as heavily similar to sales (15:25)
- Convincing directors of business development of new methodologies (16:53)
- Personalized learning and self-assessments (19:08)
- Working on and giving honest feedback (22:32)
- Lucia Piseddu is not a tough teacher, but a fair one (24:38)
- Vocabulary: sales development and business development (26:03)
- Coming up with the definition of business development (30:30)
- Scale-ups vs. start-ups and what they do (31:52)
- Getting around the GDPR rules as a business developer (34:21)
- Anyone from anywhere can enroll into the BD School (39:30)
- How to get in touch with Lucia Piseddu (41:15)
List of Resources Mentioned in the Episode
- Lucia Piseddu
- LinkedIn | Email
- The BD School
- Business Developers United Facebook Group
- Winning by Design by Jacco van der Kooij
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Get it on Barnes and Noble | Amazon
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