This TED Talk from Angela Lee Duckworth is a brilliant reminder to apply grit and perseverance to your Business Development endeavors. 

Particularly in Professional Services, the payoff for BD activities can often have a lengthy time span between input and output. Networking today, for example, could lead to business opportunities years down the line. 

Whilst this does make it difficult to know exactly the activities to focus on, I would argue that following-up and commitment are the biggest differentiators between highly-successful and mediocre campaigns.

If you've not yet read the Harvard Business Review research on what makes Rainmakers so successful, then I would definitely check out this post explaining why ‘Activator’ Rainmakers outperform their peers in professional services. 

Applying a GROWTH mindset towards your business development and thought leadership will help you to learn, iterate, and improve. 

As Angela says: “We have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned”.