Do I Need Business Development Training? Maybe

This blog will discuss some symptoms of less than optimal business development systems. If your organization is plagued with these symptoms, we may diagnose you with inadequate business development syndrome. This syndrome is best treated with business development training that is sophisticated, affordable, and on-demand.

1.       You are not surrounded by a business development opportunity seeking culture. The people in a high achieving business development organization consider each touch point with a customer, prospect, or strategic partner as an opportunity to show new value and enhance the relationship. If your organization is not focused on new value and enhanced relationships with every interaction, you are probably not performing your business development functions at an optimal level.

2.       You cannot identify the pains and problems of your clients, customers, or prospects with absolute precision. If you are going to be a high achieving business development organization, you must be able to step into the shoes of your target and understand the world from their perspective.

3.       Your target market is everybody such as all business owners. Every business owner does not need your service offering. Your job is to fully understand the quantitative and qualitative aspects of your particular target market and articulate your problem solving abilities within this particular target market.

4.       You rely on one marketing tactic to acquire all of your business. We often run into this situation with service providers that claim that 100% of their business comes from referrals. It is great that customers and strategic partners are referring new business to you through a passive type system because they see the value in your service offering. But, if you really want to ramp up growth, you will probably need to venture outside of a passive type system and include some direct attempts to reach clients where they are through direct contact, content marketing, and social media channels.

5.       You describe what you do with the title assigned to your profession. A good example would be saying that you are an accountant. By saying this, you are basically categorizing yourself as a typical bean counter that prepares reports based on historical data as opposed to a forward looking dynamic business advisor that gleans financial statement trends to double the value of your business in a seven to ten year period. Which description is more interesting to you?

6.       You do not sound any different than other people in your profession. In this scenario, you may be going beyond your title and touting your years of experience and customer service. Your experience level and customer service capabilities are assumed in the proposed relationship. Your job is to highlight why you are different than other professionals who provide a similar service. After all, they call it competition for a reason and the differentiated service offering usually wins.

7.       Your website is effectively a brochure and it sounds and looks like all of your competitor’s websites. You probably have a page about the business, a page about your service offerings, a page about industries served, and a contacts page. These are simply the bare minimum features of a business website. If you want to create a compelling stop along the information super highway, you are going to have to include features that are different and encourage repeat visits to your site.

8.       You are networking with everybody. We all know the professional networkers that attend all of the local networking events. They are acquainted with everybody, but they seldom have meaningful relationships with anybody. If you find yourself in this predicament, you need to focus on the quality as opposed to the quantity of your networking interactions.

9.       You check in with prospects instead of providing value with each interaction. We have all been down this road before. You call the prospect to check on the status of the project that you are hoping to provide. Wouldn’t it be more compelling and enhance the relationship more if you called with an idea that could help enhance their business immediately or make an introduction to someone who could help the business achieve new heights.

10.   You are not receiving any responses to your content marketing. Your content marketing should be about your prospects problems and pains instead of your service offering. Prospects need to be able to self-identify their needs with your direction. If you create compelling content that speaks to the pains and problems of your target market, you will get responses to your content marketing.

If you would like to establish a much stronger business development culture that is enhanced by sophisticated, affordable, and on-demand business development education, please feel free to email me at bkerrigan@whcpa.com or call me at 774-306-6135.