The Essentials of Business Development

If you truly want to build a dynamic business development organization, there are some essential elements and processes that you should incorporate into your business. This blog will discuss the essential elements of your business development processes.

1.   You should provide affordable and on-demand business development training for all client or customer facing personnel in your organization. Chances are that not everybody in your organization is comfortable with business development activities. But, they all have the opportunity to identify new opportunities for revenue growth in their daily interactions with clients, customers, and prospects. So, business development training should be provided to help those who are not comfortable with business development become more comfortable with business development.

2.      You should have a thorough understanding of the problems or pains that you solve. Every business represents a solution to the pains or problems faced by clients, customers, and prospects. Your ability to thoroughly understand these pains or problems correlates with identifying new opportunities to serve them.

3.      You should have a differentiated marketing message that speaks to how you solve the pains and problems faced by your clients, customers, and prospects. There will be competitors who want to serve them. So, you have speak to your desired target market in a way that describes how you will bring differentiated value to them. It is no longer simply effective to say that we have years of experience and great customer service. This is assumed to be part of the deal when working with clients, customers, and prospects.

4.      You should have a well-defined niche. It is expensive, time consuming, and inefficient to market your services to all business owners or consumers. Instead, you need to identify a niche and craft your business development and customer service strategy to provide unparalleled service to this niche. In essence, you want to be able to put a proverbial fence around your target market that is clear to you and your referral partners.

5.      You should have a comprehensive, dynamic, and strategic multi-channel marketing plan that is distributed to all client facing personnel in your organization. Hoping that you will grow your business is not a plan. Instead, you need to reduce your goals, objectives, tactics, and strategies to writing if you want to super charge your business development activities.

6.      You should have direct contact with prospects using compelling messaging derived from your core understanding of the pains and problems that you solve, your marketing training, and your marketing plan. Direct contact with prospects is the most powerful tool in your business development arsenal if you are consistently speaking with decision makers that you pre-qualify as requiring your services.

7.      You should have a dynamic networking referral system that is targeted, strategic, and triggered. More information on this essential element is available at http://btobrevenuegrowth.blogspot.com/2016/06/so-networking-is-not-working-for-you.html.

8.      You should develop creative value generating contacts to move clients, customers, and prospects down the business development funnel. Checking in with your prospects on a regular basis is essential to your success. But, there is a huge difference between simply asking about the status of a particular project and delivering value to them. Your goal should be develop creative ways to bring value to your clients, customers, and prospects with each and every interaction.

9.      You should develop content marketing that speaks to your ideal clients, customers, and prospects. Your content marketing should identify the pains and problems faced by them and it should provide them with enough information to help them begin to identify the pains and problems in their organization and motivate them to seek out solutions.

10.  You should have an accountability system, including monthly meetings, to discuss and analyze the business development activities of client facing personnel. The monthly meetings should provide you with an opportunity to share best practices, successes, and challenges among your team members. It should also motivate each team member to pursue their business development goals on a more thorough basis.

11.  You should have a tracking system for all client, customer, and prospect contacts so that this information can be shared throughout your organization. Different people within each organization will have different contact points with clients, customers, and prospects. So, it is essential that each person have access to the latest discussion points with them.

12.  You should establish metrics to measure the effectiveness of your channel activities and your business development pipeline. This information will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, your value creating interactions, and business development processes.

13.  You should evaluate your marketing plan, business development processes, and metrics on a regular basis to uncover trends in your business development activities.

This information may seem a bit overwhelming at first blush. But, we have the ability to help you break it down into workable pieces so that you can establish a world class business development system that hits on all the essential items. If you would like to be considered for our cutting edge business development programs, please feel free to email me at bkerrigan@wadvising.com or call me at 860-303-8929

Brian Kerrigan