Think about running a business where your employees aren’t focused on achieving their individual and organizational milestones. Do you believe your vision of success will be achieved this way? Probably not!
When there’s nothing specific for you to be aware of the competition, market changes, possible opportunities, or other such growth aspects, it won’t be easy for you to attract the target audience consistently.
And when you don’t have any specific plans in mind, attaining all of these measures and integrating them into the business processes becomes difficult. Therefore, you need a proper business development strategy that can help you focus on the core growth tasks of your business. As per a survey, it is stated that there’s a 30% higher chance for a business to grow immensely when it has a proper plan of execution.
So, let’s dive deeper into this article and understand the benefits of business development and how to create a proper strategy revolving around it.
What is the Purpose of Business Development?
In the easiest terms, business development for small businesses or big enterprises can be summarized as initiatives, activities, and ideas which help make your business better. You need proper planning in terms of increasing your business revenue, growing in terms of expansion, increasing profitability, and building strategic partnerships.
The goal of achieving business development is all about increasing the capabilities of the organization. It will help you find new trends, client demands, undiscovered markets, analysis, and market research. With a proper plan in pursuit, you will be more focused on benefitting your organization with the opportunities for outperforming the competitors.
Fostering growth and success is the prime agenda of business development. Proactive recognition of the available opportunities in the market will help your business adapt to the income potential, quick shifting market landscape, and other such opportunities. For you, a business development strategy will be like an SOP or document that will describe the way you approach your business operations.
What is Strategic Business Development?
Strategic business development aims to align multiple processes or procedures that align with the goals or milestones. The object of this initiative is to draw the attention of the targeted clients to avail your high-priority services.
Determining what targets you should follow and what strategies of business development you can employ is risky when you are about to start a new business. But, if you can be sure that your business development strategy is strong and suitably aligned with the business goals, you can eventually count on it to boost your levels of profitability and growth.
Any kind of faulty business development strategy or its implementation might just hinder growth or frustrate your top talents. Therefore, you don’t just have to adopt the business growth techniques that you come across, but also try and understand what would work well with your brand and what won’t!
Areas Where Business Development is of Utmost Necessity
There are a lot of areas in your business that need a proper growth and development plan. A step-by-step approach to planning scalability for each of these areas will turn out to be an all-round success for the business. Some of the areas that need proper business development include:
1. Market Research and Analysis
It will help you identify the latest market opportunities, along with effective strategies. With this, you will have a strong hand on the wheel to drive your business ahead of the competitors.
2. Lead and Sales Generation
Qualifying leads, prospecting, and coordinating with your sales team is quite important for you to convert your leads into customers.
3. Customer Relationship Management
In this area, you will have to add customer retention measures, gather their feedback and initiate loyalty programs to enhance their satisfaction quotient. It will help you drive more sales from repeat customers.
4. Mergers & Acquisitions
Negotiation of deals, evaluating potential synergies, or conducting due diligence are some of the things where you need to impose a proper strategic business development plan.
5. Funding and Financial Analysis
You ought to have plans on exploring the available funding options, identifying grant opportunities, or securing investments.
Different Business Development Strategies For You to Turn Around Your Vision into Reality
Here are some of the impactful business development strategies that you can expect to attain for attaining success:
1. Proper Networking
Networking is considerably the most commonly used strategy for business development. It is built on the theory that the customers’ buying decision is greatly influenced by their relationship with the business. Face-to-face networking is one of the best ways to adopt this strategy and win over your business development plan.
But, you need to be aware of the fact that the buyers of today are time-pressured, and networking face-to-face might seem time-consuming for some. Therefore, you need to find a way such that you don’t force your networking attempts on the buyers. Instead, take appointments, permissions and then proceed to present your business in a holistic manner.
Use social media or other digital platforms to spread out your networking attempts. As of today, a lot of your target audience is on social media platforms, which will make it easier for you to find leads. But remember, networking over social media might also demand you to make some form of investment and give time & attention.
2. Run A Market Research
You can’t expect to win over your competitors in a crowded industry without proper market research. Make efforts to analyze the market and identify the audience in the best ways possible. Gather as much data as possible regarding customer behavior, buying patterns, demographic data, and others.
Before you can present your offer or products to potential customers or leads, you should have a holistic view of their obvious problems and what services they need. Following that, note what they are currently doing about the problem they are facing without your product or services.
In the end, let them know about how your product or service has the capability to improve their situation. When you can answer these parameters well with respect to your target audience, you are already leading the way ahead of your competitors. But, to ensure you become the first preference of the target audience, run a competitor analysis as well.
Determine who is doing what and how they are better than your efforts of developing and running a business. Once you take note of the areas where you lag, don’t match your competitors; instead, go beyond them. As a result, you will have more sales to cater to and will eventually increase company revenue through business development.
3. Specify the Appropriate Channels
When you have identified your audience, you have almost everything to pitch your products or services to them. You can now set an action plan to set apart the competitors. With this, you will be able to outline the channels that you are planning to use to achieve your goals.
For this, you might have to assess the total revenue margin that you are expecting to attain in the forthcoming year. Based on that, you need to pick the right methods or channels to achieve it. Some of the channels you can acquire for improving your sales rate and curating a perfect business development plan are:
- Having a referral system
- Running advertisements and sponsored partnerships
- Content marketing
- Thought leadership
4. Define the S.M.A.R.T Milestones
For every channel that you choose to run your business on, for acquiring customers and sales, remember to set the S.M.A.R.T (Specify, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Related) goals, to track the progress. The goals you set for business development don’t necessarily have to align with the revenue. Instead, you should have goals of bringing in more prospects to your sales funnel. It will increase the chances of conversion, which will ultimately scale your revenue. Some of the S.M.A.R.T goals that you can set on your way to build the perfect business development strategy are:
- Seek social media interactions with your brand.
- Look out for achieving more LinkedIn website leads and referrals.
- Measure the sales accountability with the referrals.
- Count on the website leads and visits.
- Reduce the churn rate of customers.
5. Provide Demonstrations For the Leads and Prospects
To ensure your potential leads or prospects choose you over the competitors for the products or services you offer, then take a step ahead in planning your strategy. Give them a sales demonstration, so the leads can know how your service or product works. These demonstrations should be properly customized for you to showcase how your products or services can solve the challenges of people. Depending on your business type, you can plan on showing these demonstrations, either in person, through email, on a video chat, or through a website. It will entice the prospects to try and learn more about your offerings and ultimately secure sales with your brand.
6. Motivate Employees to Upskill Themselves
Business development requirements will keep on changing over time as market conditions consistently evolve. Therefore, it is very crucial for you to educate your employees to constantly upskill themselves, depending on their job role and the market demands associated with it.
Conclusion
So, this is a clear understanding of how a proper business development strategy can help you turn your vision into reality when it is about growing your company. Success doesn’t come easy! You will have to give in your share of the input in all areas where there’s a need for a proper business development strategy.
Get help for yourself and hire business development consultant or executive to do the needful. They will help you keep a strong tab on the progress over time. If you feel like hiring an in-house team member will be a bit expensive to look after all of these areas that might need improvements, it is always better to outsource the requirement to professional business development services for all-around assistance in preparing and executing a business development strategy. And The OnPoint Group is the right team with adequate expertise to help you with the needful.
