There are many ways to grow your business but lets face it… Who has the time! What typically happens is, we get caught up in servicing the day to day business and don’t have time to create new markets, new leads, new services to support possible new segments.

A successful business development model takes the time to:

  • Map current market segments and develop plans to ensure complete coverage (using business intelligence).
  • Research and discover potential new markets to fit current service and or products offered.
  • Develop a cross media plan to enter the new market segments.
  • Assess current staffing and work load.
  • Set achievable goals and metrics for successful entry to new markets.
  • Plan and budget the expense to achieve and cover the ROI model.

So where do you go from here? Start by asking yourself , how important is it to grow your business? If you and your organization are satisfied with the current sales volume then hey, don’t worry about it. If not, then keep reading…

A typical business development venture is:

  1. Poorly planned.
  2. Poorly executed.
  3. Poorly managed
  4. Poorly funded.

A good business development venture is… focused on the analytical preparation of potential growth opportunities for the executive management.  In both phases (development and implementation), the business developer must collaborate and gain feedback from the internal organization’s specialist functions, such as, R&D, production, marketing, and sales to validate the organization is capable of implementing the growth opportunity successfully.

Required skill sets and or alignment of support is required in the following areas:

  • Marketing, product and or service.
  • Legal support and understanding.
  • Strategy planning, documentation and implementation.
  • Financial understanding of ROI and cost of launch.
  • Proposal management or capture management (CRM tools)
  • Sales management experience.
  • Project Management experience

Now once you get started, lets look at management of this venture.  The bottom line is you need to develop a “Pipeline”  of activity. This pipeline can be used by planners and management to weight the success and rate potential clients in the pipeline to determine project staffing to manage the new activity. Successful companies usually support pipelines with some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) tool, either web-based solution or an in-house system. Business development specialists should manage and analyze the data to produce sales management information (MI). Such MI could include:

  • Reasons for wins/losses.
  • Progress of opportunities in relation to the sales process.
  • Top performing sales people/sales channels.
  • Sales and activity of services/products.
  • Manage Tasks and Actions
  • Migrate into Project Management (large wins).

For larger and well-established companies, especially in technology-related industries, the term “business development” often refers to setting up and managing strategic relationships and alliances with other, third-party companies. In these instances the companies may leverage each other’s expertise, technologies or other intellectual property to expand their capacities for identifying, researching, analyzing and bringing to market new businesses and new products, business-development focuses on the implementation of a strategic business plan through equity financing, acquisition/divestiture of technologies, products, and companies, plus the establishment of strategic partnerships where appropriate.

There are many resources out there that will guide you to a successful business development launch, but trust me, you will need help. We can help, so contact us today to discuss your current environment and where you would like to go.