The Business Development Plan & Strategies are used to develop and stream in the right direction your overall business idea and is meant to support your initial Business Plan. In addition, business development strategy is essential in setting up an approach for developing new opportunities and creating new leads, either from existing accounts or by targeting new potential accounts and prospects, in order to close them.
The post is aimed to set the layout and cover main key points in creating a successful business development plan which can be used as a support for your Business Plan.
Let’s start by saying that the main object is ‘Strategy’, therefore you will be developing a practical and attainable set of objectives in order to surpass your targets.
Identifying main business strategy points:
There are several main key questions that you need to answer in order to establish the layout of the strategy and give yourself a good start. The key questions are: Who? What? Where? When? Which? Why? How?
The following is the explanation for the questions above:
Who – identify your potential target audience?
What – identify the best possible product or service (what to offer)?
Where – identify the operation location?
When – is the best time to approach the customer?
Which – workforce personal to use?
Why – would they be interested in buying from you?
How – will you retain them as a returning customer?
In order to answer all those questions effectively, you have to dig in to your current records and do data analysis. If you have records for the past twelve month and you have conducted regular account reviews every decade you won’t have any problem and will be fast on your track, however what if you didn’t conduct reviews or don’t have any records as you’ve just starting out?
If you’ve just started out your business or planning to start in the near future, you have a good opportunity to engage yourself into a market research practice which will help you in identifying the market and its potential. Market research and market analysis is a very important step as it’ll show you whether or not you should enter the market and will help you identify the potential of your market.
Outlining Customer Profiling:
A successful business development demands a solid customer profiling in order to select the best possible target to reach. Here are several important factors to work with:
– Business Sectors
– Demographics
– Size of organizations
– Financial Situation
– Psychographics
Identifying those sections will help you to analyze and create strategies for your successful business plan.
Up-Sale or transform old customers to New Opportunities:
The cost of finding a new customer is always higher than the cost of transitioning individual to the returning customer or retaining the customer. It cost several times more to target, develop a message and communicate that message to the potential target. Therefore, after developing a one-time relationship with the customer it is critical to continue your communique and to retain the customer for the future business. You have to grow your funnel by continuously growing the number of prospects and the number of existing customers. If the customer bought your major product you can up sale anything that will logically suite customer’s needs. For example, you’ve sold a phone system to a customer you can also sell peripherals because they serve the purpose of communication.
Uncovering and Creating New Opportunities:
There are numerous ways to target and create a potential interest from the customer to you; you can use marketing to target your audience. Here are several marketing methods that can be implied to find new prospects:
- Internet Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Direct Mailing
- Telemarketing
- Lead Purchase
- Researching existing Tier 2 and Tier 3 customers for potential conversion
- Exhibitions, seminars, user groups
- Referrals
- Other forms of marketing
Be cautious as not all of the above might suite you or might be effective for your industry, but they will lead you into the ideas of how you can attract and what methods to use when trying to find new prospects. It is recommended to have marketing campaigns at least once in 3 months. Marketing should be a reoccurring and constant practice that you should be using for your business to grow. You have to experiment with various strategies and techniques to find the best marketing bundle that will work best for you. It is important to mention that there is no ultimate one practice that will be bringing you all the opportunities but at least several different practices that should make you successful.
Business Development Plan Example and Ideas:
It is your best bet to develop a Business Development Plan and review it every 2-3 month to identify what stage you are at and to see what needs to be changed in order for you to succeed more and what is successful right now.
You need a copy of all existing accounts to go over and to sort out what is logical to target. If you are just starting out, you might as well use all leads that you have or you’ll need to find all the leads to target.
Target all possible sources: business directories, online directories, websites, verticals, etc. At the development and growth stage, you must be adding a certain percentage of leads rapidly. Every week you must increase your funnel and work on the current leads. Growing you funnel doesn’t mean anything until you close the deal. Therefore, develop skills for closing deals.
After developing a certain amount of leads you must develop marketing strategy and message. Contact your prospects through the means of marketing.
You should be getting opinions of others, ask people who might know of what you are doing and know business side.
You can use a “SMARTER” mnemonic to set objectives and measure your success or failure (read more at Wikipedia):
- S.pecific
- M.easurable
- A.chievable
- R.elevant
- T.imed
- E.xciting
- R.ecorded
Successful Business Development Strategy comes from developing your thoughts and constantly looking and measuring the results. It is critical to work hard on all the errors and things that don’t bring any positive feedback. Your strategy has to be supported with your action, which is the only way to track your results.
Summary:
It is important to set goals and to follow the plan; no goal means – no target to reach. You have to have a specific target to make sure you are where you want to be.
