This article includes seven (7) tips to get you started. A Business Development Strategy is vital for all businesses. It creates long term value, helps customer retention and growth of the organization. These tips can be integrated into how you do business every day to help nurture the company and grow sustainably over time.
Know the Competition
Take time to clearly understand who your competition is, what they offer, and how they perform. This will help you differentiate the business so that you can provide customers with a unique experience that has specific benefits(value) that your competitors do not offer. When you can give a particular value proposition and have your customers come to understand it, then winning the sale is no longer about the price.
Examples of this are:
- After-hours support or extended service hours to align with customer needs.
- Developing a better-trained support team than your competition. Almost every machine or piece of software will fail, the way we take care of it when that happens can build trust and a long term relationship or damage your reputation and the relationship.
- Offering and supporting telematics. Be the one watching out for the customer by monitoring their equipment for issues.
- Offering equipment, accessories, and software as a package to eliminating the need to work with additional vendors.
Each of these examples not only brings value to the customer but potential revenue to the business. Options like these could be a possible win for both.
Market intelligence is about knowing your competition and your customer. Good market intelligence is key to understanding your customers’ needs and the strengths and weaknesses of your competition to determine what new offering could provide a strategic advantage.
Know your Customers
The key to any organization is the clients or customers. Without them, the business would not exist for long. The business development strategy must encourage the following:
- Products/services developed based on identified customer need
- A means to measure, monitor and manage customer satisfaction
- Have an effective process to resolve complaints and inquiries
- Maintain and analyze customer data for insight
Brick & Mortar vs. Online Presence
If you consider yourself to be a “Brick & Mortar only” business, please understand that very few exist anymore. With few exceptions, an online presence is a requirement, and it supplements the physical location. Because of this, maintaining a quality online presence is critical. Online is where customers have the first interaction with your brand through search, reviews, social media, and your website. Ninety-two percent (92%) of customers read online reviews in a recent survey by BrightLocal. You must maintain and manage your online presence. We will discuss how in a future article.
Build Trust
If there is a focus on adding value for the customer, then business growth will occur. The results will likely not be instant, but it will generate stable growth over time. It should also be understood that the marketing costs associated with gaining a new customer are typically far higher than the minimal cost to retain an existing customer. So the true margin on sales to existing customers will usually be better. Also, keep in mind that during economic downturns, incremental sales from existing customers keep many businesses afloat.
Communicate with your Customers
As with all relationships, communication is the key. Here are some items to consider:
- Be responsive and have systems in place to respond quickly to customer inquiries. If there are delays, find ways to make improvements.
- Communicate regularly with potential and existing customers to learn about their needs and make them aware of what you offer. Studies show that it takes an average of seven interactions before a customer is ready to make a purchase.
- Everyone in the company should be prepared to help the customer with a need or refer them to the right person.
- Ask for the sale. “We would like to have your business and serve you. How can we make that happen?” Frequently sales do not happen because we don’t ask for it.
- Continue to engage with customers. Returning customers typically purchase more with less marketing costs associated with it. It costs five times more to attract a new customer versus retaining an existing customer based on research by Investp.
Execute the Strategy Every Day
Please don’t work on a Business Plan or Business Development Plan and file it away. Everyone in your organization should understand the parts that relate to them. They should be working towards their objectives in some way every day. If it’s in a file somewhere, how do we know we are successful in meeting the goals of the business.
Process vs. Strategy
Ask yourself if the processes that you have directly support your objectives. Do they make it easy for employees to execute Business Development Strategy goals? Are the processes that your customers are exposed to consistent with the strategy also?
If your customer support, sales, or other processes do not fully support the business strategy, then consider how the process needs to be changed. An example of this is if you have a CRM tool, is the information collected, shared between sales, marketing, and customer support to providing a seamless experience to the customer or client? Improving your process can be done with internal resources or using a specialist like a business process consultant.
Develop Your Skills and Outsource
You may not have any formal education related to Business Development unless you have completed an MBA or similar degree. There are lots of resources to access information and start to determine how to develop a strategy. You will not be alone in following this path as many entrepreneurs, and other leaders that come from technical backgrounds have followed this part. These include Ginni Mometty (CEO-IBM), Carl Icahn (Investor), Mark Zuckerberg (Founder-Facebook), Lisa Su (CEO-AMD), David Karp (Founder-Tumblr), and Richard Branson (Founder-Virgin Group). This does not mean that they do not value education but rather have followed a different path and have found ways to supplement the knowledge they do have. Online research, training, skilled employees, a mentor, and consultants are all alternatives to help address any gap you may have.
The Business Development Strategy
Having a business development strategy that is being executed by each department is critical to long term success. Portion of what we have outlined applies to every part of your business. Be sure that department and individual goals and metrics truly align with your Business Development Strategy. Aligning what you measure, daily execution, and the business development strategy foster coordination for great results. Without a coordinated strategy, internal competition will cause poor decisions to be made that are not consistent with the organization’s objectives. It will create mediocre results at best. Ask yourself why in team sports, we measure the team score and keep stats for actions that individuals may have done to contribute to the final score.
Ideate Consulting Group partners & consults with small and large enterprise to apply organic business growth methods that are proven and time tested to grow sales and revenue long term.
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