When you start a new business, your biggest priority is to build your brand and maintain business growth. Unfortunately, the strategic business development process doesn't happen overnight. Business development is a continuous hard work, commitment, and determination process. There are no shortcuts for large companies to outperform small businesses in the industry or achieve instant success.
Imagine working in a company where all the employees are focused on business development tasks. There would be no one to challenge you or tell you about the business development opportunities or how you can attract a target audience effectively.
There would be no better feeling than working in such an environment. There is a reason why companies build a business development strategy and hire employees to make them grow to further heights. With the tried-and-true methods, you can reach business growth milestones that can bring your company instant success.
What is Business Development
Business development is executing growth strategies and opportunities across your company to boost revenue. It helps grow your business, discover new prospects, and convert more business leads into customers.
Business development is closely connected with sales assistants, business development teams, and representatives. Although business development is linked with sales, it is essential to note the difference between the terms.
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Business development is part of a more significant sales team and still serves a different function than typical sales work. It helps maintain relationships with prospects, learn about buyers' personas, and increase brand awareness.
By working on the business development process, your team will learn more about the following:
- Your company's objectives
- Sales targets
- Business conditions
- Target audience
On the other hand, the sales team sells your products or services to your customers and ensures they convert leads into customers. Therefore, the work related to business development eases the sales manager position.
Tips to Develop a Business Development Strategy
1) Innovate Your Networking
There is no question that cold calls don't have the kind of impact they once had. It would be best if you innovated your networking by establishing solid relationships with prospects and other visitors. You can achieve this by meeting people at conferences, trade shows, or industry-related events.
You can use mobile business applications like LinkedIn to reach out to your potential customers. For example, you can interact with people who sign up for your email subscription and become part of your mailing list.
2) Offer Consultation
You should provide consultations and assessments for your new prospects as a business owner. If the prospects talk about how your products and services match their needs, they will find it easy to decide whether they should convert or not.
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Conversely, consultations and assessments also identify how a prospect is unsuitable for your business product. This assessment is critical because it helps you save time nurturing or dealing with unsatisfied customers on your journey.
3) Nurture Prospects
Before your customers take action, you must provide them with a sales demo so that they understand how your products and services work. It would help if you customized your demos to show your lead or prospect how your products can solve their problems. You can share these demos on social media or your business website.
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Nurturing prospects is integral to your business development strategy, whether by phone call or email. It provides your leads and prospects with information about your products and services. This relevant information can help them decide whether to make a purchase or convert.
Nurturing your leads allows you to organize your content according to the products and brands so they can understand how these products can solve their problems. You will also encourage your prospects and give them the impression that they are heard and understood by your company.
4) Offer Different Types of Content
Provide your prospects with different types of content, such as images, videos, and social media posts, so that they can learn more about your brand and products.
It is the best way to meet your prospects regardless of their location and provide them with their preferable content to read. You must ensure that all your content is downloadable and shareable so the prospects can deliver your content to their team members. They can discuss your product's or service's potential with the team to understand how they can solve their problems.
5) Communicate With Marketing
Although business development occurs in the sales department, it doesn't mean the internal business development work only involves other sales department members. You can host regular meetings and communicate with your departments regularly that impact your business' success rate, such as marketing and product development.
Marketing ensures that you develop content and campaigns for your target audience so they understand how your products and services can impact their lives. So why wouldn't you talk to them about your blog posts, marketing campaigns, social media posts, and website content for the people you sell products to?
Your reps can share any content developed by your marketing team and help the prospects convert into customers. Moreover, you can inform your marketing team about any content missing for prospects.
If projects and campaigns are outside your domain, you can open a marketing agency to help fill the void. However, like your marketing team, your marketing agency must understand how your products and services can connect with your target audience.
6) Invest in Your Website
Building and promoting a website is the perfect way to make your first impression count in the eyes of your prospects. You don't get second chances when it comes to your first impressions; in many cases, your website is the first impression of your brand. Therefore, you mustn't just build your website but make it visible by working on its search engine ranking.
When you implement your business development strategy, make sure that you conduct the following tasks:
- Make your website attractive and engaging
- Connect with your social media profiles
- Optimize your website for search engines
- Link your website to collateral, such as sales content
- Maintain an active blog
7) Motivate Your Employees to Refine Their Skills
The good thing about a business development strategy is that it is permanently active. Technology and marketing conditions are constantly evolving, so you must ensure your employees stay ahead of these marketing trends.
People involved in the business development process should have the attitude to learn and develop new skills. For example, if your company adopts new technology, you must train your staff thoroughly, so everyone knows what to expect.
It would be best if you also encouraged your employees to learn about the nuances of their field and the related industries. For example, is artificial intelligence (AI) about to influence your industry? If so, the head of the departments may change the way how the companies interact with each other.
Build a Business Website on Strikingly
Strikingly is a professional website builder that allows business owners worldwide to build an effective website within a couple of hours. We provide our users with attractive and responsive website templates from various industries.
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Start by reviewing the templates we have provided in our collection and choose the suitable one for your business plan. Some customization factors on a website template include the following:
- Text fonts
- Website navigation buttons
- Color schemes
You can easily add your business content to these templates. It depends on how you organize your content. Some templates look better with multimedia content, whereas others perform better with heavy texts.
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Building a business website is one thing, but marketing to improve its search engine optimization (SEO) ranking is another. SEO rankings are significant for your business development strategy. It ensures that your audience discovers your website URL in search engines.
Strikingly provides you with multiple tools to boost your on-site SEO. First, add a site description in the settings, and ensure that you have added all the relevant keywords in your website content. The more thorough your keyword research is, the better chances the business developers will boost their online presence.
If you are building your business website for the first time, you will likely struggle to implement your ideas. Hence, you can look into your competitor's websites and monitor the steps they have taken to make their website a success.
Conclusion
In normal circumstances, your company will alternate between business growth and periods of stagnation. Hence, it is essential always to keep an eye on business development opportunities and not be afraid to experiment with them. However, you must be cautious with your approach and avoid converting potential business growth into a significant business blunder.
If you are still deciding whether to pursue a business development opportunity, you can go back to the drawing board and look into your business plans and forecasts again. It will help you to determine whether your business is viable or whether your company can manage the negative cash flow in the short term.
Strikingly fully believes in the growth of businesses across different sectors and industries. You can find many popular platforms on the Internet to read more about business development practices. You can also use our live chat feature and interact with our Happiness Officers. We will give you an insight into all the cutting-edge marketing strategies so you can expand your business in the long run.
