The “High Growth” Approach to Your Business Development Strategy
Business development is a crucial strategy to develop and master before you get into scaling your business. Many people think that business development is just another name for sales. The parity between the two is there, but the real definition is very different when it comes to practical business scenarios.
Business development is a typical process that identifies the nature of new clients and helps the business acquire the clients with backed-up research to drive growth, sustainability and profitability to target return business, referrals and client loyalty.
Let’s assume a high growth-oriented business development approach.
Assume levels 12 and 3 as the prime parts of this approach. In the first 2 stages of the approaching model, the idea is to attract prospects and build an engagement model for the audiences. I am saying audiences because you will be providing some value in terms of various kinds of content and they will consume your content.
It is very crucial to understand that the second stage, which is building an engagement model, comes only after you have maintained your prospects and have attracted the top quality audience that can be remotely interested in converting to your clients. Building an engagement model is very crucial as it will form a trust base for you as a service provider.
Only after you’ve succeeded in attracting and engaging them into becoming the client that you need them to be, do you then have to figure out how to turn opportunities into clients. The opportunities can be in the way of a giveaway coupon for a certain service, or course that you are selling. In a way, you have to maintain a lead magnet in this 1,2,3 step model to understand the business development of your brand.
Business Development, Sales and Marketing
As mentioned earlier, business development is an entirely different set of processes. That helps you to develop your business and convert your prospects into clients. However, sales and marketing also help in this process of client conversion. Although the sheer difference between business development, sales and marketing make a big impact on business decisions, if not made clear for or by the entrepreneur.
Marketing is a process where you determine what product and service will offer to your target audiences and at what price. In the process of marketing, you see what product the market needs and what is the closest alternative to the perfection of the “market need” that you can offer with your product. Understanding this process is important to survive in the competitive marketplace.
On the other hand, sales are concerned primarily with converting leads or opportunities or prospects into clients for the firm. The core function of sales is to get the word “out” and get prospects “in” the business to generate revenue. Business development is mostly confused with series. This is not very astonishing because many people who have a sales background have been using the title of Business Development Associate manager or developer.
This phenomenon happens predominantly between organisations that assume that business development is just sales and that is why most of the organisations are not high growth.
The question now is what are high growth firms? How do they up their business development game?
The High Growth Approach
The answer is simple. The high growth firms are the ones who understand their positioning in the market. It is as simple as introspection and retrospection of your operations and results on and on until you find the flaws and the reasons for your success.
The high growth firms understand what is needed in their operation to succeed and what they need to do to get out in the market to gather the clients they need.
Most high growth forms that I have noticed do not have a very broad spectrum of services. Rather, they specialise in a niche-based service and they portray themselves as the best in that segment.
To understand the business development tactics of a high growth firm, I will say understand the basics of business development because that is where the distinguishing between high growth and average firms happens in the practical world.
The basics of these high growth approaches are:
Focusing on networking rather than general, pointless marketing
High growth firms understand that the marketing money they acquire has a higher value than being vaguely spread out in a market that is too busy to care about a new offer that a brand is offering. So they spend their money on attracting new clients via improving the quality of their work and reference via the networks of their business relations as well as clients’ business relations.
Targeted marketing, outbound telephone and mail
Spending all the marketing money on purchasing billboards in crowded areas is the average approach. The high growth firms know where their clientele is and that is why they target their clientele via outbound telephones and cold emails. They design their websites and every other digital front very intelligently. As a brand, you need to be certain where your voice is going to be heard. Target intelligently and maximise your productivity.
Developing a combined strategy
A combined strategy is a customised plan for your business according to the strength of your trade. In this manner, if you are following a single strategy, there can be certain limitations. The development and amalgamation of a dual strategy compensate for the limitations of a singular strategy.
Furthermore, the combined strategy will be customised to your business needs and clients which will help you in gathering the market positioning that you aim towards.
The only possible loophole in a combined strategy is perfect execution. You have to look forward to executing your combined strategy according to your business requirements as well as market positioning and environment.
All these tips and tricks will help you understand and distinguish the difference between an average and a high growth firm’s perspective of business development. There are numerous strategies that high growth firms practise regularly. I hope this information will be fruitful for your business.
Understand and identify your KPIs and capitalise on them. Be high growth. Aim to the elite.