Business development strategies are crucial for helping businesses to grow, expand, and reach the next level.
Effective business development is one of the fastest ways to grow your business but it can also be one of the most time consuming as it often requires focus, planning, stamina, and resources. However, when done right, your business development processes can have a huge impact on your growth, your revenue, and your company’s future.
Here are 5 ways to improve your business development process:
Effective market research
Market research plays a vital part in any business development process, helping you to understand your current market position and determine where it is going.
Carry out research into your industry, your geographical area, and the market segment you are targeting. Telemarketing is a great tool for this.
Research contracts, bids, and opportunities for co-operation with other companies – this can help you to increase your revenue channels.
Subscribe to industry-related databases, forums, and blogs. These can be hugely valuable, providing detailed information about projects within your sector. This can save you time when collecting information and reduce your market intelligence efforts.
Focus on your client’s needs
Rather than focusing your business development process on what you’re offering, focus instead on what your client needs, listen carefully to the client’s individual requirements and preferences. If you listen carefully you should then be able to modify your own pitch to match their requirements. This, in turn, should increase client satisfaction rates.
Prioritise client satisfaction
A dissatisfied client could damage your company’s reputation as a whole.
With this in mind, client satisfaction is key for effective business development and should always be your priority. If a problem or issue arises, you need to fix it as quickly and effectively as possible.
Don’t let relationships go cold
As well as providing a good service to your clients, it’s also important to maintain relationships. After all, studies have shown that retained clients spend, on average, 67% more than new customers.
Make it part of your business development process to engage with your clients periodically. Set up Google Alerts for your clients so you know what’s happening in their world or share useful content with them when you come across it. You could even send notes on special occasions, such as birthdays and anniversaries.
Ensure to connect with your clients on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Innovate
Innovation is key when it comes to beating your competition. After all, if you offer your clients something unique, there’s a high probability that they will do business with you.
What more can you do with your services? Is there a part of what you offer that needs something extra in order to increase sales? Perhaps you need to integrate services into packages?
Continue to innovate and improve your business development process to benefit your clients and consequently your sales pipeline.
If you’d like to understand how we can help with your business development process, contact us on 0345 241 3038 or get in touch today.
