If you’ve heard the term business development and are curious about how it works or if you’re someone that already knows the basics and would want to understand how to setup an effective business development process - this video is for you. Business development is pretty straightforward, it simply means generating enough demand for your product or services so that you’re not only able to sustain your current operations but are also able to lead your business to a reasonable amount of profit.
An effective B.D process usually has 4 steps -
Lead generation
Qualifying leads
Followups
Conversions
Now, we’ll look at each of these, one by one.
A great Lead generation strategy is a mix of inbound and outbound where inbound simply means the leads or enquiries that come in through references and outbound could mean cold calling, trade shows, events, meetups.
It’s also a mix of offline and online efforts. An example of offline could be flyers, newspaper ads and online would be digital ads, youtube videos, blogs.
Lead gen strategy will also be a Mix of organic and inorganic - an example of organic would be SEO, content writing and inorganic would be facebook, youtube, instagram ads
So, if your lead generation process includes all these 6 ingredients, namely - inbound, outbound, offline, online, organic and inorganic, you will have a highly effective lead generation process.
The second step, qualifying the leads is usually understanding the client and their requirements and whether or not they’re a great fit for your product. You determine this by understanding their budget, timelines, customer lifetime value, support cycle and specifics of any other requirements and expectations that they may have. Some companies have a checklist and even a questionnaire to help them define a customer-product fit.Once you’re through this and you’re sure about the client, you can then move forward to the next step, that is following up.
Following up includes calling the lead or emailing them a couple of times to remind them about your product. This is also a great stage to offer them a quick discount to make your product highly attractive to them.
The last stage is conversion where they actually become your client or customer. This is where you ensure they’re highly satisfied with your services by enhancing their experience.
And this makes up for the entire business development cycle.
To ensure your B.D cycle is effcient, you have to keep refining it at each stage make a lot of changes based on the type of results that you might be seeing.
Maybe you are generating enough leads but they’re falling off in the follow up process - to improve this, you can try different ways of following up and different frequencies, a big reason for lead fall off could be that you’re losing them to your competitors, in this case, it makes sense to find out the services, benefits and price that the compeittors are offering them so that you can create a more competitive proposal.
Maybe you’re not generating enough leads in the first place, to solve this problem - you can try multiple different channels or maybe increase your budget spend on the existing channels.
With every successful conversion, you also need to note down the cost per acquisition. And this has to be much lesser than the cost of your product or service, otherwise the process is not sustainable. The other thing to look at is the conversion timeline. If you’re selling a low value product and the conversion timelines are long, this again is not sustainable.
It’s really about having a lot of data about all stages of your B.D process and knowing when to correct your course with the right actions.
One such software, that we like to use, is dominate a.i. It’s an A.I powered tool to help manage each stage of the B.D process. This not only enables you to map out your entire process but also presents you with data points and actions that you can take to course correct.
You can follow the steps and tips provided in this video as well as do some trial and error on your own to come to the right mix of actions and create an effective process for your business.
0 Comments