Business development: 7 examples of high-impact strategies
If you want your business to prosper, there's no secret about it: business development is essential to keep your beautiful ship afloat.
Yes, but there's more to it than that. You've got your sights set on the great outdoors: increasing your sales, boosting your growth, setting sail for new markets, conquering a wider customer base, and so on. In short, you're aiming high!
But first, what exactly is meant by business development? Who in the company is concerned?
Without looking for a standard procedure or a magic recipe, start by drawing inspiration from winning strategies, ideas that you can apply in your own business.
Because there's no one right way to develop sales: it depends on your specific context, your objectives, the market in which you operate...
Always higher, always further, always stronger? You've got a bet! Let's see how you can put this plan into action. ⚡️
First of all, what is business development?
Definition of business development
First things first. To understand exactly what we mean by business development, let's look at its definition.
It's a multi-faceted process designed to ensure stable and sustainable sales growth for your company. Effective business development is essential to sustaining your company's activities, whatever they may be.
It's a set of strategies, methodologies and tools used to generate sales on a regular and sustainable basis, and encompasses :
- sales strategy,
- sales prospecting
- lead generation,
- sales cycle management,
- customer loyalty, etc.
As you can imagine, the field is vast!
💡 Sales development objectives will be translated into the implementation of a sales action plan (CAP), which provides the sales team with a medium- to long-term vision, and enables the company to be viable.
Alignment with marketing
The sales process can only thrive if it is supported by a solid marketing strategy. Building a marketing plan will ensure the generation of qualified leads on which sales staff can build to close deals.
While prospecting is of course an integral part of sales development, it has been proven that :
companies are 70% more likely to see their sales grow over time, if their sales and marketing teams work effectively hand in hand.
➡️ ️ To support your company's business development, marketing, communications and sales must therefore work together to build a coherent offering, raise awareness of your brand and assert your value proposition to your targets. Let's hear it!
Who is a business development manager?
Business development people occupy different roles, depending on the size of the company and the organization of its departments. As the process is broad, it encompasses several professions and sometimes combines sales and marketing.
Development professionals may have the following titles:
- Development manager, Sales development representative, Business development representative,
- Commercial, Business developer,
- Account manager, Customer success executive,
- Sales director, Development director, Head of sales.
The objectives pursued by the development professional contribute to increasing the company's overall growth, by initiating actions such as launching a new product or expanding into a particular priority market.
While the Sales Director provides the vision and direction, the Development Manager implements the strategy in coordination with the company's various departments. He/she may also be called upon to structure and lead a team of sales representatives to pursue sales initiatives.
These actions may involve, for example, extending prospecting to new targets or winning new contracts from existing customers.
What is the purpose of a business development strategy?
The business development strategy will list all the commercial actions to be carried out in order to :
- start up a business,
- ensure long-term development,
- establish a foothold in your target market,
- stand out from the competition, etc.
Once your target (or ideal customer) has been determined, this strategy is generally broken down into four major areas:
- your offer: the products and services you sell to your ideal customer,
- your pricing model: at what price you want to sell them,
- your positioning: where you want to be in the market,
- promotional strategy and communication plan: to reach your buyers.
The strategy may well aim for the moon (and we wish you high ambitions! 🤩 ); nevertheless, it must remain concrete and realistic.
This means matching it with SMART objectives, as well as business performance indicators (KPIs). It is deployed over several years and remains a course for carrying out actions and informing decision-making.
💡 Market research is a very useful tool for getting it off to a good start, offering you in-depth knowledge of the market in which you aspire to launch or evolve.
7 examples of winning business development strategies
Example no. 1: master your unique offering
You have an offer that works relatively well. Why not stick with it and perfect it, rather than diversifying your catalog? This can be a winning approach if you concentrate your efforts on mastering it perfectly.
💡 To do this, put your product development team to work: together, design exactly the product or service your customers dream of. You'll increase the added value of your offering compared with the competition! And your sales team can be more effective if they focus on a single, well-crafted sales process.
Example 2: Target niche markets
In the face of stiff competition, in a market with multiple players already in place, an effective strategy may be to target a very specific segment. Your sales actions, prospecting, content marketing, etc. focus on the issues faced by this particular niche target, and your solution is tailored to meet them.
💡 To do this, choose a strategic segment for you rather than tackling the whole market. Your value proposition will be all the more relevant to your target audience the better you master your specialty. A word of caution: make sure your niche is viable before you launch!
Example no. 3: focus on innovation
Setting up a genuine innovation strategy can be a lever for expanding your business. You make the choice of differentiation: creating a competitive advantage to create value while affirming your brand's culture of innovation.
You can choose between several types of innovation:
- incremental, which involves adding new functionalities to your product or service ;
- customer experience, which involves taking an innovative approach to enhancing the customer experience;
- adjacent, which consists of giving your product or service a functionality that already exists in another market;
- marketing, which will focus on an innovative approach to promoting your offering.
💡 Once again, market research will be your ally if you don't want to fail in creating an innovation!
Example no. 4: focus on key accounts
Major growth potential can be found in large companies, helping to generate a large proportion of sales. One of the advantages is that you can focus on a smaller number of high-value-added customers. Yes, because the budgets of large organizations allow them access to more expensive solutions.
💡 To achieve this, you can implement an account-based marketing strategy to canvass and take care of your key accounts, while formulating an offer as close as possible to their needs. If you want to move fast, this may not be for you: decision-making and purchasing processes are relatively long.
Example no. 5: opt for freemium
The freemium model is a strategy commonly used by SaaS players. The idea is to offer a free service to a broad target audience, in order to attract a large number of users, with the hope of later selling a more complete, paying version to a certain number of them.
The objective set is to convince freemium customers to pay foraccess to benefits, such as a better user experience, more powerful features, personalized customer support, etc., that perfectly match their expectations.
💡 A strategy that can prove highly effective and generate an interesting ROI when costs are under control and users have no secrets for you.
Example no. 6: offering more value to existing customers
In some cases, your customer database is rich enough to provide the right information. Find out what their needs are, so you can delight them even more with your offer. If you listen to them, try to find out exactly what issues they face, they can be the guiding thread in your sales strategy.
💡 Once you've detected a strong need, create a solution that complements your existing offering, to generate maximum revenue on your current accounts.
Example 7: forging strategic partnerships
It can be a good idea to forge relationships with other companies to form interesting synergies. For example, by enabling you to enter a market with the same target audience, where you can maximize the impact of your joint efforts. Or by enabling you to take action to conquer new markets. Or by developing new strengths. A veritable virtuous circle can be set in motion!
💡 The choice of organizations with which to partner will be decisive, but also think about the brand image you're going to convey through each partnership.
Business development tools: it's your turn to perform!
If these examples have inspired you, you're probably determined to take action. Would you like to give your sales team a gift? Why not give them the means to boost their productivity, efficiency... and motivation at the same time!
Can you see us coming? 😏 There are many tools available to help you put your sales development strategy into motion. We're thinking, for example, of :
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): to manage all your interactions with customers and prospects on a single interface, centralize their data and automate sales tasks;
- Sales Automation: to automate the sales pipeline, and boost the efficiency of your sales forces by providing them with all the tools they need to accelerate your sales development;
- Lead Generation: to reinforce your sales prospecting and marketing campaigns, and multiply your sales opportunities.
We've selected two particularly powerful tools for you to take a closer look at. See for yourself:
Pipedrive, your scalability ally
CRM software designed to increase your sales and scale with you? That's the promise of Pipedrive: simple to use, it offers you an array of tools to accelerate your sales development, and think big and far ahead!
You'll benefit from a whole range of sales-oriented features, including efficient pipeline tracking thanks to an optimized view, workflow automation, numerous integrations and powerful lead generation tools. As an added bonus, the tool is flexible and scalable to support your growth.
Don't hesitate to try it out - it's free for 14 days! 🤩
Webmecanik Pipeline, efficiency with simplicity
How about a CRM that's as powerful as it is easy to learn? That's exactly what Webmecanik offers with its Webmecanik Pipeline software. It's incredibly efficient, with comprehensive features for managing your customers, prospects and sales.
But that's not all! For ambitious teams, Webmecanik Pipeline connects to Webmecanik automation to help you become more efficient in your sales development: you boost the performance of your marketing actions, propel your campaigns and generate more qualified leads.
And with all that, it's French and completely free. Why didn't you say so? 😉
👉 And if you want to find out more, discover other sales support tools in our dedicated article.
Let's summarize!
In the end, there are perhaps as many sales development strategies as there are companies ? Keep in mind that the best strategy is the one that enables you to achieve the best possible profitability over a given period with your current and potential resources. So test, adjust and find your own!
Of course, tools are no substitute for a good strategy, but they do help you to put it into practice... and even to evaluate and monitor the progress of your action plan, thanks to the included dashboards. So, once your team is well equipped, don't hesitate to set ambitious goals to climb your next peaks! 🚀
Article translated from French