Business Development And Entrepreneurship

To remain competitive and secure in the new economy, it is imperative that companies communicate to their employees the critical importance of proactive branding, marketing and business development. Leading outbound prospecting: On the flip side, this kind of outreach involves researching and contacting potential customers that haven’t proactively expressed interest in your product through cold calls and cold emails—with the goal of qualifying sales opportunities for your sales team.

Development strategies based on a strategic marketing plan for example will address a changing customer base and market dynamics, help one to understand horizontal and vertical target market opportunities and how to develop the right products, services and solutions to meet the target market needs.

When you separate the responsibilities of business development and sales within your organization, you’re grouping similar activities together and making individuals responsible for a limited set of goals that are directly impacted by the activities they’re expected to do on a daily basis (having a clear connection to impact being one of the three things that make work most meaningful).

Such techniques include, but are not limited to, assessments of marketing opportunities and target markets, intelligence gathering on customers and competitors, generating leads for possible sales, follow up sales activity, formal proposal writing and business model design.

Although sales and business development are different teams and functions, it’s easy to see how important it is for both strategies to work in lock-step: effective selling isn’t possible without dedicated business development, and business development relationship-building can only be done if a business has a solution and reputation for being able to help meet a need in the market.