Posted 30.06.2022
Getting a business, particularly a B2B business, fully off the ground takes a lot of time, effort and dedication. If you’ve established your brand and are seeing a steady revenue stream then we’d like you to take a step back, and appreciate and celebrate such a massive achievement.
But the hard work doesn’t end there. Now it’s time to generate a business development strategy that will help you continue offering a brilliant service to your customers, hit your upcoming business goals and increase revenue and profit.
Business development refers to your planned efforts to continue growing your B2B company. Growth in this respect could mean:
Whatever you want your B2B business to achieve, you’ll create a business development strategy to help you get there.
Taking the above as an example, if your main business development goal is to gain a competitive edge, then some examples of business development strategies (note that we said ‘strategies’ and not ‘strategy’ as you’ll likely need numerous plans to achieve one goal) for the above goal could include:
And more.
This is quite a broad, top-level example, we’d have to know a lot more about your business and product offering to go into any more depth, but hopefully, this gives you an idea.
To help with your business development efforts, here’s a run down of what to include in your strategic business development plan:
How quickly you want to grow is entirely up to you. You may want to pull out all the stops and reach for the stars or you may be more interested in a slow and steady approach to win the race.
Whatever you decide, we recommend that you think both short and long term when putting a business development strategy together.
Some growth opportunities you may be interested in include:
This will require an in-depth understanding of your target audience, the digital platforms they spend their time on and how they like to be marketed to.
Whether you’re still an emerging business or you’ve been operating for a long time, we always recommend that you run multiple growth strategies at the same time.
At some point, a campaign won’t perform as well as anticipated. At moments like that, having another marketing channel to fill the gap while you reassess and tweak your underperforming channel.
By analysing your current position, you can use forecasting to ascertain where your brand would be financially in a year, five years, or ten years if you continued operating as you currently are with no changes to operations at all.
From here, with the help of a financial strategist, you can set ambitious but attainable financial goals based on your growth strategies. For example, if you were to increase sales by X% each year for five years, what financial position would you be in, is that a position you’d be happy with?
You would also be able to calculate (to a certain extent) how much it would cost you in the short term to meet your long-term goals.
You’ll know by experience that:
All require budget.
Once you know how much money is ‘in the pot’ so to speak, you can let your departments like your sales team and marketing team know how much time they can assign to each campaign to help your B2B business hit and even exceed your target goals.
Speaking of budget, be sure that whatever technology or tools you invest in to improve the customer experience, sales and revenue will grow alongside your B2B business.
Having to switch to a new process will be costly and time-consuming (moving everything over, training your team and giving them time to get used to the new technology or tools).
At Evolve Trader, for example, our B2B product catalogue management system will grow with your brand, so that you can devote as much time and budget to your growth plans as possible.
The penultimate step to generating a quality and effective business development strategy is to sign off on your sales and marketing strategies so that they can get going, giving them as much time as possible to hit their micro and macro targets.
It’s also important to confirm what metrics will be used to measure performance to avoid vanity metrics muddying the waters. There’s no point in measuring something that will make your teams look good but have no tangible impact on growth.
The final part of your business development strategy is to decide how often you’re going to review how your B2B marketing and sales efforts are performing against your set growth goals.
Shorter-term strategies could be reviewed quarterly and longer-term plans could be reviewed annually for example.
An effective business development plan can help you better communicate with your target market, streamline your marketing efforts and turn qualified leads into paying customers. At Evolve Trader, we offer different technology solutions to assist B2B businesses in the following sectors:
If you’d like to find out more about how our technology can fit in with your business growth plans, please complete this form and a member from our team will be in touch.
