Business Development For Dummies

Anna Kennedy

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118962701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Growing a small business requires more than just sales

Business Development For Dummies helps maximise the growth of small- or medium-sized businesses, with a step-by-step model for business development designed specifically for B2B or B2C service firms. By mapping business development to customer life cycle, this book helps owners and managers ensure a focus on growth through effective customer nurturing and management. It's not just sales! In-depth coverage also includes strategy, marketing, client management, and partnerships/alliances, helping you develop robust business practices that can be used every day. You'll learn how to structure, organise, and execute an effective development plan, with step-by-step expert guidance.

Realising that you can't just "hire a sales guy" and expect immediate results is one of the toughest lessons small business CEOs have to learn. Developing a business is about more than just gaining customers – it's about integrating every facet of your business in an overarching strategy that continually works toward growth. Business Development For Dummies provides a model, and teaches you what you need to know to make it work for your business.

• Learn the core concepts of business development, and how it differs from sales
• Build a practical, step-by-step business development strategy
• Incorporate marketing, sales, and customer management in general planning
• Develop and implement a growth-enhancing partnership strategy

Recognising that business development is much more than just sales is the first important step to sustained growth. Development should be daily – not just when business starts to tail off, or you fall into a cycle of growth and regression. Plan for growth, and make it stick – Business Development For Dummies shows you how.

Part I

Getting Started with Business Development

For Dummies can help to get you started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to discover more and do more with For Dummies books.

In this part …

• Gain a clear understanding of what business development encompasses.
• Realize why business development can be problematic for small, growing companies.
• Look at business development from the customer’s point of view.
• Align your business development with the customer lifecycle.
• Use business development tools to secure your business growth.

Chapter 1

Introducing Business Development for Services Firms

In This Chapter

Defining business development

Looking through your customer’s eyes

Making time for business development

If you ask ten people what they think business development is, you probably get ten different answers. Chances are that even your own view of business development isn’t completely aligned with others in your organization, unless you’ve taken special and unusual steps to make it so.

Whether you’re a business owner, involved in business development or just interested in discovering more, you probably inherited your view of business development from your business experiences, gleaned it from Google, created it yourself or perhaps used a mix of all these influences.

In this chapter, I set the scene for the whole book, providing a clear definition of business development, which involves strategy (see the chapters in Part II), marketing (Part III), sales (Part IV), customer management (Part V) and partnerships (Part VI) – and I set out why business development matters. I also describe the central role of your customers and tackle the problem of becoming overwhelmed, discussing how and why you need to find time for business development in your company.

Answering the Question: So What Is Business Development Anyway?

Here’s the $64,000 question: What is business development? Is it something to do with sales? For sure. Is it related to business growth? It had better be! Does is have anything to do with your business strategy? Probably.

When you set out to create something, say, a new company, a growth plan or a new service, nothing says how it ought to be: in other words, your ‘something’ is what you create it to be. You may have noticed, however, that in business what gets created soon becomes the norm, the accepted way, the way it has to be. So that when you try to change something, someone always says, ‘but we’ve always done it this way’. Boy, don’t some people take themselves seriously!

When this happens, you can find yourself forgetting that you created it, whatever it is, and that therefore you can recreate it. Successful businesses take recreation seriously – recreation is built into their DNA. Recreating is how they keep their offer (the service they bring to the marketplace and something I discuss in detail in Chapter 5) fresh, how they assimilate new ways to market themselves, how they reduce their sales cycles and how they find great partners to help them grow their businesses.

Check out Chapter 2 for lots more on the importance of business development.

Recognizing that business is a serious business

If you’re thinking that business is a serious matter, I agree with you. Professional football is a serious game (and a big money business). It has a purpose (get that ball over the touchline – or in the goal if you’re thinking soccer), it has rules and it’s clear what winning looks like (and the winners receive prizes!). Think about business like that and it becomes fun; well, some of the time.

Given the different ideas people hold about business development, having a definition is useful. Here’s mine:

Business development is the discipline required to achieve growth through the acquisition of profitable net new customers and expansion of existing customers.

Clearly business development is concerned with growth and most companies achieve growth by getting new customers. Even if you grow by acquisition, you’re still, at the root of it, acquiring new customers (though note that, unless they’re profitable to you, you really don’t want them). You also have existing customers and many firms neglect the opportunity for growth that lies within those existing (or historical) customers.

Discipline is required to acquire, keep and grow customers. Discipline has two meanings here:

• Discipline is the serious study of business development as a business competence. I’m frequently amazed how many people think that they can do business development when they’ve never studied it for a moment. If you think about your offer and the knowledge and experience it takes to do what you do for your customers, you probably don’t take that lightly. So start thinking of business development the same way. You have to study it, become an expert and use the discipline.
• 
  Discipline is the rigor of doing business development every day. When small firms have plenty of business, they neglect business development, and when they’re running out of business they panic and start scurrying around for new opportunities. This approach is disastrous. Getting new business takes time. If you’re not looking ahead to where your revenue is going to come from in three or six months’ time, you’re facing the spectre of horrible revenue swings, which stress your company, your cash flow and your co-workers/employees.

Business development gives you a disciplined approach to creating your offer, taking it to the market, acquiring customers, developing them to enhance your success and partnering with others to grow still further.

The discipline helps you smooth out the bumps in the road. You know – the bumps that caused you to pick up this book, whatever they were.

Understanding how business development differs from selling

I need to dispel a myth: a lot of people equate business development with selling, but in fact selling is just one of its functions, not the whole thing.

Selling is only part of business development

Sales is the art and science of presenting a solution to a prospective customer’s need and getting to a transaction, where the customer ‘buys’ your solution.

By contrast, business development is much broader. To develop a business, you have to create solutions to the problems or pains that are sufficiently common in the marketplace for you to build a viable business. Then you have to figure out how to take that offer to the marketplace and generate results.

Business development encompasses:

• Your offer: Creating the solution you have or the reason your business exists. Move on over to Chapter 5 for more on your offer.
• Marketing: Making the market aware of your offer. Chapters 8 to 12 contain all you need to know about market...