All you need to know about business development! 2022

 All you need to know about business development! 2022

Business development, a term that is often not clear enough, gets mixed up with sales development!

What is the correct concept of business development? What are the responsibilities of a business developer? What is the difference between it and sales development?

One of the biggest challenges a startup founder faces is to keep his company growing! Business development has many different factors that define what it is, so you may hear this term have many definitions, varying by company, people and processes.

So, let's explain it to you:

What does business development mean?

Business development is the art of identifying opportunities and transforming them into actual business, and implementing multiple strategies aimed at growth and creating long-term value for all aspects of the company, such as customers, markets and relationships.

Business development covers everything you can do to develop your startup. This will include selling, marketing, developing and implementing strategies for your startup. The bottom line is that if you can prove one of the following points, you'll be able to have the strength to get you started:

- You can make money for the company

- Save money and expenses

The growth of the project has been achieved in several aspects

You can improve their current product.

Main aspects of business development:

1- Networking:

Networking is a very important aspect of business development, the main task of which is to build relationships with existing partners and create new ones. It is also important to communicate with influential individuals in your field constantly, through face-to-face meetings or hosting your own meeting.

2- relationships

The strength of business development rests on the foundation of strong relationships. Building, managing and benefiting from relationships based on trust, respect and mutual appreciation within and outside the organization is essential to enabling long-term development.

3- Markets

The role of business development for markets comes in the ability to open new markets for companies, by studying the needs of markets and creating demand for their products, and the correct targeting of the market that is determined by geographical data, demographics, lifestyles, and buying mentality.

4- Target customers - Cutomers

This is the most important aspect of business development. Customers are the people who pay you for your products and services, and without them you wouldn't have any business to develop.

As a business developer, you must identify the most valuable customer for your business, target them in the right ways, and develop on existing targeting strategies to reach them with your product and establish your brand image in their minds.

Now let's find out exactly what a business developer does.

What are the tasks of a business developer?

There is one primary responsibility to business development, and that is to grow your business! , The strategies to activate and achieve this goal will differ for different companies, but the idea remains the same in general for all companies.

The most important tasks required of a business developer:

1- Follow up and seize growth opportunities for the project

Via:

Analyzing new market opportunities

Target customer analysis

Comprehensive analysis of competitors, strengths and weaknesses

Studying the market share of the company

2- Follow up on market developments and business methodologies

3- Planning and preparing presentations for the development plan

4- Development on existing products

5- Developing the company's human resources.

6- Deliver products to the most efficient and potential customers

7- Supervising the development of marketing strategies

8- Writing reports on developments

9- Providing feedback to management

How do business developers qualify potential clients?

Each company has a target audience they want to reach – in other words, they have an ideal potential customer they want to sell to. Often this depends on what your current customer base looks like and is determined using a customer-persona profile.

One of the most popular customer onboarding frameworks for business developers is the BANT framework, which means:

• Budget: Does the potential client have sufficient resources and budget to purchase/invest?
• Authority: Is this potential customer the ultimate decision maker?
• Needs: What are the biggest problems this potential customer is looking to solve with my product?
•  TimeLine: When are they likely to buy?

The BANT Client Qualification Framework is one of the necessary tools that helps the business developer to reach the highest quality clients according to the standards commensurate with the company. It also ensures that each sales opportunity that is prepared has a higher probability of closing and will move down the conversion funnel more quickly.

What is the difference between business development and sales development?

These two concepts may be mixed a lot, because both of them lead to an increase in sales, although both of them aim to develop and develop the project, but the two roles differ greatly, which can be clarified in the following:

The role of business developers:

Qualify potential customers down the sales funnel, and move closer to the purchase, without closing the deal themselves.

So here comes the role of sales professionals:

The primary function of the sales team is to generate revenue, by demonstrating the product, conducting negotiations, and following up on and closing purchases.

Many business development teams operate as a subset of the sales department, and similar metrics are adhered to.

Where does the role of marketing in business development come from?

The main responsibility of marketing is to promote the brand and establish its presence in the market, through various communication strategies, such as content marketing, advertising, public relations and others. It is measured by various measurement indicators.

However, the main marketing metric that it relates to business development is lead generation.

The business developer team relies on marketing to generate high quality leads, while the marketing team expects business developers to grow these customers and qualify them to turn into sales opportunities. Thus, the two teams complement each other in alignment with the sales team in order for the growth to materialize and the project to develop.

Business development, people development!

What if your growth as a person actually made your company better? And what if your company's thriving presence requires you to be aware of your weaknesses and instability in your business?

Developing personal skills is as important as developing business, and it can be said that they are basically one! Because in the end the person who develops first is the person who will develop the business tasks, to come up with the concept of business development.

Invest in your team, constantly develop your skills and their skills, and you will see that your project grows with you in parallel.

Conclusion:

There is no one-size-fits-all definition of business development. However, knowing the basics is the first step in understanding exactly what a business developer team does, and how it all fits into the big picture of a growing organization.

If you are a founder of a startup, and you are looking to grow your business, you need to develop your network first, then your target market, your potential customer base, as well as your relationships and investment in your team skills and personal skills. All of this will lead to the development of your project and achieve higher sales.