Roadmap to Success "Find the right Business Development Strategy for your Business"

Roadmap to Success "Find the right Business Development Strategy for your Business"

What is business Development? Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships. The business developer is concerned with the analytical preparation of potential growth opportunities for the senior management or board of directors as well as the subsequent support and monitoring of its implementation. Both in the development phase and the implementation phase, the business developer collaborates and integrates the knowledge and feedback from the organization’s specialist functions. The business developers' tools to address the business development tasks are the business model answering, "how do we make money" and its analytical backup and roadmap for implementation, the business plan. Business development professionals frequently have had earlier experience in sales, financial services, investment banking or management consulting; although some find their route to this area by climbing the corporate ladder in functions such as operations management.

Importance of Business development strategy

Here are some reasons why having a business development strategy is important:

• A well-defined business development strategy will offer a guide on how your business is performing internally. Also, how you are performing against your competition and what you need to stay relevant into the future.
• The strategy can identify trends and opportunities in the future. It can examine the broader changes in market such as political, social or technological changes, as well as consumer changes, and can develop tactics so your business can modify and develop to suit these future changes.
• A business development strategy creates a vision and direction for the whole organization. It is important that all people within a company have clear goals and are following the direction, or mission of the organization. A strategy can provide this vision and prevent individuals from losing sight of their company’s aims.

Challenges of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is one area that businesses large and small should pursue to ensure that all employees are involved, especially in activities designed to achieve the company’s mission, vision, values and core strategies. Strategic planners face a number of challenges that they need to be alert to and prepared to overcome.

Engagement: A key challenge that strategic planners face is engaging the right people in the planning process. The words "strategic planning" can strike fear in even the most experienced businessperson, but small businesses are most at risk of avoiding this important task. It can help to avoid or minimize the business jargon and to clearly explain to those involved the benefits of the planning activities; primarily helping the business to focus on those activities most likely to generate success.

Consensus: Probably the most challenging aspect of strategic planning is people. Strategic planners face the need to get a large number of people with different backgrounds; interests and perspectives to agree on the direction the organization should take. Achieving consensus can be challenging, but fortunately there are a number of business tools that can be used from simple brainstorming, to mind mapping to nominal ranking.

Execution: The greatest challenge for strategic planners in any environment is execution, actually putting the plan in place. Too often so much effort and attention is focused on developing the plan that once it's developed the planning team feels that their work is through. But it is at this point when that the real work just begins. Actually achieving the goals, objectives, strategies and tactics in the plan is the point of the entire process, as effective strategic planners know.

Types of Business development strategies

Growth Strategy: A growth strategy entails introducing new products or adding new features to existing products. Sometimes, a small company may be forced to modify or increase its product line to keep up with competitors. Otherwise, customers may start using the new technology of a competitive company. A small company may also adopt a growth strategy by finding a new market for its products. Sometimes, companies find new markets for their products by accident.

Product Differentiation Strategy: Small companies will often use a product differentiation strategy when they have a competitive advantage, such as superior quality or service. Companies use a product differentiation strategy to set themselves apart from key competitors. However, a product differentiation strategy can also help a company build brand loyalty.

Price-Skimming Strategy: A price-skimming strategy involves charging high prices for a product, particularly during the introductory phase. A small company will use a price-skimming strategy to quickly recover its production and advertising costs. However, there must be something special about the product for consumers to pay the exorbitant price. One disadvantage of a price skimming is that it tends to attract competition relatively quickly, according to the Small Business Administration. Enterprising individuals may see the profits the company is reaping and produce their own products, provided they have the technological know-how.

Acquisition Strategy: A small company with extra capital may use an acquisition strategy to gain a competitive advantage. An acquisition strategy entails purchasing another company, or one or more product lines of that company.

Choosing Among Business Strategy Alternatives

Choosing the business strategy that's best for your business may be difficult but there are plenty of anecdotes about highly successful companies that stumbled into a successful business strategy. Many business owners stumble when it comes to culling a single business strategy from a short list of attractive strategic options. In reality, there are probably multiple strategies capable of delivering similar outcomes for your business.

Following are the ways to know if the choice taken is correct:

Competitive awareness: The first step in selecting a business strategy is to evaluate the strategies currently employed by rivals in the marketplace. There may be a valid reason why the rest of the industry has adopted a specific business strategy. But also sometimes doing something different can also be an option.

Ease of execution: Do your current resources and labor assets lend themselves to a smooth implementation process? Business strategies sometimes look good on paper but quickly lose their luster because the business owner underestimated the execution requirements.

Long-term outlook: A business strategy that delivers short-term results may not be the best option. Rather than focusing exclusively on short-term outcomes, you may want to choose a strategy that positions your business for sustained, long-term growth.

Employee buy-in: Employee buy-in is an important consideration in business strategy selection.  When the workforce feels personally invested in the strategy selection process, they become incentivized to see it through to completion. And due to this it is easy to implement the strategy in the company.

Strategy blending. 

It's perfectly acceptable to combine the strengths of several viable business strategies into a single, blended business strategy. Sometime an error can occur due to blending different strategies together but a professional person can do the blending effortlessly by creating a hybrid of the best strategies together by taking the elements, which work for each strategies.

Six steps to develop effective construct a business development strategic planning

• Determine Your Objective
• Perform a SWOT analysis
• Analyze the Current Market
• Develop a Strategy and Tactics
• Monitor the Results
• Plan the Growth

Effective Business Development Strategies to get started

1. Market Research: Performing market research is highly important in order to understand your company current position and determine where it is headed. Perform research about the industry you are in, the geographical area you cover and the market segment you are targeting.

2. Enhancing the Public image: This strategy addresses the company’s image and how it is perceived by the different stakeholders, the company is a brand, and like any brand, you cannot control the way perceive it, however you can only try to influence your audience perception.

3     Increasing market exposure: Develop your company presence over different social media platforms; ensure you choose your platforms according to your target audience (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)

Develop content to post on your different social media platforms, such as (Press releases, Success stories, case studies, promotional videos, ongoing training activities, testimonials, etc.) Increase your online exposure by applying search engine optimization techniques to enhance your online visibility.