Business development: 7 examples of high-impact strategies
If you want your business to prosper, there's no secret about it: business development is essential to keep your beautiful ship afloat.
Yes, but there's more to it than that. You've got your sights set on the great outdoors: increasing your turnover, pumping up your growth, setting sail for new markets, conquering a wider customer base, and so on. In short, you're aiming high!
But first, what exactly do we mean by business development? Who in the company is involved?
Without looking for a standard procedure or a magic recipe, start by taking inspiration from winning strategies, ideas that you can apply in your own business.
Because there is no single way of developing sales, it depends on your own context, your objectives, the market in which you operate...
Always higher, always further, always stronger? You've got a bet! Let's see how you can put this plan into action. ⚡️
First of all, what is business development?
Definition of business development
First things first. To understand exactly what we mean by business development, let's look at its definition.
Business development encompasses several facets of a process designed to ensure stable and sustainable growth in a company's sales. Effective business development is essential to sustaining your business, whatever it may be.
It is a set of strategies, methodologies and tools used to generate sales on a regular and sustainable basis, which include :
- sales strategy
- sales prospecting
- lead generation
- sales cycle management
- customer loyalty, etc.
So you can imagine that the field is vast!
💡 Sales development objectives will be translated into the implementation of a Sales Action Plan (SAP), which provides the sales team with a medium- and long-term vision, and enables the company to be viable.
Alignment with marketing
The sales process can only prosper if it is supported by a solid marketing strategy. The construction of a marketing plan will ensure the generation of qualified leads on which sales staff can draw to close deals.
While prospecting is of course part of sales development, it has been proven that :
Companies are 70% more likely to see their sales grow over time if their sales and marketing teams work effectively together.
➡️ ️ To support your company's commercial development, marketing, communications and sales need to work together to build a coherent offering, raise awareness of your brand and assert your value proposition to your targets. Let's hear it!
Who is a business development manager?
The people in charge of business development occupy different roles, depending on the size of the company and the way its departments are organised. As the process is broad, it encompasses several professions and sometimes combines sales and marketing.
Development professionals may have the following titles:
- Development manager, Sales development representative, Business development representative,
- Commercial, Business developer,
- Account manager, Customer success executive,
- Sales director, Development director, Head of sales.
The objectives pursued by the development professional contribute to increasing the company's overall growth by taking action, for example launching a new product or expanding into a particular priority market.
While the Sales Director provides the vision and direction, the Development Manager implements the strategy in coordination with the company's various departments. He or she may be required to structure and lead a team of sales representatives to pursue sales initiatives.
These actions may involve, for example, extending prospecting to new targets or winning new contracts from existing customers.
What is the purpose of a business development strategy?
The business development strategy will be used to list all the commercial actions to be taken in order to :
- start up a business
- ensure long-term development,
- become established in your target market
- stand out from the competition, etc.
Once your target (or ideal customer) has been determined, this strategy is generally broken down into four major areas:
- your offer: the products and services you sell to your ideal customer,
- your pricing model: at what price you want to sell them,
- your positioning: where you want to be in the market,
- the promotional strategy and communication plan: to reach your buyers.
Your strategy may well be aimed at the moon (and we hope you have lofty ambitions! 🤩 ), but it must remain concrete and realistic.
This means matching it with SMART objectives, as well as commercial performance indicators (KPIs). It is deployed over several years and remains a course for carrying out actions and informing decision-making.
💡 Market research is a very useful tool for getting your business on the right track, by providing you with in-depth knowledge of the market in which you aspire to launch or grow.
7 examples of winning business development strategies
Example no. 1: mastering your unique offering
You have an offer that works relatively well. Why not stick with it and perfect it rather than diversifying your catalogue? This can be a winning approach if you concentrate your efforts on mastering it perfectly.
💡 To do this, involve your product development team: together, design exactly the product or service your customers dream of. You'll increase the added value of your offering compared with the competition! And your sales team can be more effective if they focus on a single, well thought-out sales process.
Example no. 2: Targeting niche markets
Faced with tough competition in a market with many players already in place, an effective strategy may be to target a very specific segment. Your sales, canvassing, content marketing, etc. initiatives focus on the problems faced by this particular niche target, and your solution is tailored to meet them.
💡 To do this, choose a strategic segment for you rather than tackling the whole market. Your value proposition will be all the more relevant in the eyes of your target audience if you have mastered your speciality. A word of caution though: make sure your niche is viable before you launch!
Example no. 3: Focus on innovation
Setting up a genuine innovation strategy can be a lever for expanding your business. You choose to stand out from the crowd: create a competitive advantage to create value while affirming your brand's culture of innovation.
You can choose between several types of innovation:
- incremental, which involves adding new functionalities to your product or service ;
- customer experience, which involves taking an innovative approach to enhancing the customer experience;
- adjacent, which consists of giving your product or service a functionality that already exists in another market;
- marketing, which will focus on an innovative approach to promoting your offering.
💡 To avoid failing to create an innovation, market research will once again be your ally!
Example no. 4: focus on key accounts
Large companies can offer significant growth potential, helping to generate a large proportion of sales. One of the advantages is that you can concentrate on a smaller number of high added-value customers. Yes, because the budgets of large organisations allow them access to more expensive solutions.
💡 To achieve this, you can implement an Account Based Marketing strategy to canvass and take care of your key accounts, while formulating an offer that is as close as possible to their needs. If you want to move fast, this may not be for you: the decision-making and purchasing processes are relatively long.
Example no. 5: opt for freemium
The freemium model is a strategy commonly used by SaaS players. The idea is to offer a free service to a broad target audience in order to attract a large number of users, with the hope of later selling a more complete, paying version to a certain number of them.
The objective set is to convince freemium customers to pay foraccess to benefits, such as a better user experience, more powerful features, personalised customer support, etc. that perfectly match their expectations.
💡 A strategy that can prove highly effective and generate an attractive ROI when costs are kept under control and users hold no secrets for you.
Example no. 6: offering more value to existing customers
In some cases, your customer database is rich enough to be able to extract the right information from it. Try to sound out their needs so that you can delight them even more with your offer. If you listen to them, try to find out exactly what issues they're facing, they can be the guiding light for your sales strategy.
💡 Once you've detected a strong need, create a solution that complements your existing offering, to generate maximum revenue from your current accounts.
Example no. 7: forging strategic partnerships
It can be a good idea to forge relationships with other companies to create interesting synergies. For example, by enabling you to enter a market with the same target audience, where you can maximise the impact of your joint efforts. Or by enabling you to take action to conquer new markets. Or by developing new strengths. A real virtuous circle can be set in motion!
💡 The choice of organisations with which to partner will be decisive, and you should also think about the brand image you are going to convey through each partnership.
Business development tools: it's your turn to perform!
If these examples have inspired you, you're probably determined to take action. Would you like to give your sales team a gift? Then why not give them the means to boost their productivity and efficiency... and their motivation at the same time!
Can you see us coming? 😏 There are many tools available to help you put your sales development strategy into motion. We're thinking, for example, of :
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): for managing all your interactions with your customers and prospects on a single interface, centralising their data and providing features for automating sales tasks;
- Sales Automation: to automate the sales pipeline and boost the efficiency of your sales force by giving them everything they need to accelerate your sales development;
- Lead Generation: to strengthen your sales prospecting and marketing campaigns, and multiply your sales opportunities.
We've selected two particularly powerful tools that are well worth a closer look. See for yourself:
Pipedrive, your scalability ally
CRM software designed to increase your sales and grow with you? That's precisely what Pipedrive promises: it's very easy to use, and offers you a whole range of tools to accelerate your sales development and think big!
You'll benefit from a range of sales-focused features, such as efficient pipeline tracking thanks to an optimised view, workflow automation, numerous integrations and powerful lead generation tools. As an added bonus, the tool is flexible and scalable to support your growth.
Don't hesitate to try it out - it's free for 14 days! 🤩
Webmecanik Pipeline, efficiency with simplicity
How about a CRM that's as powerful as it is easy to learn? That's exactly what Webmecanik offers with its Webmecanik Pipeline software. It's incredibly effective, with comprehensive features that let you manage your customers, prospects and sales.
But that's not all! For ambitious teams, Webmecanik Pipeline connects to Webmecanik automation to help you become more efficient in your sales development: you can boost the performance of your marketing actions, boost your campaigns and generate more qualified leads.
And with all that, it's French and completely free. Why didn't you say so sooner?
👉 And if you want to find out more, discover other sales support tools in our dedicated article.
Let's summarise!
In the end, there are perhaps as many sales development strategies as there are companies ? Bear in mind that the best strategy is the one that allows you to achieve the best possible profitability over a given period with your current and potential resources. So test, adjust and find your own!
Of course, the tools are no substitute for a good strategy, but they will help you greatly to put it into practice... and even to evaluate and monitor the progress of your action plan thanks to the dashboards included. So, once your team is well equipped, don't hesitate to set ambitious goals to climb your next peaks! 🚀
Article translated from French