We always think about business development as a revenue booster strategy. However, this is not the primary goal of a business development strategy.

Business Development focuses on pursuing strategic opportunities to cultivate commercial relationships and identifying new markets for your products or services.

Business Development Strategy

There are four basic steps for creating a business development strategy for your small or medium-sized organization.

a. Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your audience is the key to your business development. Always prefer quality over quantity. It is not necessary to have a large audience, but a high-performing one always is. Identifying your target audience can save a lot of your time. You may waste your time fostering a relationship with an unqualified prospect who will never close the deal.

b. Conduct Market Research

You must learn about your audience before encouraging them to work with you. Get the answers to the following questions to know your audience well.

• What are the primary challenges your audience is facing?
• What are the services they are looking for?
• What is their current problem-solving approach?
• What benefit can your product offer them?

These questions will help you get to know more about your market.

c. Figure Out The Appropriate Channels

The next step is to set up an action plan which you will follow throughout your journey or at least for the upcoming year. Outline the channels you will be using to achieve your goals. You should assess your yearly revenue goal and how you will achieve those goals.

d. Define SMART Goals

You should set SMART ((specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-related) goals for all the channels. It will allow you to track and measure your progress. It is possible that your primary business development goal may not be to generate profit or revenue, but there should be a component aiming to introduce new prospects to the sales funnel.

5 Practical Business Development Ideas

Business development ideas are practical tactics that will help you identify qualified prospects, network more effectively, improve your brand awareness, and uncover new opportunities. This is how SSDC helped a Medical Device Company lift its sales by $10M in two years by identifying new market opportunities.

1. Innovate Your Networking Ways

It is no longer a secret that cold calls have become less effective compared to the previous time. You should look forward to some new ways to establish a connection with your potential clients. You can host local business events to give your business a boost initially.

Social Media is another great platform to connect with your prospects. You can use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to reach your customers. Create a good connection before you pitch your ideas or sales proposal.

2. Offer Consultations

Provide consultations and assessments to your prospects. You can create videos telling how your product works. Tell them how your products or services will fulfill their needs. It can help your prospects decide whether to convert or not.

Furthermore, this process will allow you to analyze if the target prospect is an ideal candidate or not. Analyzing unhealthy prospects is equally valuable as it prevents you from wasting your time nurturing them.

3. Nurture With Personalized Demos

Whether you are nurturing your clients with phone calls, emails, meetings, or any other mode of communication, it is important that you establish a personalized connection.

For instance, while providing your specific lead with a sales demo on how your product works, you should specifically target them and tell them how your product will benefit them in particular.

Ensure with your customized demos that your product will solve their challenges. This personalized approach will not only encourage them to convert but will also improve your brand awareness.

For example, you are assisting students with their academics and helping them understand their courses. You should create separate demos for the students of different levels and different fields. Offering specific Dissertation Assistance for the Healthcare field and telling them how it will impact their academic performance will boost your revenue and help you achieve your goals.

4. Provide Prospects Several Ways To Engage With You

Being an owner of a small business, you cannot simply put your advertisements on the billboards and pay a lot of money to digital platforms to showcase your brand.

But you can try to engage your prospects with your brand by providing them with several types of content.

All you need is to keep reminding them about your brand through different platforms and content. You can use blogs, videos, emails, and social media posts to connect with your potential customers. You can also divide your prospects based on their interest and meet them with your content where they love to spend time.

5. Never Miss On Your Marketing Content

Alongside nurturing your leads and providing them with regular content to improve your brand awareness, it is important to continue with your marketing strategies. Never miss out on email campaigns, social media posts, or cold calling, depending upon your product. Make sure to leverage Instagram and Facebook.

Invest in your website, where you can write about your products and services. Your website is your first impression, and you should never compromise on that. Make your website visually engaging and connect your social media profile to it. Optimize your website for search engines, and you can even go for a PPC campaign to boost revenue and brand awareness.

While Summing Up

Business development is not only about increasing your revenue. It is about growing your business and improving your brand awareness. It is more about connecting with new customers. Before you start, take your time to create a business development strategy to identify your audience, market, goals, and channels.

Once you have identified these four aspects, move towards nurturing your potential leads to be your regular customers. Focus on your marketing content and create an engaging website.

I hope that this article has provided you with some helpful knowledge about business development for small and medium-sized business owners. Wishing you the best of luck with your business growth.

Author Bio

Claudia Jeffrey is currently working as an Editor at Crowd Writer. She often blogs at Word Count Jet. Claudia loves to travel, and in her leisure time, she tries new recipes and Italian cuisine.