Business development (BD) has emerged over the past decade as an essential tool for long-term success in business. It works alongside sales, incorporating marketing and customer service to deliver new clients and business opportunities to help drive business growth and profitability.

In a broader sense, a business development strategy looks at ideas, initiatives and the activities undertaken by your company to build a better business for the future. At the end of the day, longevity should be at the heart of every business, and BD is your strategy to reach it.

You can’t develop and grow a business for the future if you don’t know who your customers are, their pain points, frustrations and goals. Customers are the lifeblood of business and BD means knowing your customers better than they know themselves.

Markets are all about understanding your own business and making decisions for growth based on either geographical or psychographic data. Should you launch a new product? Should you expand in a certain state or country? Is there a type of person you’re attracting to your business but you’re missing the sale because you can’t cater to their needs? All of these are decided by understanding your business and understanding the market you operate in.

The final pillar of successful business development is relationships. A business development manager should be the head-honcho of corporate relationships. It’s their role to identify key relationships which benefit both parties and are an avenue for further growth and profitability.

The combination of these three pillars is essential for a successful business development plan. BD will not only help you grow your sales and revenue, but it also helps effectively target your marketing and raise your customer service.

Businesses of all sizes are always looking for ways to improve, increase that bottom line and work more efficiently, it’s what business development is all about. Automation is spoken about a lot in marketing and sales circles but on the surface that just sounds like a car making robot or the swinging bird that presses the Y button for Homer when he gets fat (Simpsons reference for those unfamiliar).

In reality, automation is as simple as sending a thank you email once a form has been submitted or using a live chatbot with pre-determined questions and responses to qualify leads that come to your website.

Automation as part of your sales enablement plan can transform your team from wooden spooners to looking like the 96’ Chicago Bulls. For those non-sport fans, 96’ Bulls are arguably the greatest NBA team ever assembled, including Michael Jordan, Pippen and Rodman, but that’s not important now. What’s important is setting your team up to succeed so at least they’ll look organised, efficient and personable through automation.

I’ve mentioned before how automation doesn’t have to be complex, it’s about arming your customers with the tools they need at every step of the buyer’s journey to proceed without you holding their hand.

Let’s say in your sales pipeline you have a stage called “Closing the deal”, this is when things start to heat up. You’ve got a potential customer drawn in, the last thing you want to do is have the workload of your sales team affect the time it takes to send a quote out. Leave it too long and people move on, lose interest or find another solution. A quick hack once a deal reaches this stage is to set up an automation to grab the deal and contact information from your CRM and auto-populate the quote. You can even have it send the quote and have them sign online. No-fuss, no salesperson delaying the deal because they were late back from lunch and you’ll have a potential customer who has been armed with the tools they need to make a purchase.

If you’re interested in learning more about automation in sales or want some quick hacks for your own pipeline, check out our article below.

If your marketing team is good at what they do, a salesperson won’t necessarily need to get out there and find sales leads. However, a sales team who are serious about hitting their targets need a few tricks up their sleeves to ensure they are getting the right leads rolling in.

Sales don’t need to get out there on a microphone spruiking a deal, you don’t need to be designing billboards or cold calling, here are two of our favourite simple ways to generate sales leads.

These aren’t going to flood your inbox with leads each and every month but think about the opportunities and sales you are missing if you’re not willing to try them out. If you’re a salesperson serious about hitting your goals, have a read of our article “Ideas for Generating Sales Leads” and start implementing these simple tricks for more leads.

Lead nurturing is the process of drip-feeding potential leads information and content to keep your service front of mind while providing solutions to their problem. By feeding an interested lead content, you prove that you’re an authority on the topic, you help solve their problems and you show them that if they have questions, you have answers.

Not everyone is ready to purchase the moment they find your service so you need to be patient. By setting up some lead nurturing sequences you can ensure you’re providing value to your customer without being too in their face.

Here’s our list of tips and tricks to effective lead nurturing in sales:

1. Get the timing right
2. Ensure the content is relevant and answers their questions
3. Offer variety in content
4. Personalise it
5. Your nurturing end goal is always to end up closing the deal
6. Give them a way to convert in every email.

By following these tips and tricks every time you set up a sales lead nurturing sequence you’ll be giving your sales team the best opportunity to convert. By arming leads with the tools and knowledge they need to make a purchase, you’re giving yourself the best shot possible.

To dive a little deeper into setting up your own sequences, check out our article “See More Sales With a Little Lead Nurturing”.

A big factor in hitting your sales targets each and every month is how you set them. Too ambitious and the pain of not hitting them every month could be deflating to a team, too reachable and you’re just letting your sales team coast every month.

How do you set effective sales targets that your sales team have a chance of hitting every month? A quality sales target should have these characteristics;

1. Set SMART Goals. Not sure what that is? Learn more about SMART goals here
2. They are relevant to you, your team and business
3. Your goals are known and understood by everyone4
4. They’re monitored and tracked
5. Revise them constantly
6. Base your goals off real data
7. Partner them up with a real reward

When setting your teams goals, ensure they are SMART goals and use our list above to ensure you’re giving your sales team every opportunity to push themselves and reach their sales targets. If you need more details on each of the characteristics above, read our article “7 Essentials to Setting Sales Targets Your Team Can Hit”.

Thankfully, the way consumers are purchasing has changed so the way you sell should be adapting. The decision to purchase has been made long before a customer reaches out to the brand so it’s now up to the businesses and salespeople to prove how they can help the customer.
Here’s a quick rundown of a few little techniques we like to use when closing the deal.

1. Give them a free trial or demo, where possible
This has become a key player in the software and IT world with seven day free trials all the rage across silicon valley. Nobody wants to part with their hard-earned dollars not knowing if a product or service is a good fit.

2. Give it a sense of urgency
A sense of urgency puts the ball in the customers’ court and allows you to focus on more deals rather than getting pushy and calling non-stop. We’re all victims to FOMO (fear of missing out) so if an opportunity is passing us by, we’re more likely to grab it with both hands.

3. Over-offer, then pull back
We’re big on ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ at Neighbourhood. Providing extra little tips and tricks to make your job easier is a favourite past time of Trav’s, just get him on the phone and you’ll leave with an abundance of extras you didn’t know about. Over-offering simply means offer the Rolls-Royce of packages with everything they need and if the price is an issue, slowly drop the price and if needed features until you find a happy middle ground.

4. Address what is preventing your customer from committing
This is our favourite of the lot. Really find the painpoint of your opportunities and address them. It may take a bit of digging to really find the issue but once you do, solve it for them and they will be more likely to purchase.

Adapt the way you sell to the way customers purchase and you’ll have much more success when closing sales. Throw out the old closing techniques of pushing your service on them and start helping them solve the issues they are coming to you to solve.

If you’re interested in learning about closing more deals for your business, have a more in-depth look at “Our Top 4 Sales Closing Techniques” or get in touch today.