Maximising B2B business development efforts when you’re not a salesperson
Something I’m really uncomfortable with having run a business development agency, is the idea of ‘natural born salespeople’. It implies that you can somehow be disadvantaged in executing good business development activity from birth. The whole nature and nurture debate in a macro context of generating new business needs to be retired. Anyone can implement a brilliant BD strategy to win revenue. We’ve seen it done brilliantly in many different ways by many different people. As with so many of the strategic plans and processes that we implement for our clients, it’s about creating and investing in a business development system you can trust. Give me a system that works over a single ‘natural born salesperson’. Why? The first thing is leverage, with an excellent business development system and process you can scale your sales team quickly and efficiently, bringing each member up to operational autonomy faster. You develop the system and it leverages 1,2, 10…100 salespeople to fill your pipeline with new business opportunities.
Accelerate new business opportunities: establish the value proposition
Whenever we take on business development consultancy work we look to establish what the value proposition is. One of our favourite tools you can use is the Value Proposition Canvas from Strategyzer. What we would look to establish from the very start is why your customers will want to buy your product or service, and what value does it create for them? If we can establish the answer to this question, we know two things: who the customer is and what will motivate them to buy.
What is your hook: articulate your value proposition
When we know the customer and we know why they’ll buy your product, the next step we’d take would be to help you articulate your value proposition as succinctly as possible but with as much impact as possible. This forms the narrative within which you want your product or service to be considered. For example - your customers are ecommerce retailers and your stock management platform reduces overstock and protects their margin? We need them to think about how painful holding on to stock can be and how important profit is to them - this is setting the narrative. Your product or service helps them solve it. A big part of establishing the narrative comes with working on your brand and understanding the impact it has on your business performance.
Reaching your target audience: get out there
Not literally, but figuratively speaking, you need to get your message out there. You know who you want to talk to and you know what you want to say, so part of our role is to establish which channels you can use to market your product or services to reach your ideal customers. Again, there’s lots of advice and content out there on how you can reach your target audience. Our top tip: make sure you measure the results of what you are doing. You will be familiar with the term ROI (return on investment) - if you don’t know what the return is, you can’t justify the investment you put in be it money, time or effort.
Generating new business leads with an effective marketing strategy
We consider effective marketing as one of the key components of good business development. Leads from lead generation activities offer one of the most important performance indicators, certainly one of the most tangible. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking loads of marketing leads are a good thing. They can be, but give me fewer high quality leads over loads of weak ones any day. Generating leads can be achieved in lots of different ways - ranging from lead magnets like downloads where you capture data from the prospect, through to telemarketing campaigns. The key takeaway for any new business activity is you need to know what constitutes a ‘good lead’. Ask yourself what are the things that make it more likely the lead will buy from you. One of the tools we’ve installed for a number of our clients is Hubspot, and they have a lovely post about lead scoring that you can use to help develop a clear articulation of what is a good new business lead for you.
Map your sales pipeline
We’ve done lots of work for our business development clients on mapping the customer journey. It’s important to understand what the pathway to buying your product or service looks like. Part of the journey happens before they connect with you, but your sales pipeline structure should map what the journey looks like after they’ve engaged with you - via your marketing, or if they came to you organically. You need to think about the key steps from first engagement to completing purchase. Perhaps your SAAS product needs a demo, then a scoping / discovery meeting, then a quote, then some negotiation on price, before you can draw up a contract that they can sign. Each of these points become stages on your pipeline and a big part of our role as a business development agency has been to help our clients install CRM (customer relationship management) systems to manage their sales pipeline.
Nail your new business development process
This is where the really important bit for non-sales people comes in - get your process mapped out for how you take your customer through the sales pipeline stages. Think about what you need from your client and what your client needs from you to move from one stage to the next. Looking at the SAAS example, you can’t run a demo if you’ve not got a calendar invite sent and accepted. Nor can you run an effective scoping call if you haven’t sent an agenda, meeting plan and required outcomes list. For each stage of your sales pipeline there are hygiene points - things that have to happen. If you work out what these are, when they have to happen, and how you can make them happen you’ll have designed yourself the initial business development process for you to follow, refine and improve. Plus it gives your salespeople (if you have them or plan to hire them) the framework they need to start selling effectively as quickly as possible.
