BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

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When business struggle to increase sales, expand to new markets, partner with other companies or organizations to improve profitability, they involve their teams in business development. This process applies to all departments: from marketing to sales, product to project management. Goals can include revenue growth, expansion to new markets, strategic partnerships, and more. Business development helps companies reach their targets based on the plan and under a specified budget.

To improve profitability, conclude a profitable partnership, and reach new locations, a business development should have a customer profile, market opportunities, sources of revenue, state of the industry, opportunities for business expansion, and other vital information.

A business development process is the combination of steps your business takes to grow effectively, boost revenue, improve relationships with leads, and more. These steps are what your business development team will work on every day. It includes everything related to delighting customers along each part of the buyer's journey.By working through your business development process, your team will have a strong understanding of your organization-wide goals, sales targets, current business situation, who your target audience members are, and more 

 1. Conduct extensive market research
Successful business development rests, in large part, on you understanding your market and target personas.Study and survey your current customers to see who tends to buy from you. Look into your competition to get a feel for where you fit into your broader market.

2. Raise visibility and awareness
Actions like constructing an effective website, investing in paid advertising, building social profiles, participating in co-marketing partnerships with industry peers, and maintaining an active blog can all go a long way in supporting successful business development.

3. Promote thought leadership.
Publishing in-depth, industry-specific blog content is one way to grasp on every aspect of field, you can frame yourself as a reliable, knowledgeable resource for your customers. That kind of trust often translates to sales, down the line. Other media like webinars, white papers, and video content can also help case.

4. Conduct outreach
This step is typically supported by extensive research on individual prospects, paired with contacting warm and cold leads proactively but not aggressively.

5. Qualify lead
BDRs have connected with leads, they need to qualify them to determine their viability and understand whether they're worth the sales org's time and effort.This is one of the most important part in the business development process — in some respects, it could be considered its last step. Successfully executing this point typically means the process, as a whole, has worked.

6. Provide exemplary customer service
Business development is an ongoing process that involves virtually every side of your business in some capacity and customer service is no exception. Service org needs to keep current customers happy to generate positive word of mouth and bolster your company's reputation.

7. Develop sales content from success stories
Another part of business development is translating customer satisfaction into actionable, promotable sales content — pointed, product-specific content that's used to generate sales. While marketing content is used for thought leadership and garnering general interest, sales content is used to appeal to potential buyers, looking into your company specifically.

When it comes to organizational growth, business development acts as the thread that ties together all of a company's functions or departments, helping a business expand and improve its sales, revenues, product offerings, talent, customer service and brand awareness. Four factors that influence the importance of business development are:-

It builds important relationships:-Connecting with clients, colleagues and other members of one's network can be fundamental to identifying new business opportunities, generating leads and making critical hires. And, strengthening existing relationships will help deliver repeat customers.

Boosting revenue and lowering:-Key to the business development process strategies to help increase the amount of money that's coming into an organization, while making sure less money is going out. Focusing on business development can help an organization identify which markets and products have the most profit potential, and which deals to chase first.

It can help improve the company's overall image:-A business developer can work closely with the marketing team to develop campaigns that solidify the company's target audience and reach new customers and markets. A significant aspect of business development understands the inner workings of a company's products and services, as well as its customers.

It may open up expansion into new markets:-By analyzing demographics and customer data, a business developer can find ways to enter these markets and access new segments of customers.