What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:

• Have the core demographic changed?
• Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc) 
• Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
• Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources? 
• Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
• Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent? 
• Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

• Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
• Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
• Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
• Attract new customers and partners
• Brand advocates

The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.