5 Best Practices in Business Development Success

What is business development?

Business development is the activity of pursuing strategic opportunities for your business by cultivating partnerships and other commercial relationships, or identifying new markets for your products or services.

Business development focuses on creating long-term sustained value for your organization, which translates into new markets, products, and processes.

Using business development strategies can help you create a long term value or positive image for your company in the minds of customers, stakeholders, and markets. It’s all about identifying these interconnected networks which in turn create new opportunities for growing your company.

Take a look at five best practices that can make your business development efforts a success:

1. Know the difference between business development and sales. Make sure you identify and create partnerships that will leverage revenue and distribution or that enhance your product. This is different from sales where the focus is almost exclusively on driving revenue.

2. Focus on quantitative, not qualitative aspects. Building a business focusing on a qualitative value proposition is difficult and has a higher likelihood of failure. A quantitative value—lower costs, more customers—on the other hand, can dramatically increase your odds of success.

3. Assess your opportunities. Make sure everyone you’re working with understands why a deal makes sense for your company. Does this deal drive revenue or does it help the company enter a new market? The goal needs to be clear and measurable.

4. Make careful deals. There is a significant difference between doing deals and doing the right deals.

5. Get legal counsel. A legal agreement should include commercial terms that stipulate what happens if things don’t work out. This requires a legal counsel that will assess business opportunity versus risk and explain the tradeoffs.

Assessing your business development strategies and following these guidelines will help keep your company on the right track to success.

To know more click on the link: https://www.meirc.com/training-courses/marketing-sales/certified-business-development-professional

George R. Khayat

Partner

Mr. George Khayat is a partner with Meirc Training & Consulting. He holds a bachelor of science in management from the Lebanese American University, a master in marketing and communication from ESCP-EAP University in France, and is currently completing a master of science in management from St. Joseph University in Beirut. George is a certified marketing analyst (The Graduate Board of Management, USA), a chartered marketer (Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK), a certified Lego® Serious Play® method facilitator, and a certified sales professional (Sales Training International, USA). He is also certified in Action Selling® (USA) and Guerrilla Marketing (Australia).

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