Figuring out a Good Business Development Strategy

Business development strategies are formed so that a business is able to determine how best to allocate its resources when developing a business plan and figuring out when to invest its limited funds. The basic elements of a business development strategy can be developed by looking at the seven basic questions: who, what, were, when, which, why, and how.

Who is the target audience?

What will be sold to the target audience?

Where is the target audience?

When will they be approached?

Which employees are appropriate to approach these particular customers?

Why would they want to meet with and ultimately buy from the company developing the business development strategy instead of the competition?

How will the company reach their target audience?

Drafting effective business development strategies becomes less complicated if regular account reviews are conducted among key accounts on an on-going basis. Regular account reviews should indicate that 80 percent of a company's business should come from existing customers, with 80 percent of that revenue coming from just 20 percent of those customers.

This breakdown, which is known as the Pareto Principle, will allow a company to determine how much marketing time, effort, and money should be dedicated to growing new business. Ideally, this number will be around 20 percent of the total selling time.

One effective business development strategy involves growing an existing account by working upwards, downwards, and sideways, since it takes more effort to develop a new relation

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