THE NINE PILLARS OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT COLLABORATION
1. Business Development:
Business development (the creation of long-term value) is an organizational missive, not an individual one. Decide that, as an organization, you will empower your employees, strategic partners and business colleagues by leveraging their combined networks of influence to grow your business and your organization.
2. Networks of Influence (NOI):
Popular business social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter offer the powerful potential to understand the relationships between an organization’s employees and its prospects. Effective NOI analysis can enable a company to request warm, trusted introductions into prospects.
3. Community of Influence (COI):
Face-to-face interaction remains crucial to business development success. However, the internet and mobility have eliminated prospects’ need for such communication in many stages of the sales process. Thus, our reliance on communities, such as non-profits, charities, and associations, is more important to bringing people closer to together than ever before. Understanding and cultivating (e.g., by encouraging volunteerism and board leadership) your organization’s COI will increase both influence and new business opportunities over time.
4. Prospect Analytic Services (PAS):
Leveraging relationship-building activities such as NOI and COI will increase the potential entry points into a number of prospect organizations. Utilizing the Prospect Analytic Services (PAS) offering provides a powerful solution for prospecting. Use PAS as a business development management tool as you pursue; prospect companies, their employees, websites, social media profiles, work history, community engagement and more.
5. Event Engagement Influence (EEI):
Pre-event, At-the-Event and Post-Event action plans should be foundational to your event strategy. Make the effort to understand the community leadership of the people and organizations that will be at these events. Most importantly, understand that the most important aspect of event engagement returns is what you do after the event, now that everyone has something in common.
6. Social Media Best Practices:
Despite the ubiquity of social media, and the valuable data it can provide, few organizations have a clear strategy.. Identifying and cultivating areas of group social influence can create a powerful network effect.
7. Strategic Advisory:
Your prospects have several challenges that can benefit from strategic advisory. You have several subject matter experts, data and intellectual property at all levels of your organization. Developing a strategy for mining and delivering this expertise (in the form of an advisory board, strategic partner relationship, digital content and marketing) adds value to your prospects on an ongoing basis.
8. Vertical and Horizontal Sectors:
Every business has vertical and horizontal perspectives. Just as every company has clients that are positioned in an industry. As a provider, having an industry perspective with your clients is critical to business development. Consider that your prospect list has similar industry positions as your clients. Leveraging your client’s area of interest with your prospects makes good BD sense. Developing perspectives, whether it be for your clients in a vertical or horizontal position, will increase your relevance with them and will open new prospect doors.
9. Globally Aware:
Every business that has a website is global. Certainly, if you have clients many will have a global pursuit whether that is importing or exporting goods and services or both. Having a global perspective should be foundational to your company culture. So, leveraging your network and community of international influence makes good business sense for today and in the future.