5 ways dedicated business development can improve your bottom line

We all want to grow our businesses. And we have a pretty clear idea of what we want, and mostly how to go about it: you’ve got a sales team, and you’ve got a marketing team. While often misunderstood, they are clearly two distinct departments, with two distinct functions.

Of course, both teams rely on each other to succeed, but often, the roles can get blurred, either because the distinctions have been misunderstood, misinterpreted, or just forgotten about, but they obviously have different priorities, and require different skill sets.

Mix up who does what, and you can find yourself with problems. When you start missing targets it’s easy for everyone to start blaming each other: marketing blames sales, sales blames marketing – and senior leadership blames everybody.

But what if it wasn’t either teams’ fault? What if the issue was actually what was missing in the process. The missing piece to complete the picture that enables the two separate teams, with two separate priorities to work successfully in harmony together.

What if successfully building appropriate business development strategies was actually an entirely different skill set from either sales or marketing?

B2B business development: a skill set all of its own

It’s a structure that has been embraced by some of the world’s largest and most successful companies, from Amazon (which has six business and commercial development teams) to KPMG. And, while we appreciate not all businesses may be built to that scale (yet!), every business can, and should, adopt a mindset that sees business development as a speciality in its own right: one that bridges the gap between optimising both the power of your marketing and the skills of your sales team – and helps your sales grow, and bottom-line fly.

Business development is a distinct skill set and unique function in its own right, and one that can, and should, join the dots between your sales and marketing teams. To fully reap the benefits that can come from these skills, it should be seen as an entirely separate stage in the process, sitting between marketing and sales, with its own dedicated department.

H3: 5 ways business development can boost your revenue

Here are five of the key benefits that come from a skilled, dedicated approach to business development:

1. Lead generation

Since lead generation comes early in the pipeline, at the front of the funnel, this can often be seen as a marketing function. However, sales teams are also encouraged to network and ask for referrals. Leads from a marketing campaign can often be very broad, and leads from sales networking tend to be singular. The advantage, then, of a business development team is that they can concentrate on generating very large numbers of highly relevant leads – by vertical, by industry, by region, by target, by size – very quickly and effectively. By putting business development at the start of the sales cycle, you’ll achieve highly targeted, relevant lead generation, at scale, that other teams just can’t find.

2. Lead qualification

Between making multiple touchpoints and closing the deal, there’s a gap: lead qualification. Because there’s no point talking to the right business if you’ve got the wrong person sitting in front of you.

Business development specialists approach lead qualification differently to sales or marketing – they use direct outreach to personally qualify prospects. Is your lead a business, or a person – or several people within that business? Does their job really involve what their title suggests it does? Do they have the authority to buy from you? And if you have identified the right person – what are their pain points? What is their appetite for your value proposition?

A business development team should not only more efficiently and effectively close the loop between MQL and SQL, but should also add vital intel on the person, the business, and most importantly, the opportunity for your sales teams.

3. Prospect conversion

Next step is converting a lead into a firm prospect. By talking directly with the lead, and carrying out an extensive needs-based analysis, your business development specialist will have started to build the relationship. This will also give him or her the opportunity to provide your sales team with rich insights to optimise the approach and engagement with your prospect going forward.

The business development team should then be able to book a confirmed meeting, ideally in the diary of a named sales team member. A diary full of confirmed appointments with qualified leads, and a cheat sheet of highly relevant intel as to how best to approach the meeting, is the most cost effective way of both maximising your busy sales team’s time, and setting them up in the best possible way for success.

4. Account management

Being one step removed from the actual sales process, a business development team is perfectly placed to develop and maintain an ongoing client relationship with the client.

Understanding the account, their needs and requirements, puts the business development team in the ideal place to fully nurture all opportunities within that account across multiple verticals, regions and countries, and the perfect opportunity to work on repeat business. All things your busy sales team often just doesn’t have time for. Account management can include– and be on the lookout for new opportunities, whether it’s a new market, an adjacent market, a related product and service, or a new country entirely.

5. Saving money

As we all know, marketing isn’t cheap, and, nor are your highly trained and often expensive sales teams. But if you are failing to build a bridge between the two, then you are more than likely to be making your teams work in a way that is suboptimal. By identifying the distinct skills that business development brings, you can ensure you are setting up both your sales and marketing teams to succeed at what they each do best, and not what they don’t have time and the specific skill sets for, for what sits, often unseen, between them.

A business development team is often the unknown, unseen, missing link in optimising the power of your sales and marketing teams, and ultimately your business. The missing jigsaw piece that the very best, and most successful business find and embrace.

Pure Business Development are specialists in outsourced business development. Working with companies of all sizes from large, public enterprises to privately owned SME’s. Our highly experienced teams are focused on client service and have a results driven mindset.

To understand more about how we can help your business grow, book your introductory chat today.