Reports say that 9 out of 10 start-ups fail. And only 50% of entrepreneurship thrive for more than 5 years. And only 0.1% of businesses grow to make revenue of 250 million per year. For, companies face a lot of challenges. And only those that adopt the best business development strategies survive, grow, and develop.
This blog tells you what business development strategies are and discusses 5 of the best ones to be implemented for the success of your firm.
What is Business Development Strategies?
The term “Business Development Strategies” refers to implementing a mix of several individual business development tasks across different departments of a business. These tasks can relate to business, commerce, networking, cost-savings, organization, partnerships, and negotiations. In short, it seeks the holistic development of a business to make it fruitful and enriching.
Business development strategies facilitate establishing long-term value for a company’s customers, markets, and interrelationships.
Top 5 Business Development Strategies for your Company
1. Networking
If there is a business development strategy used all over the world, it should be networking. Yes, businesses need to focus on their customer relationships. For, businesses can witness a 25 to 95 percent increase in their profits by increasing their customer retention by just five percent.
Networking helps businesses by
- Driving community growth
- Opening up new opportunities
- Influencing positively
- Ushering in loyal and long-term customers
- Giving new ideas, perspectives, and practices
- Facilitating up-selling and cross-selling
- Building up your confidence
So, your business should start adopting digital networking techniques such as social media networking and invest time and effort into it.
2. Client Satisfaction
Businesses can be adversely affected by unhappy and furious clients. For, it spoils your relationships with the clients and also destroys your firm’s reputation. So, your business development strategy should make it mandatory that your staff should immediately work on fixing any issue that arises with a client. Reputation management software can be very much helpful in this regard.
Taking quick actions would impress and delight your clients so much that they would start spreading the word about your brand in your industry. While dealing with clients, ensure that you practice empathy. Put yourself in their shoes to feel their issues as they themselves would. This way, you’ll be efficiently nurtured in your business.
3. Expanding your offerings
A business’s customers and their needs are constantly evolving. So, it should expand its product and service offerings. You’ll be able to predict and provide for your customers’ future needs by being aware of their long-term needs and industry trends. This approach also allows your firm to be the pioneer to market a product or service.
You can accomplish this in the following ways-
- Review your product or service portfolio
- Keep abreast of changes in your industry
- Find ways to expand your current offerings
- Complement and diversify into new areas
- Offer new added-value services
- Create new partnerships
- Pragmatic marketing (an approach that involves a series of product tests and adaptation to ensure that the final product is appealing to the market)
4. Offering Discounts and Rebates
Consider offering discounts on all your products, limited discounts on a few products, seasonal discounts during festive seasons, early-bird discounts for new products, or custom discounts for retargeting customers. You can also offer rebates, which are deferred discounts given as a lowering in pricing after a buyer buys a product.
Offering discounts and rebates and marketing them properly is one of the best business growth strategies. For, it will incentivize consumers to start buying from you. This would increase your sales and brand affinity too.
5. Effective Marketing
You need to market your brand and its offerings to increase sales and generate revenue. However, unlike in the past, generalized marketing is not the way today. People prefer personalized experiences across all touchpoints like email, website, ads, social media, content, etc.
So, you need to analyze customer data across these channels to develop targeted marketing messages. This is where CRM software can help. It will also help you identify those channels and strategies that work the best for your brand.
Conclusion
Business Development Strategies are several individual business development tasks implemented across different departments of a business to make it a fruitful and enriching one. These facilitate establishing long-term value for a company’s customers, markets, and their interrelationships. Only those companies that adopt the best business development strategies survive, grow, and develop.
This blog discussed the top five business development strategies which are
- Networking: Digital networking drives community growth; opens up new opportunities; influences positively; ushers in loyal and long-term customers; gives new ideas, perspectives, and practices; facilitates up-selling and cross-selling; and builds up confidence.
- Client Satisfaction: Make it mandatory for your staff to immediately work on fixing any issue that arises with a client. This will impress and delight your clients so much that they would start word-of-mouth marketing your brand.
- Expanding Offerings: A business’s customers and their needs are constantly evolving. So, you should expand your product and service offerings.
- Offering Discounts and Rebates: Offering discounts and rebates and marketing them properly will incentivize consumers, increase your sales and brand loyalty.
- Effective Marketing: People prefer personalized experiences across all touch points. So, analyze customer data across these channels to develop targeted marketing messages.
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Author Bio:
Shivani Goyal
Shivani is a content writer at InviteReferrals, which provides referral marketing software that allows businesses to attract new customers from existing customers through referral campaigns.
