Business development plans are essential to start making impact with your work winning effort. Completing an assessment of your sales ecosystem, it is easy to start doing everything at once. But, your enthusiasm will only get you so far. A systematic approach is essential if you want to start getting repeatable results. To achieve a systematic approach you must carefully aim your effort.
Aiming Your Effort
Your strategic intent and sales ecosystem assessment provide an excellent foundation. Therefore, use these to form your action-oriented business development plans.
Sitting at a desk waiting for the customer to call is not business development. It requires daily effort. Get into the market, talk to customers, and feedback your findings to the company leadership.
Daily marketing activity fills the sales funnel. This requires daily action, to turn leads into opportunities and sales. It never stops—the cycle needs continuous effort. Activity must always be working toward the goals of the business.
To sum up, that is a lot to stay on top of. In an ever-changing day where customers, opportunities, and leads are all competing for your time, there must be a system. A plan is required that outlines this system of action. This allows you to approach your customer base in line with your goals. Additionally, it prevents customers and opportunities being forgotten. The following section summarizes the three plans that will focus your activity in the right direction.
Introducing the Three Plans
Strategic Plan—contains the overarching goals and intent of the company as well as the core growth areas. Usually has a 3-5 year time span. Only one of these plans will exist at a time.
Operational Plan—covers the goals and focus areas of the business development function for the coming year. Likely forms part of a broader business unit plan. A separate operational plan should be in place for each area of operation. For example, business development managers in Florida and Alaska will be following the same strategic plan. However, each has a separate operational plan capturing local differences in the industry and market.
Tactical Action Plan—this daily use plan executes on the operational plan, identifying daily actions for the business developer.
Your Business Development Plans
It is not necessarily the role of the business developer to create all three plans. This will depend on the company size and structure. As an entrepreneur or small business owner all three will definitely fall into your work flow. Whilst, a BDM in a large organisation will likely have responsibility for the operational and tactical plans. At a bare minimum, you must have input into the operational plan and ownership of the tactical action plan.
Take care when developing these plans, as they ultimately shape the growth of your business. Use the data collated in the assess stage to aim your efforts in a direction based on evidence and opportunity, not gut feel.
Over the coming weeks I’ll unpack the three plans in more detail giving tips on how to implement for your own use.
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If you need help with your business development planning, spaces are available on my personalised coaching program. This a one on one service will let us do a deep dive into your business development planning, market assessment and daily activity. I’ll personally keep you focused and accountable.
As always I’d love to hear what you think. Leave a comment or reach out on LinkedIn.