Assess Phase
To begin your journey in business development you first need to understand the specifics of the Sales Ecosystem that you will be operating within. To gain that understanding you first need to define what the strategic intent of your organization is. This can then be followed with how your product offering differentiates itself, and defining your customers. This is the Assess phase of the Triple A Framework.
I must make clear that the Assess phase does not comprise a detailed quantitative data analysis. Rather a broad assessment that allows the shaping of a robust business development plan. Many technical entrepreneurs fall into the trap of getting hyper detailed with their market analysis. They spend an inordinate amount of time and resources collecting and scrutinizing market and customer data for no significant gain. It is better to have a broad assessment that can be shaped following feedback from customer and market interactions. Having a hyper detailed assessment with no customer interactions informing it is next to worthless. I believe that the Assess phase described below, achieves the right balance between being data-driven, quick to achieve and practical in shaping the plans in the following Aim phase of the Framework.
Why Define the Intent
The strategic intent of a company can be defined as its future intentions and direction. What does it want to become and what does it intend to offer to the market? The long-and-short term goals of the company will act as a broad guide for the business development activity. Taking on business development responsibility, it is easy to become overawed by the scale of opportunity, and to start attacking the problem by reaching out to the market with high energy but no focus on where to direct that energy. This can lead to you reaching for potential customers only as they come to mind, with no clear tactic on how to get them to meet with you or understand your offering. A lot of effort will be wasted approaching customers that are not suitable while high value targets may be missed.
The Wrong Strategy?
You may develop a robust plan and start pursuing it relentlessly, but unknowingly, into the wrong segment where there is no support from head office. This happened to me when I was leading the Australian sales effort for a European instrumentation company. I could see that the Mining Industry in Australia was one of the biggest in the world and that we were not taking advantage of this massive opportunity. To my mind, there was a huge gap that could be filled by our product offering, and running the numbers, the proposition was extremely compelling.
I armed myself with a plan, which detailed the target companies and the role titles of the people we would need to talk to. With high energy, I began the assault. But as I opened up meetings, I slowly began to realise that our initial offering was not compelling enough for the mine companies. They needed a slightly more niche offering. This aligned with some projects I knew were being run by our R&D team in Europe. I took my findings back to the bosses, explained where we were at, and looked for support for a trial, only to find that the senior management weren’t interested. Their efforts were being placed into industries with more strategic value to the company, which resulted in no support for my plan, and a lot of wasted effort. If I had interrogated the company’s intentions and gained an understanding of their longer-term goals, I would have realized that mining did not play a prominent role in their global strategy. Perhaps the hours and money I invested could have been put to better use elsewhere.
Strategic Intent
The solution is to understand the strategic intent of your company and align your plan with it. That is not to say that outlier opportunities should be ignored, but you need to understand where most of the resources of the company will be funneled.
Before you start any business development activity you need to determine the strategic intent of the organisation, including its vision, purpose, and direction. Defining the intent points you towards the desired end goal and provides guidelines and boundaries to keep your business development activity aligned with the desired outcomes of the organisation. The company-wide intent needs to be combined with the objectives of the business unit, division, or product line that you are representing. This will then inform the structure of your business development activities.
Company Vision and Objective
In an ideal world the company vision and objectives should be readily available and easily understood by all employees; however, this is often not the case. There may be pithy taglines and mission statements framed on the office walls but the clarity around their actual meaning is often clouded. A crucial part of business development planning, requires that the vision and intent of the organization must be clearly understood.
Develop clarity. Sit down with the leadership team, and gain an understanding of what you need. At a minimum, the following questions should be answered:
- What is the purpose of our organisation?
- What are the key aspirations of our organisation?
- What makes us different from the competition?
- What market do we play in now?
- What markets do we want to play in for the future?
- What do we want to look like in three years’ time?
- Where does our business development effort fit into the above?
Small Business
If you are a small business owner and you don’t have a company vision or objective defined a great place to begin is Start with Why by Simon Sinek. Then answer the questions above and shape your own.
Call to Action
Have you defined the intent of your company? If so do your business development efforts align?
Are there any questions that I’ve missed to help define the company vision and objective? As always I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Please get in touch or leave a comment below.