If you have a business, you need a business development strategy. Without a business development strategy, you aren’t going to be able to orchestrate your business in the direction that you want it to go. Still, developing a business development strategy can be a challenge. Today, we’re going to take a look at what makes a business strategy great.
What is a Business Development Strategy?
“Business development strategy” is intentionally vague, but the strategy itself needs to be precise.
Essentially, a business development strategy is a lot like a business plan. It encompasses the steps that you’re going to take, both short-term and long-term, to get to your goals.
Who are your customers? Markets? How are your relationships developing? What is your branding like? How are you going to get followers and leads?
So, while business development strategy, or “biz-dev,” might seem vague, the actual answers that it imparts needs to be extremely complex and detailed.
If you don’t have a business development strategy, you don’t really know what your goals are, and you don’t know how you’re going to achieve them. It’s very likely to turn into a disaster.
Why is Business Development Important?
Let’s say that you want to drive from California to Washington. Instead of planning a route, you just start going north. How bad can it be? Well, after you’ve gotten turned around by roads that double back, you’ll find that you’ve wasted quite a bit of time.
A business development strategy is like having a roadmap. You know where you are. You know where you want to be. But you also need to know how to get there.
Your business development strategy/roadmap doesn’t always have to be accurate. Perhaps you’ll find that there are roads that are blocked. Maybe you’ll run into bad weather.
But having that plan also makes you agile, because you can pivot from one plan to another. You can more easily see the shape of things when you have a map right in front of you.
If you want to have investors or partners, business development is even more important; most people aren’t going to bet on a dream that’s held completely within your head.
In many ways, business development does overlap with having a business plan. The only difference is that a business plan generally concerns the organization’s operations and how it will be run, whereas a business development plan is more strictly focused on the organization’s evolution and growth.
The more documentation you have regarding your business, the more you set yourself up for future success.
When Will You Use Business Development?
Ideally, you’re going to use business development throughout the growth of your business.
During tumultuous times, you’ll look to business development to chart your course. During easy times, you’ll look toward business development to ensure that you can sustain meaningful growth.
You’ll be constantly reviewing and revising your business development strategy to ensure that it’s still accurate to the current market and the current position.
And you’ll find that your business development docs are also going to be necessary and helpful if you ever need loans or similar.
Business development is going to pervade every part of doing business. And without it, you’re going to quickly find that you don’t really know what you’re doing, where you’re going, or how you’ll get there.
But though you might know that business development is important, you might not know how to actually create a business development strategy. Since this isn’t something that’s covered for most business owners, business owners need to learn on their own how to do it. And they can get help at the London Image Institute.
Contact London Image Institute
If you haven’t performed the basics of business development now, you need to do so before it’s too late. Many businesses fail because people simply didn’t plan ahead. You don’t want to be one of them.
At the London Image Institute, you can go through an easy sequence of training and seminars to find out more about business development. You’ll learn why it’s important, how you can achieve it, and what the basic components of business development are.
