In part one of this two-part post on building business development, Director of Business Development Jeff Tillar looked at how to secure a solid development foundation. Quality data and effective tools, along with market intelligence, are the base of a thriving business. But you need to use that data and those tools in the right way to achieve your development goals.
Step 3: Optimize Messaging and KPIs
After you gather the market intelligence you need to understand your target industry, take what you learned and develop multiple outreach campaigns. Each of these campaigns should target a different opportunity segment. Execute these campaigns to validate what you learned from your market research, getting real results to your hypothesis on prospect pain points and preferences.
To understand what makes a campaign a success, you need to set-up key performance indicators (KPIs). Relevant KPIs include conversion rate, meeting set rate, open rate, and close ratio. Get a baseline for each KPI before you begin tracking so you’ll know if you’re making progress.
Each marketing campaign should have its own KPI tracking. As you gain data, you will need to make adjustments. Be careful to only change one element at a time (i.e., time of day sent or mode of communication) so you can accurately target what triggered an improvement.
Over time, you’ll understand the ideal lanes to ramp up your sales effort and come to near perfection in your outreach methods. The KPI data you gain also aids in forecasting your sales pipeline to help you plan for the next quarter and beyond.
Step 4: Invest and Scale
Once you’re consistently running the bases with your campaigns, it’s time to ramp up your sales team to promote growth. You’ll want to specialize your team with dedicated business reps to build your pipeline and opportunity managers to close deals. Plus, you need a devoted CRM team to manage data and a marketing group to optimize your outreach content and manage marketing campaigns.
Notice that it’s best to hire these specialized team members at the end of these four steps. If you invest in bringing in too many sales or marketing team members too early, they’ll have little direction and won’t target leads correctly. No matter the experience, you need to have a strategy before you expand your team.
Jump-Starting Your Development with NuGrowth Solutions
It can be challenging to know where to start if you’re unsure where you are in the business development process. That’s where a team like NuGrowth can help. We consult with you to identify your business’ needs and provide solutions.
Our CRM and market research team gain and manage valuable industry data, our marketing specialists craft custom go-to-market campaigns and outreach content, and our experienced sales reps execute strategy and train your current team to optimize your pipeline.
Get everything you need to tackle any business development dilemma in one place: contact the experts at NuGrowth today.
Sarah Deak is a veteran copywriter and content strategist with NuGrowth Solutions. She likes to look for the unexpected angle and uses her background in education, business development, and marketing to create interesting and informative pieces to equip readers with actionable data