Sales leaders often want to know how to improve their revenue or hit their sales numbers. To reach new heights, you need to start by building a solid foundation. That’s your business development plan. If you’re wondering where to begin, you’re in the right place to learn. We’ll explore how business development works and how to create a winning plan.

What you’ll learn:

• What is business development?
• What’s the difference between sales and business development?
• How does business development work?
• Why is business development important?
• How to create a business development plan in 7 steps
• What’s the best technology for business development planning?

What is business development?

Business development (BD) is the process of long-term planning to increase your company’s value through relationships, markets, and customers. It involves researching your target audience, finding new opportunities, and using your channels to reach them. Your sales representatives can only close the leads they’re talking to. Finding and starting those conversations is what business development is all about.

What’s the difference between sales and business development?

The sales team receives leads, works them through their sales pipeline, and sells your company’s products and services. Sales representatives work their territories and their lists to close deals and convert leads to customers. It’s a transactional and tactical process.

On the other hand, the business development team digs through the entire marketplace to find new growth opportunities. Business development representatives prospect, reach out to leads, qualify them, and move them through the funnel. It’s a strategic process that requires patience.

When both teams are working together, businesses thrive.

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How does business development work?

Business development takes many forms. Researching the market to find growth opportunities. Creating a new lead-qualifying process. Managing a project across departments with marketing and sales. Analyzing data to validate a theory. And of course, sales prospecting to find good leads.

Areas for new business development

So where do brand-new growth opportunities come from? Here are some places to start:

• Market analysis: Look into the market using tools like a customer relationship management (CRM) tool and determine areas your competitors haven’t tapped, or issues where current customers are dissatisfied. Those are gaps where you can introduce an existing product, a new bundle, or new campaigns.
• Strategic partnerships: Collaborate with partner companies on channel partnerships (such as third-party resellers) that can create new opportunities for both parties.
• Product development: Innovate on your offerings based on customer feedback, working with other teams to create something new. This could be new features to existing products, new product line extensions, and new business models (such as introducing freemium options or subscription offers).
• Mergers and acquisitions (M&A): Buy up market share and do a lot of business development all at once. If business leadership makes this decision, business development is responsible for finding ways to transition the new organization’s customer base over, and possibly migrate them to your company’s products instead.
• New funding: Find investors for working capital, things to invest in, and obtain grants to expand the business. Business development reps would be responsible for the outreach approach to investors, and making the case for the funding using sales data and customer feedback.
• Emerging technologies: Keep an eye on the industry and find new ways to disrupt your industry and take your company further. This could take the form of new channels like a trendy social media platform gaining popularity, or a new must-have feature that all your competitors begin adding to their products.

What skills do you need for business development?

Whether you’re thinking about transitioning into a role as a business development representative (BDR), or you simply need to add BD skills as you start wearing more hats in your current role, you’ll need some important skills. It’s easy enough to get started. Develop a curiosity about the customers you serve, the problems you solve, and the market you’re in. Here are some core skills:

• Communication: Business development representatives have to be skilled in cold calling, interacting with prospects on social media, and building relationships.
• Finding prospects: BDRs interact with prospects a lot, so they need to update the sales funnel, qualify leads, and nurture them.
• Business intelligence: Reps have to understand their business and competition through research, know how to collect meaningful data, and interpret and present that data using visualization dashboards.
• Data analysis: They should know how to track and present data to leadership, such as revenue, pipeline value, and the influence of business development on that pipeline.

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Why is business development important?

Nothing stays still in the world of sales.

According to the State of Sales report, 82% of sellers say they’ve had to quickly adapt to new ways of selling in the face of global challenges, including supply chain issues, inflation, and health precautions. On top of that, 57% of buyers said they prefer engaging with companies through digital channels. And 81% of sales reps said buyers are increasingly doing their own research before reaching out.

You need to adapt your plan as markets shift, and that’s where business development comes in.

Business development is the core activity that helps an organization find new areas of growth and strategize on making those areas work. It’s important for finding new leads, converting them, and keeping them as reliable customers.

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How to create a business development plan in 7 steps

What is business development planning? If I was joining a brand-new team and building a plan from scratch, here’s how I’d approach it.

1. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals with “sales math”

Start by reverse-engineering how to hit your target. Let’s say my quota is closing a million dollars a year, so that’s $250,000 per quarter. Ask these questions:

• How many deals do I have to close?
• What’s the average deal size?
• What are typical closing ratios?
• How many qualified opportunities would I need in the pipeline?
• How many first meetings would I need to do?
• What does the outbound activity look like in order to get a meeting?

To create the goal at the start of that list, use S.M.A.R.T. goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely).

So if I want that $250,000 in a quarter, that’s specific. We can measure all the stats in our sales math to figure out if we’re on track. To judge if the goal is attainable, we’d need to calculate the lead and volume increase. A jump of a few percent points is likely; a 50% increase isn’t. Any goal that’s geared towards growing the business is relevant to the business development representative’s job. And it’s timely because it’s set for this quarter.

2. Choose key performance indicators (KPIs)

As a subset of the goal setting, we need to choose the KPIs that we’ll measure along the way. Try these common KPIs for business development:

• Changes in revenue
• Lead conversion rate
• Leads generated per month/quarter/year
• Prospect and customer satisfaction
• Pipeline value

3. Market research

The next thing I want to know is how we’re messaging (and to whom). These are the core components of a solid business development plan:

• What are the key core personas and the accounts that I’m targeting, and what do they care about? What are their priorities?
• What are their current solutions? If they’re not using ours, how do they get the job done instead? Do they do it themselves?
• Do they use a competitor, or (in the case of tech sales) do they just use a spreadsheet? What problems does that create, and how can I align my solution to those problems?

Once we know these, we can figure out how to position our product or service to our target audience.

4. Pick a strategic target

Even a niche product can draw in a pretty broad list of leads. However, it’s not effective for our sales reps to just work a list of 100 accounts from top to bottom. If only a small percentage of your target market is in buying mode right now, you need a targeting strategy.

You need to pick low-effort targets first who have buying intent. If you’re collecting leads in a fully featured CRM, the system can track actions they take, including opening marketing emails you send to them, visiting key parts of your site, and even interacting with your social posts. AI can elevate these leads as “high intent,” or it can be done manually by reviewing actions taken by your leads list.

5. Sales pitch and sales enablement

Once you know your product-market fit, who you’re talking to, and how you’re approaching them, you can boil your messaging down to a sales pitch. It should explain your business’s mission and how it fits with the needs of your target persona in an attention-grabbing way.

From there, you’ll need to adapt that message to all kinds of sales enablement strategies. You should be asking questions like:

• What should the emails sound like?
• What’s the right sequence?
• What are the common objections I’m going to come across, and how do I handle them?

6. Set the budget

All this work will cost money. While it’s expected to have a return on investment (ROI), it’s not as immediate as sales activity. The budget needs to account for necessary personnel, tools, and forecasted returns. You’ll need to work with your finance team to ensure you have funds allocated to bring your plan to life.

7. Customer outreach

Finally, you need to decide how you’re going to prospect and nurture your leads, which depends on the budget you just set. Here are some methods to consider:

• Cold calling
• Networking
• Referrals
• Upselling current customers
• Cross-selling
• Sponsorships with partners
• Advertising

Once you’ve chosen your mix of outreach methods, you need to decide on the cadence and order of channels. For example, you might use social posts to get the initial leads to your site. From there, you could pepper them with retargeting ads to make sure they sign up for your email list. Then you reach out with a “welcome series” of emails that introduce and entice them to your offer. The offer and messaging could change the longer they go without taking any action.

8. Measure, test, and improve

Form a plan to measure the relative success of each individual outreach strategy to decide where to invest more the next time around. Methods that lag behind should be investigated for weak points where leads are lost so they can be tweaked and tested in the market again.

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What’s the best technology for business development planning?

The modern business development team needs a good tech stack.

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform helps track the pipeline you’re building. Standardize the cadence of your outreach and build repeatable sequences that your entire team follows to help enforce your strategy.

Lead scoring helps you know when to move prospects to different parts of the pipeline, and some programs even monitor and collect customer signals to help automatically notify business development representatives when it’s time to reach out again.

No matter what platforms and tools you choose, it’s important to start with a process before throwing data intelligence and automation at your problems. Technology can only scale a process. If that process is broken or bad, it’s just going to make your problems bigger.

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Build a plan to move your business forward

Before you can hit your numbers, you need a plan to get there. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals, build your customer persona, and choose the right channels to reach your prospects. When you do this, you can build a roadmap for the future and grow your revenue.