When business is good and our staff is fully occupied, we can’t imagine not being busy (maybe even secretly longing for a break so we can catch our breath).
On the other hand, when things are slow, and leads are few and far between, the pipeline is empty; it seems like we will never win another piece of new business ever again.
Does this pattern sound familiar to you? It does to me because I saw this pattern at the companies I worked at in the past and even fell prey to it myself!
As a business development expert, I’ve fortunately accumulated an impressive toolset over my career that I can deploy quickly as the need arises.
Also, I know that when you take action, your actions will be rewarded with results. The in my experience, while the results might not be immediate, they are inevitable.
Starting is the key. Once you start, momentum will kick in. You will find that momentum is business development’s best friend. The cynical voice in your head
whispers:
“Risk a No? No, thank you.”
“I don’t know where to start? Can I keep the momentum going?”
“I have so little time. Where do I get the best bang for my buck?”
“Hey,” the voice murmurs, “let’s wait one more day, and maybe some fantastic opportunity will fly in over the transom in the meantime.”
Resist. Don’t fall victim to that voice!
Rather than give in, here are three business development tactics you should be using and will serve you well, especially during those lean times when your pipeline needs filling quickly.
- Build Strategic partnerships
An excellent business development strategy for any executive who dislikes doing business development is forming strategic partnerships.
A strategic partner is an organization or person with whom you share clients but not products/services. These are complementary, non-competitive businesses. For example, your strategic partners might include:
- Technology providers
- Other Companies/vendors. (Make sure you establish systems and
- processes as you might have control of the customer)
Strategic partnerships tend to make a lot of sense for companies that work with clients in specific business categories.
The key to a strategic partnership the relationship is that it is mutually beneficial to all parties. As such, it increases the success factor by an order of magnitude. It’s simply more rewarding and easier and to reach out to a known and trusted partner than it is to cold call or email to a new prospect.
- Gather Testimonials
Testimonials are a powerful marketing tool. A testimonial is a third-party endorsement of your company’s skills, effectiveness, and excellence. They can do much heavy lifting for you, yet companies often don’t manage them well or overlook them entirely.
Why are testimonials so effective?
When you get right down to it, what you sell—what your clients value most—are
- you and your ideas.
- How you generate ideas
- How you’re going to make use of those ideas
That’s abstract stuff. Even the most outstanding salesperson will tell you abstract concepts are much harder to sell because you’re selling an expectation of success with no explicit guarantee.
But you do your best.
Here’s the thing: your prospects don’t know you, so how can they be expected to trust you. They can’t. They don’t know you yet. But they do trust other clients who have faced and overcome (with your help) similar challenges.
It’s entirely different, however, when your clients use these words to describe your company’s ability to turn the abstract into solid results because, coming from them, it’s objective feedback.
The best advice for successfully obtaining testimonials from your clients is to ask early. Set expectations that if you do good work, you will be asking the client to share feedback. And tell them why it’s crucial. You might even relate it to the process they went through, and the critical role peer feedback played in selecting you.
- Cultivate Referrals
Referrals are perennially the number one potential method clients use to find potential partners. When surveyed and asked, “what are the most important ways you use to learn about potential partners?” The top two answers were:
#1 Conversations with colleagues and friends
#2 Discussions with senior Company management
In other words, good old-fashioned referrals from peers/colleagues whom they trust. Like everything in life, there is a right and wrong way, and if you’re not successful when asking for referrals, you most likely be asking in the wrong way.
Please don’t make the request only about you; frame it so that there is an upside for them.
Also, they may be willing to help, but your request lands in their inbox during a busy day, get brushed aside, waiting until they have more time to deal with it, and then it’s forgotten.
Instead, be specific about the kind of partner you’re seeking and the value or benefits a partnership can offer. You might find your contacts are more responsive and enthusiastic about helping.
Make your request noteworthy by including current events, tease a strategy.
Finally, the surest way to destroy an intelligent referral strategy is with lousy execution. So follow through, do it quickly, take the reins with profound gratitude, and ask for a meeting.