Business Development Tactics

If you've got a trusted relationship, you often don't even need a Web site or brochure to make a sale. But as soon as you enter unknown waters in which you or your company are strangers, you need some other form of ammunition to create and build a relationship.

The "Solution Selling" section talked about strategic selling. This section talks about strategic marketing.

"Targeted business development" refers to a strategic process for getting business that tightly integrates the marketing and sales process for maximum effectiveness and measurability. The process makes sure that marketing systematically overlays with the sales effort, so that the marketing support goes precisely where it's needed in the sales field.

Targeted business development starts with a strategic planning process, usually conducted annually or before a product or service launch. It is then reviewed quarterly and redone every year.

Depending on the market segment, many marketing services companies do not run their businesses using a strategic plan, but rather with a process that includes a sales forecast and list of activities related to a budget. Each year, the goal gets set, and the managers budget for specific activities. A strategic plan steps back and looks at the goals, measurable objectives, and most appropriate strategies, plans and actions, regardless of past budgets or plans. The mix of strategies can change from year to year based on the changing goals, market conditions and outcomes of previous efforts. The final strategic plan report might have a two-page summary and no more than 10 pages of details, but it represents the complete plan for the year with time line, results measures and premises, etc., often laid out on a spreadsheet for easy visualization.

The Five Steps of Targeted Business Development

One of the key unique elements of this process involves the integration of marketing and sales activities toward achieving customer-related goals.

Step 1: The Strategic Plan—Identifying your goals, measurable objectives, unique selling benefits, strategies, plans and actions.

Step 2: Getting Permission—Building a database of qualified people willing to learn more and receive your communications.

Step 3: Target Marketing—Developing marketing tools such as advertising, public relations, Web sites, brochures, events, direct marketing and PowerPoint or other presentations to generate awareness, identify more prospects and build credibility with prospects who engage.

Step 4: Target Selling—Integrating marketing and sales campaigns to generate leads and more qualified prospects for the database and equipping your sales team with tools they can use individually to help prospects and build relationships.

Step 5: Measurement—Creating a system that allows for real-time integration of all of the above processes, showing the return on investment in terms of prospects who turn into customers and the revenue and profits generated, as well as the sources of businesses and activities related to converting prospects into customers.

Step 1: The Strategic Plan

Only a very small percentage of companies manage business development through a strategic plan integrated to focus specifically on customer acquisition and retention. Instead, in most organizations, different groups have different roles in the process and often compete for resources in order to preserve their annual budget for their activities. In fact, many organizations have three or more groups that can affect customer outcomes, including sales, marketing and customer service, not all of which report through the same management channels.

The targeted business development process starts each year, or before the launch of a new product, service or other business development initiative, with a planning process designed to identify the best strategies, actions and plans that will contribute to achieving the goals and measurable objectives. This written document, containing the key premises, audience characteristics, unique selling benefits, strategies, actions, plans and measures, provides the basis for highly measurable marketing, since the results get benchmarked against a complete set of goals and objectives.

Nevertheless, most organizations forgo this process, using instead the forecast and budget method that goes something like this: "Here's what we think we'll do, and here's the money we need for these activities we feel will contribute to the result." In this process, forecasts and budgets often do not constitute strategic plans based on goals, measurable objectives, unique selling benefits, opportunities, etc., but rather an adjustment based on past experience.

The strategic planning session generally lasts for a half-day day and should include management of all the teams that contribute to business development. Ideally, the program is led by someone who has no perceived ax to grind, who will take into account the strategies and ideas of all parties without concern for his or her own budget.

The planning process also can include another day or two of research to double-check assumptions, as well as the time required to write the report up into a draft plan to be approved by all parties. This process not only comes up with a fresh strategy every year, with measurable goals, but also helps generate consensus and alignment among your team, since they all contribute to the process and approve the final plan as a team.

The plan should address the following issues, using a round-robin approach so that all views are heard:

• Goals—What specifically do you want to achieve?
• Measurable Objectives—How you will measure success?
• Unique Selling Benefits—What's your edge?
• Business Environment—What external market or internal issues could affect the outcome?
• SWOT Analysis—What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to achieving the goals?
• Strategies—How do you expect to achieve your goals?
• Plans—What will be done by whom, and when? And how will it be measured?
• Actions—Timetable and roles and responsibilities.

The document can include a one- or two-page top-line summary for top management, and then more granular details for each of the participating groups. Depending on the pace or urgency of your business, team leaders regroup every month, quarter or half-year to review results against the plan, so you can make adjustments if necessary to stay on track. This document is used not only to evaluate your final results, but also to plan for the future. Systematically learning what works and doesn't work helps make your next effort more productive and diminishes risk.

Step 2: Getting Permission 

Almost every business sale begins with a dialogue necessary to get permission to maintain communication. It often can take multiple calls just to get someone to hear you out, and then to say it's okay to send them information and put them on your mailing list. Anything your organization can do to minimize the costs of identifying qualified people willing to give you permission to communicate can significantly reduce the cost of marketing. It costs very little to target-market via e-mail or even direct mail, or to telephone people who have opted in to receive information.

Technology makes it easy to get and keep permission, no matter what the medium. It starts with having a Web-based permission form people can use to sign up for information or find a personal contact, whether directly via the Web, or at a trade show, over the phone, or via a salesperson that is inputted into the system. The permission form collects whatever qualifying information you're able to obtain, as well as the specific permissions granted related to receiving phone calls, faxes, e-mail newsletters, mail information, etc. This permission becomes an invaluable asset that can provide more measurable results more cost-effectively than any other form of marketing. The most important question to ask: How did you hear about us? Although not foolproof, the data that comes from this question provides a good guide to what's generating response.

Once you get permission, you have to keep it, or the recipient stops reading. To keep permission requires matching the needs of your audience with your marketing needs. That means understanding the type of information they need to know related to your company's fields, and how your organization fits into the solution. (See following step, "Target Marketing.) This is not a job left to traditional marketers or salespeople.

Step 3: Target Marketing 

It's said that good marketing consists of identifying the right audience with the right message. Technology makes it easier than ever to get permission, but the process of keeping permission still depends on understanding your prospects' needs, desires and areas of pain and where your products or services fit as a solution. Success comes from finding the right match and then following through to create satisfied customers, referrals and a sustainable business. If your organization claims that you sell solutions and not just a product or service, your communications strategy had better say so clearly.

Marketers and sales managers can't stop selling. Their instinct and DNA compels them to sell, and the notion of providing objective information runs counter to their nature. Keeping permission requires being useful, and sending out a continual stream of self-serving marketing rarely serves much use, except to your competitors who monitor it. Read most marketing materials and Web sites, and it's sell, sell, sell. That doesn't provide much of a climate for solution selling. Marketing does not mean selling, it means relationship  and trust building. To build relationships and trust, organizations have to help, first and foremost, and not always sell.

To have some hope of breaking through the clutter, marketing communications should be:

Permission-based—People are more likely to open an e-mail if they remember requesting it.

Targeted—Short of getting permission, the key today is identifying as precisely as possible the potential field of buyers, because 1,000 prospects identified today and systematically communicated with over time could yield all of the business most marketing services companies will ever need.

Beneficial—People anticipate something that they expect will help or reward them. That means offering useful information, entertainment or incentives that resonate with your target audience.

Multitouch—People are overwhelmed, so it takes smarter and smarter marketing to break through. The availability of multiple media makes it more affordable for any size company to mix up a campaign with different media to maximize the chances of penetration.

Trackable—The ability to correlate activity with each prospect, which, fortunately for most marketing services providers, is surprisingly affordable. The permission form makes this possible because every name coming into the system gets tracked by source.

Lead Generation
The many marketing services companies who spend little on advertising and marketing usually explain that they have found it difficult to measure, especially since many marketing services companies have relatively few accounts and function in specialized areas. On the other hand, many companies really don't know whether their marketing works, because they don't have the sort of tracking systems in place to reliably identify every inbound inquiry and what ends up happening to it. Sales cycles in marketing services, along with the volumes of spending involved, often mean a wait of months or even years to turn an inquiry into a major piece of business. Most companies have little way of tracking this, especially when salespeople have little incentive to promote the fact that a lead came from an advertising or marketing program instead of their own hard work. 

Organizations that implement the sort of lead tracking programs outlined below under "Lead Management," made remarkably easy by today's technology, have an entirely new interest in advertising and marketing because they can place a value on every lead that turns into a sale—as long as they can make the connection. And given that marketing services and product companies often have clients generating anything from the tens of thousands to millions of dollars, one customer can pay for an entire year's advertising or marketing program. The real benefit to advertising or almost any marketing centers not only on making a sale, but also on identifying a qualified prospect for a future sale. When lead generation gets tied to getting permission, and a CRM system and solid sales team support the process, an organization can gauge quite precisely the contributory benefits of the various media and other communications it employs. At the very least, by tracking marketing results by prospect and account, organizations can effectively measure the cost of getting new business and the tactics that deliver the best results.

That said, marketing still consists of throwing a variety of information and offers at the wall and seeing what sticks; success depends on what's getting thrown at what wall, when and how. The marketing mix today can easily mix advertising, direct marketing (e-mail or print), events and road-shows, promotions, trade shows and newsletters. All of these work best based on an integrated strategy with a consistent theme designed according to your goals and opportunities during a specified period. No matter what the media mix, the goal is to identify people who have given permission to begin the dialogue, and to measurably track their eventual progress to the sale.

Lead Management
Many marketing organizations do relatively little to generate leads and depend upon their salespeople to target the best prospects and build personal relationships over time. Some of the larger companies exhibit at trade shows and run advertising, but even they often have a hard time measuring the impact. That's because most organizations lack a good system for distributing leads to salespeople and making sure all leads are followed up and tracked.

Customer relationship management software makes this much easier, but software does not change human nature, and salespeople often don't enjoy the micromanagement that can come with CRM systems that measure their every move. A good way to ease salespeople into this mode is to start using CRM specifically for lead distribution and management. Salespeople who don't use the technology won't get the leads generated from advertising and direct marketing, giving them an incentive to engage. In addition, a good lead management system comes with a complete set of tools for easily following up with the customers with templated letters, sales materials and Web site links at their immediate disposal on the prospect's contact page. By just a few clicks of the mouse and a few sentences in the notes field, salespeople can report on the results of each call without a need for filing any separate reports. People gravitate to tools that make life easier. Use CRM to make life easier, and the chances increase that people will use it.

Internal Marketing
Delivering your promises is as important as making them, and your employees are often the key to success. Your business development process should include an equally systematic process to make sure your employees have the capability, motivation and vision to consistently satisfy employees. Click on "Employee Motivation" to learn more about this critical area.

Step 4: Target Selling 

Leads can come from only so many sources—your marketing, your sales effort, word of mouth, repeat business. The better you target your salespeople on identified prospects, and the better you equip your salespeople to help and not just sell, the better your results—or at least your ability to measure them. 

If your organization can benefit from any marketing, it's marketing targeted precisely at the people being contacted by your sales force. Today, technology makes it easier than ever to make sure that your salespeople have whatever sales tools you provide, from PDFs, brochures, Web sites, white papers, presentations, and soon podcasts of audio presentations, invitations to educational or entertainment events, etc. 

Your CRM system should include an easily accessible library of documents your salespeople can use as needed in a way that enables you to track what has been sent to whom. This gives you invaluable information related to understanding the influence of marketing on sales.

Today's Sales Blitz
In the 1900s, a sales blitz consisted of a day or more of cold-calling, often face-to-face, when the sales team went out into the field and knocked on doors or made a hundred phone calls. Today, a sales blitz in marketing services and products is an integrated campaign consisting of multiple elements in a coordinated period, culminating in one or more calls made by a salesperson to either find qualified prospects, get their permission for ongoing dialogue or for an immediate sales call. With the properly integrated CRM system, management easily measures results by salesperson. A sales blitz can involve a lower-level individual to find prospects or higher-level people who should prospect from time to time, as well.

These campaigns have very clear results, measured in terms of people who want presentations, opt in for further communications and eventually become customers.

Step 5: Measurement

While ad agencies hire legions of researchers to bedazzle clients, results marketing provides relatively simple measures for the average company.

Getting Permission—How many people signed on to receive information from you each year? Where did those names come from? How many of them became customers? The data coming out of the results marketing process isn't perfect, but it provides much more measurement than most organizations get today.

Target Marketing—How many people responded to a specific campaign? Where did the names you use come from, or what was the advertising source? What did it cost you to get a qualified prospect or customer? What activities did that prospect or customer participate in, and what communications did they receive? All of this gets easily tracked in a results marketing process.

Target Selling—How many people became customers? What percentage became repeat customers? Who sold the account? What was the source of business? What types of marketing contacts did the company have with the prospect before the sales?

Return on Investment—What's the cost of getting a qualified lead? What is the value of the lead in terms of average annual revenue? What percentage of your business comes from various media or marketing efforts, or word of mouth?

With the right technology, even small companies can gather highly measurable data about the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Armed with such tools, many likely will actually increase their marketing activities, since they can finally measure the benefits.

Target Marketing Tools

In a solution-selling environment, the traditional marketing approach of continually promoting your organization's virtues no longer applies. Solution selling requires an understanding of your client's needs and business environments, so self-serving promotional material sends the wrong message: that your organization has more interest in selling than helping clients. While every organization requires a Web site, sales brochure and presentation tools that tout the company's unique selling benefits, target marketing tools go beyond self-promotion to provide useful information on trends, how-to tips and ideas related to your organization's product or services. Providing useful information helps clients make better, more informed decisions and sends a message that your organization intends to help clients get results, rather than simply sell, sell, sell.

Today's target marketing tools should include:

• Newsletters with trends, research, surveys and tips, and be written by journalists, not marketers;
• Executive white papers with objective, authoritative information;
• Web sites with case studies and trends, research, how-to and other information provided in the newsletters and white papers;

Presentations outlining best practices and useful information. These can complement, rather than replace, presentations used for selling, and get used at speaking engagements or when a client invites you for a training or information session with colleagues.

Are You a Results Marketer?

Here are 30 questions you can answer to determine whether your company has already entered the world of New Marketing. Answer the questions and count up the number of Yes answers. (You don't have to answer questions that don't pertain to your business; it won't affect the score if several questions go unanswered.) Here's how to score your organization:

25-30  Cutting-edge
20-24  Ahead of the pack
15-19  On your way
10-14  Behind the times
Under 10  A long way to go