Planning Your Business Development for 2023
The business environment is ever evolving but what doesn’t change is the need to build long-lasting, meaningful business relationships and the best way to execute on that is by developing a good plan. There’s a lot to keep in mind when creating a successful business development plan. Good planning provides unified objectives for your team to work towards and the metrics in place to ensure its success. It also allows your organization to run smoother and with much less stress. It can seem daunting at the start, but breaking it down into smaller steps can make it much more approachable for you and your team.
Create A Vision Statement
The first step in planning is creating a vision statement for the upcoming year around your business development plan. Think of where you would like your business development efforts to be on 12/31/2023. Did you train your staff members on business development tactics? Are you partnering with more strategic alliances? Have you opened any new markets? Are you achieving your revenue goals? Think about what’s important to you this upcoming year and how your business development plan will help you get there. Keep it short too. We recommend that you keep your vision statement to one paragraph.
Set Objectives:
No plan is complete without setting some overall objectives. The objectives are specific goals that you want to achieve through your business development plan. We recommend that you set no more than 4 objectives. We also recommend that they are a combination of revenue and activity objectives. For example, you may want to use your budgeted growth goal for 2023 as an objective or a revenue increase in a certain service line or geographic area. Then, think about certain activities that you or your team members need to accomplish to reach those revenue goals. Activities could include presentations with a minimum number of qualified prospects or center of influence meetings for example. Whatever you decide, make sure it stretches you and your team but is not unreasonable.
Develop Your Tactics & Metrics:
After you’ve created a successful vision statement and objectives that your entire team is behind, it is essential to determine the type of tactics you’re going to use to reach your objectives and what metrics you set in place to stay true to them. If you’re not using metrics to track the success of your tactics, you could be wasting a lot of valuable time. As you’re executing on the plan, tracking how you’re doing can give you a lot of data on how effective your tactics are at reaching your goals. If you’re not doing that, it’s harder to determine what’s working and what’s not.
There’s obviously a lot more to building out an effective relationship development or business development plan, but this should get the wheels turning. If you need help or want to learn more about how we can remove the chaos from your business development efforts and create a metric-driven business development plan then give us a shout.
Partner with Dinkel Business Development, LLC Today
If you want to learn more about metric-driven business development planning, we’re here to help. Please call us at 443.226.0163 or reach us via email at john@dinkelbd.com to get started.
