Business developments are the initiatives and activities a company takes towards generating more business. The goal is to increase revenues, achieve growth by business expansion, enhancing profitability in terms of strategic partnerships and business activities.
Startup- Roleplays
A budding start-up would look for support in many avenues including promotions, R & D, marketing, business growth, customer support and re-engineering current processes to obtain better outputs.
Imagine as a start-up –
- What are your challenges?
- What is your growth plan?
- Do you have a unique value proposition?
- A well-defined target audience
- Apt human resources
- Articulate financial planning
- Sensitive to competitor market moves
As a start-up, you need to step on various stones at once to build an equilibrium as well as plan ahead. Some of the ways in which start-ups can plan business development are by-
- Promoting Business Online
Depending on your product and target audience, you can think of the online mode of business as an alternate and important way of doing business. Today most of the market audience is readily accessible to the online media and they can be easily approached under a strategic approach and restricted budget.
- Offering Business for Franchising
Businesses cannot decide one fine day, I want to offer to the franchise. It has to be a long preparation, like working on a standardised process to obtain positive results. But if you think your business is set and can be replicated under a franchise model, you can approach consultants who can guide you with working out a franchise package. This is a faster and more organised way of growing your business.
- Multiple Facilities
If you think your business has the potential to serve different locations, target audiences and also the back-end resources to manage the entire operations, you can build a chain of outlets or facilities for quicker market reach and expansion.
Strategic planning which includes financial planning, infrastructure management and resource management is the prime necessity as a part of the feasibility test.
- Watch your competitor’s move
It is essential that you are wary of your competitors’ moves. Sometimes, it is good to watch competitors make a move and based on their positive experience, you can take a similar plunge. You can save a lot of money and resources in the analysis as your competitor has already done that. However, if you think your product is unique and can be very successful, you should take the first opportunity to launch it after a thorough market survey.
While you practise the above moves, it is important not just to understand, observe and analyse, but also to pivot your plan, after ascertaining where you are going wrong, or what is lacking.
As businesses, you will always have your set of individual challenges and will need bespoke ways to deal with them, but to perform business development is to be awake and aware of how the market is functioning, and what the competitors are doing. What does the audience need? Is my product/service being able to meet the consumer requirements? How profitable is my business? And a lot of continuous analysis to make your business development strategies more meaningful.
Authored by: Ms.Neeta Chavan, Director, BNI Navi Mumbai
