Business Development Strategies For Small Companies

Statistics already show that half of all small businesses and companies fail within their first five years of existence.

With one in three surviving the past ten years, it is already a tough terrain to maneuver. Small businesses need a strategy to get into the market and stay ahead. 

Even as a small company owner, you can still feel lost and make error-riddled business decisions even with an attractive small business loan in place.

Business development strategies are there to guide small companies through growth while focusing on crucial operations such as employee development, marketing, and partnerships.

In this article, you’ll find out why you need a business development plan and the top strategies to use.

Why apply a business development plan?

The business development plan shows the process used to identify, acquire, and groom new business opportunities and clients to drive growth and profits.

It describes the strategy small company owners will use to achieve these goals in detail. Here’s why you need to apply a development plan:

• To Boost Sales and Profitability: Every small business owner is in the business for profit. Passion doesn’t pay the bills, so profitability is one way to measure a business’s growth. A solid business development plan allows a small company first to understand the most profitable markets, document revenue models, and pursue those profitable markets.
• Understand Your Customers Better: Knowing your target markets and key demographics are open secrets to business growth and critical parts of development plans. You get to see things from your customer’s perspectives and figure how best to win them over.
• Opportunities For Expansion: Sooner or later, small businesses/companies will need to expand into newer markets that hold more opportunities. This is what business development caters to - presenting expansion opportunities via research and making expansion possible.
• Enhance Your Small Company’s Image: One of the benefits of applying a business development strategy is that it helps improve your company image. Business development plans analyze both your customers and your company’s daily operations, and this plan’s information is helpful for business developers and marketing campaigns. (btw check this digital marketing company west palm beach for the help with enhancing your company's image in web)

Top 5 business development strategies for a small business

The type of firm, available resources, and goals determine the kind of strategies it sets up and follows.

These are some top development strategies that a small business can follow:

• Referrals: Referrals are one of the business development strategies small companies need in their arsenal, and it starts with keeping good relationships with existing business partners and clients. Most firms get some of their business from referrals, relying on clients and contacts to identify suitable prospects for their services. The key is in using new digital strategies that increase the chances of referrals while making your area of expertise visible.
• Networking: Networking has a reputation for being one of the most universally used business development projects for firms that offer professional services. It, however, can be time-consuming and costly to pull off, but the rewards to your business outweigh the cost. 
• Sponsorships and Advertising: While traditional advertising may not offer much growth, more modern forms and techniques give brilliant results. More so, targeted online advertising is one of the more promising tactics to use.
• Content Marketing and Thought Leadership: It helps create higher visibility while encouraging prospects to engage via speaking, writing, and putting out online content. These contents should demonstrate your expertise and how you use it to solve your clients’ problems.
• Direct Mail and Telemarketing: These are some precise strategies to use. Direct mail might be expensive. However, will an accurate and up-to-date mailing and call list, the right message sent at the right time, you can get prospects that help your business development strategy.

Aspects of developing a successful business development strategy

Small companies need a business development plan primarily for the guidance it gives the business’ vision, mission, purpose, values, target audience, service/product to achieve success.

Here are some aspects of developing a successful business development strategy: 

• Go back to your company or business vision
• Evaluate your business and use market penetration statistics to measure how much of the market you control
• Define and identify your target audience as well as their changing taste and preferences
• Identify your competition, what they offer, pricing policies, their marketing campaigns, and the successes they recorded.
• Bring up new and fresh ideas and set more recent priorities from your evaluation
• Assess your development plan and set goals.

Conclusion

Most small business or company owners either have no strategies or do not see the need to implement one.

But if your company is at a stage where a fast boost will do it a world of good, you need to figure out the development strategies to put in place.

Always know that a healthy budget from an easily accessible small business loan can help you successfully implement your business development strategy.