The Basics of Business Development

F rom increasing sales to outsmarting your competitors, business development is all about the growth of a business. At its most basic, business development can be defined as developing ideas, concepts and initiatives to facilitate the growth of a business. This includes almost everything associated with the business – increasing revenue, expanding into new market segments, reducing costs, improving customer relationships, etc. Let’s find out how business development plans integrate different departments of a business.

• Sales: One aspect of business development is assessing the potential of new markets in order to set an achievable sales target. It’s then transferred on to the sales department in order to decide on the strategies for achieving those targets.
• Marketing: In order to achieve the targeted growth, the marketing department sets up strategies for promotion and advertising. However, they depend on the business development plan for their budget allocation.
• Legal & Finance: Is it financially and legally worthwhile to enter a new market independently? Or is it more beneficial to go into a strategic partnership with other companies? Business development answers these questions after consulting with the legal and the finance team.
• Product & Project Management: To support growth, business development analyses the requirements for new facilities, products and services, etc. These analyses is then gets passed on to the product and project management teams to implement those plans.
• Customer Service: After analysing current strategies, business development prepares plans for future customer relationship development in order to enhance sales and company reputation. Then the customer service team gets involved in fleshing out those plans and put them into practices.

To conclude, business development is a key component of any business that makes many key decisions and provides guidance to all other departments in order to achieve an overall improvement of the business.