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Skills and Techniques: Selling, Leading, Communicating, and Managing since 1987

Personality Assessment Tools from Inscape Publishing (DiSC products) - Authorized Distributor

Major Focus:

1. Organic growth vs. M&A growth

2. Use Web resources to analyze market potential and create a strategic sales plan

3. Adapt LinkedIn Advance for Networking techniques to reach influencers and decision makers

4. Understand value is a future event, leverage the business challenges of: time and uncertainty

5. Use business acumen financial language to get their attention: cash, working capital, margin / income, NPV, IRR, etc

6. Leverage industry knowledge to craft a solution

7. Use Tablets and Cloud technology to improve productivity of sales professionals

What is Business Development? It is the ability to understand business models, needs, and challenges to recommend a solution. It is being prepared to discuss current issues in the customer's industry and describe in financial terms how you can impact the issues. You need to be able to talk the language of business: Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Working Capital, Revenue vs. Cash, etc. which will get their attention and differentiate you from the competition. As a business development manager, your primary goal is organic growth by tapping new markets or by taking marketshare from your competition. The initial step is to analyze the market and craft a business development campaign that maximizes your strengths and attacks the weak areas of the competition. Both require strategic and tactical skills and techniques. And in these extremely competitive times, when you finally get the initial meeting with the prospect, three people are figuratively in the meeting: you, the prospect, and the incumbent supplier. And all suppliers claim to have the best customer service, the highest quality, the fastest delivery, competitive pricing, etc. It is not only what you do but how you do it that makes the difference in business development. Skills included in the training modules will provide the tools to structure a strategic business plan and the tactics needed to help the prospect discover what they should be getting from a true business partnership. Some people buy based on intuition and some on logic / rational factors. We stress the need to initially present a financially based logical proposal grounded in financial language to get the rational attention of the decision maker.

Our business development manager skills training is a pragmatic, experiential engagement that will enable the manager to be proactive in uncovering concerns and cost - justifying solutions to address the value gap. Value based selling goes beyond just a competitive price by identifying the abilities and services you offer that will help the prospect lower their costs, improve working capital, or sell more of their products. Effective business development techniques include how to make recommendations that will add value and have measurable impact on the top or bottom line of the income statement. Many times a business development professional may feel he / she is using value added consultative skills, but the client views the proposition as expected performance. Keep in mind that the value added offering of today, in the client's eyes, becomes the standard of tomorrow: the value bar keeps going up.

Business development knowledge, skills, and abilities:

• Craft a strategic sales plan based on PEST of the industry and SWOT of the business unit
• How to maximize LinkedIn Advance for Networking
  Get automatic updates on saved Advanced Searches
  Utilize the Export Tool and Connection Surfing
  Offering and requesting introductions
  
• Adapt to different communication and motivation needs and review strategies developed for a particular prospect
• Deal effectively with "price only" potential customers
• Use the benefit to gain or loss to avoid model to gauge interest
• Know how to identify the "pain" and exacerbate the performance gap of the current supplier
• Present benchmarking analysis and industry knowledge to establish credibility
• Modify conversation topics based on the "level" of contact
• Review the structure of a "three objective" proposal
• Use financial business acumen skills to dollarize the solution
• Understand business development manager skills in negotiation: when to make the first offer, when and how to make and ask for concessions and how to make the other person feel they won
• Execute a business development campaign based on an action plan
• Reference examples of effective business development manager skills

Business Development research links:

http://www.census.gov

http://www.naics.com/search.htm

http://factfinder2.census.gov

http://www.highbeam.com

http://www.industrynet.com/search.asp