Many early stage entrepreneurs and solo professionals struggle with the discipline to maintain effective new business strategies relying instead on referrals. There is a better way to build your new business chops.
How do you feel about the effectiveness of your business development initiatives? We all recognize new clients are of vital importance, however many solo professionals only do business development activities when they’re not engaged with the demands of their paying clients. If you want your business to grow, your business development strategies and tactics must be working for you all the time regardless of how busy you are with your current clients. Unlike referrals, sustained business development activities will create predictability in your business. Business development is an imperative you cannot ignore if you are to have a thriving business.
Business development is not selling.
Selling is about creating and presenting your solution to a specific problem the client-to be has shared with you after much conversation. Business development involves a lengthy process of turning suspects into prospects. The objective of your business development activities is to have a full pipeline or funnel of qualified prospects that may do business with you in the future– usually six months to a year down the road.
Your business development strategy must enable you to discover, attract, and qualify only those prospects who are a good fit for you, value your expertise, and will pay a premium fee for the solution you provide. To accomplish this, you must first articulate a specialized value proposition around your expertise, and position your value proposition in the minds of prospects in a manner that separates and distinguishes you from your competitors.
Be a value-creator not an order-taker.
To increase your influence in the buying cycle, you must center your business development strategy on building a “value-creator” positioning. The reality we all face today is clients have abundant choice. The basic economic principle of supply and demand governs the price of literally every product or service. When your prospective clients have abundant choice, you will most likely have little or no power in the buying cycle. Clients will naturally be focused on obtaining your services at the lowest price possible.
Value-creators are highly paid specialists–known for their expertise in either a professional discipline (PR, web developer, writer, designer, etc.) and / or a specific market vertical, (apparel, packaged goods, legal, health care, etc.) Value-creators build their business and reputations on deep and narrow expertise. On the other hand, order-takers are usually generalists who try to be all things to all people. They are in abundant supply and always compete on price.
When you position your expertise as a specialized value-creator, your business development activities will automatically be more focused and productive.
You will more easily be able to identify your prospects and build your database accordingly. Also, your ability to attract clients-to-be will not be limited by your location because clients who require your expertise can come from everywhere. This expands your potential for new business opportunities exponentially!
Turning an interruption into a conversation.
Once you’ve made the decisions about your specialized positioning, and your positioning is properly reflected and stated on your website and other marketing material, you will be building your database of suspects and reaching out to them in some fashion. Business development means you will have to interrupt people. Of course no one likes to be interrupted. That’s why you must understand that the business development process is not about creating business next week. Business development involves a long process of turning an interruption into a conversation. There are two types of outbound business development communication to your suspect list– passive and direct outreach. Both are necessary to align your efforts to the buying cycle of your clients-to-be.
Passive Outreach
Passive outreach is a business development process focused on creating awareness to your business. This may sound like a colossal understatement, but how you create awareness has an important impact on your ability to turn an interruption into a conversation. The best method for accomplishing this is to continuously share your expertise and knowledge with your targeted tribe of clients-to-be. Here are some items to consider in building passive awareness:
- create a blog and write about what you know will be valuable and useful to your target audience. Make sure people can easily subscribe to receive your blog articles directly.
- Submit articles and white papers to other bloggers and offline publications in your area of expertise.
- Develop a long-term strategy for using social media, and begin to participate in the online dialogue that is exploding right now in every professional discipline.
- Become a featured speaker or panelist at business conferences and events centered on your particular area of expertise.
- Use email marketing to distribute your content, share news and information to your target audience of suspect clients-to-be. Make sure you comply with all the protocols and regulations surrounding spam.
These passive outreach activities should never involve direct solicitations for business. At this level, your focus should be about adding goodwill to the collective dialogue your clients-to-be are interested in. This builds trust, which in turn builds credibility to your claim of expertise.
Done properly, your passive outreach business development efforts will create opportunities for you to respond to inbound inquiries from prospective clients you are seeking your specialized expertise. I like to think of passive outreach as chumming the water to attract the fish.
Direct Outreach
You might automatically associate direct outreach as cold calling. I never cold call and you shouldn’t either. (Unless you enjoy rejection). Direct outreach is also about creating awareness to your expertise, but the methods are more highly targeted and involve some form of incentive for your client-to-be to reward you with the time of day. The advantage of direct outreach initiatives is the potential for discovering more near-term opportunity that you can effectively qualify as a good fit for your expertise. Of course, there are many tactics you can utilize, but here is the process I believe is most effective in early stage direct outreach:
- Send a snail mail introduction letter to a prospect. The letter must be brief (no longer than your little finger). In the letter you “invite” them to visit your blog/site so they can access your knowledge sharing, become of aware of your specialized expertise and learn how other companies have benefited from their association with you. Enclose your business card with the letter.
- In those instances when you have real knowledge that a client-to-be is currently seeking a solution to a specific problem, you may outline in your introduction letter /email your capabilities and experience in providing a solution. You may attach appropriate case studies as proof of your expertise.
- Follow up your introduction with a phone call to qualify their interest, and your capacity to be a good fit for them. Ask only for their permission to include them on your mailing list, or to be subscribed to your blog posts. Usually you will do this as a voice mail message. I suggest simply stating your return number and your email address.
I suggest in these early direct outreach communications that you do not ask for an appointment to a sales presentation.
Remember you goal is to establish awareness and credibility only! People simply do not have time to attend random webinars and sales presentations at this early stage. Believe me, if the client-to-be sees a good fit and they have a current need, they’ll let you know.
Inbound conversation is the goal of outbound business development.
As a stated earlier, business development is not selling! The goal of business development is to drive inbound conversations with clients-to-be and focus those conversations on discovering if there is a good fit between their need and your capacity to add value to them. Once that conversation starts, you have moved into a deeper phase in the sales cycle with the client-to-be. To work effectively, you must maintain the on-going discipline to actively pursue passive and direct outreach to your prospects.
If you are to grow your business beyond referrals, business development activities must be consistent and focused on turning suspects into prospects and your interruptions into valuable conversations.
