For years, the success of your development firm has been directly tied to the performance of your sales team. But these days, things have changed. Your clients are more demanding and sophisticated than ever before, and they’re not going to be wowed by big promises like they were in the past. These days, you have to deliver on those promises with a well-defined and proven process that repeatedly works while adding value to each client relationship along the way. If you can do this consistently, it will only be a matter of time before your competition is left in the dust and your company becomes an industry leader instead of just another competitor in a crowded marketplace. But how do you get there? You need a plan! The good news is that we’ve got one for you.
7 Reasons Your Development Firm Needs Business Process
For years, the success of your development firm has been directly tied to the performance of your sales team. But these days, things have changed. Your clients are more demanding and sophisticated than ever before, and they’re not going to be wowed by big promises like they were in the past. These days, you have to deliver on those promises with a well-defined and proven process that repeatedly works while adding value to each client relationship along the way. If you can do this consistently, it will only be a matter of time before your competition is left in the dust and your company becomes an industry leader instead of just another competitor in a crowded marketplace. But how do you get there? You need a plan! The good news is that we’ve got one for you.
New business development is a time-consuming and expensive process.
You’ve probably heard the statistic a million times: it takes up to six months to develop and launch a new product. If you’re in IT, that’s not surprising. But what if you’re in sales? Identifying target customers and qualifying leads is just as time-consuming and expensive as developing software, and it’s only one part of the larger business development equation. The good news is that there are tools available to help your company create, manage, track and measure this process so that all departments can work together more effectively. A great example of this is Workfront, a SaaS platform built specifically for businesses like yours with growing teams who need visibility into where their top priorities lie at any given moment so they can focus on what matters most.
Salespeople are often overworked, stressed about meeting sales targets, and can be unreliable at times.
Salespeople are often overworked and stressed about meeting sales targets. They can also be unreliable at times. Salespeople have a high turnover rate, so they’re challenging to manage, expensive to hire, difficult to fire, and in many cases, hard to replace. In order for your business to run smoothly, you need a process that ensures proper instructions are followed by everyone involved in the process of selling your product or service.
The sales environment is constantly changing.
The sales environment is constantly changing. For example, the size of the average deal has increased from $129K in 2016 to $190K in 2019. The average number of deals closed by an individual rep dropped from 6.7 to 4.1 between 2016 and 2018, while the median income per rep has remained steady at around $150k/year for the last five years. To keep up with these changes and more, your team needs to be able to adapt quickly, a process that requires training, tools, and processes around how they work together best.
A company needs a formalized approach to new business development.
The wrong process will make you waste time, money, and effort on the wrong salespeople and opportunities. And the wrong process will make it hard for your development firm to identify its ideal clients who genuinely need your services. The right process will help you find the right salespeople and ensure they’re working with the right prospects. The right process will also ensure that when one of those prospects expresses interest in hiring your firm, it’s possible to turn them into clients as quickly as possible.
The right business development process will ensure the right people meet the right prospects at the right time.
The right business development process will ensure the right people meet the right prospects at the right time. But how can you be sure your business development efforts are moving things forward? How do you know if your team is on track or if they’re spinning their wheels in all the wrong ways? How can you ensure that no one acting on behalf of your company is wasting time and effort—and money—pursuing leads that will never pan out? Business processes help know all that.
Your salespeople will be more productive if they have a business development process to follow.
As a salesperson, you want to be as productive as possible. In fact, you probably have several processes and procedures in place that help ensure your success. Yet many companies don’t have a formal process for how their sales team should conduct business development efforts. If you establish such a process, it can help the right people meet with prospects at the right time and ensure they can maximize their productivity by reducing administrative tasks. A well-designed business development process ensures that all members of your team are doing what they are supposed to be doing at each stage of the sales cycle and not just because they feel like it or think it needs doing but because there is an established workflow that makes sense both for them and for their prospects.
You need to increase your profit margins fast!
You need to increase your profit margins fast! You’ve got a business model that works, and you want to keep it going. You’re busy, but there’s one thing you know for certain: if you don’t fix this quickly, your company is going down the drain. What can you do? First of all, take a step back and ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish?” If the answer is anything other than “I want more money in my pocket,” then we need to work on defining what “more money” means for your company.
It takes planning, strategy, and good people to make the sales happen in your firm.
Let’s say you have a well-defined business process, with all the right people in place and a clear strategy for how to sell your offerings. What do you think is missing? The answer might surprise you: It isn’t another big feature, more training, a new platform, or even more money. The most important thing any development firm can add to its mix of processes, systems, and systems is a way to manage sales performance that measures what matters most for long-term success: acquiring clients who will become profitable over time.
Conclusion
A business development process is a key to aligning your salespeople and marketing efforts with your strategic goals, so you get new business flowing in faster. There are many benefits to having this process in place, but it can take some time and effort. If you’re one of those firms that have never had a formalized approach to new business development before, then now is the time to start!