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Step 5: Relationship Development

Step 5: Relationship development

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This fifth step is where the hard work, diligence and persistence pay off in your search for success in new business development.

People buy from people they know, like and trust and so having an active relationship with prospects who remember your name when they want to and can get in touch with you easily when they want to is very important.

How memorable is your business?

People are forgetful. What are the ways that prospects use to remember your business?

I know people save the newsletters that I mail out. I find people write replies to Newsletters that I sent months ago and the reason is that they keep them “just in case” they need to get in touch again. Many businesses do not use a business database and this is a shortcoming.

There are many ways to stay in touch with people and it’s beneficial, as your mailing list grows, for you to have some that are semi-automated and do not require a lot of your time in order to fulfil.

Good examples of these are autoresponders and newsletters. We also use social media as a way of staying in front of people we have a set-and-forget process of feeding RSS feeds through to our social media profiles so that we can appear to stay ahead of the news and on top of new developments even though we are not actually watching social media every hour of the day!

Staying memorable

Every business owner should have some form of regular networking in their diary. This could be as simple as a trade professional membership group, your chamber of commerce, or some specialist group for your area of expertise. Meeting people regularly is a very good way of staying front of mind. But beware, these people must be your prospects, not your competitors!

One way to find out if you are doing well in your relationship development is to track the number of new people we put into the business database. I collect business cards from as many people as I can who I think maybe of potential future interest to the business. This includes suppliers as well as prospective clients.

How and where do you get business cards? And what do you do with them?

It is important to have a careful plan to stay in touch with new people you meet. Some of them you want to spend time with and have a slowly developing individual relationship, others you can use mass communication. When planning your marketing, you need to think through these processes and organise all the communications necessary.

I have two special face-to-face relationship development techniques which I use. One is my circle of influence. The other is unhurried conversations.

A circle of influence is a small group of people who regularly feed new work through to us. These are people in parallel businesses whose services precede ours in the business service cycle. I meet with them on a quarterly basis or speak to them on the phone and they send us new enquiries and we are also able to reciprocate work back to them.

Unhurried conversations work on a slightly different format. It is a social event in the evening where I gather a group of interesting people around our board table for some afterwork drinks and nibbles. We use a format whereby only one person may speak any time. This forces everyone to listen carefully to what is being said. There is no agenda. The conversation takes whatever direction it wants to go. Learn more about the unhurried conversations format at this website. It is interesting that in this busy age of connected people and individuals so many people value a slower pace of talk, chat and interaction. Working at the slower pace allows my guests to take their time in thinking and considering whether they might work with us.

In summary – formalise all methods of building relationships between the business staff and prospective customers.

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Profile Raising

Step four: Profile raising for new business

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Getting well-known for what you do is a very long-term process. But this should not deter you because it’s relatively easy nowadays to become known for a specific skill or product.  

Becoming famous for being good at what you do in a public forum takes a few simple steps, repeated.

Symbol for profile raising as part of new business development

The goal of this step in the new business development process reinforces prospects’ decision-making when they come to select someone to do work for them or with them. If they can find out about you independently, and online they are far, far more likely to hire you then if they cannot find out about you.

Where is your brand findable in public?

So let’s have a look at the different places where a stranger could find out about you and your business and the things that you do.

  1. Do you write articles?
  2. Have you been mentioned in the news?
  3. What about public speaking?
  4. Have you ever been to a conference?
  5. Do you ever speak or present at business events like BNI, the Chamber of Commerce or Local Business / Professional Membership Associations?
  6. What about running workshops or webinars?
  7. Do you host events at your own premises?
  8. Could you invite clients and prospects to learn more about your skill and expertise in a face-to-face environment?

Here are some of the things that you could do to improve your “find-ability”.

Business awards Does your industry run annual awards and could you enter?  Many parts of New Zealand have local Westpac Business Awards happening every year.  This not only adds to your internal feelgood factor for the team by entering, but it also gives you handy PR and some external credibility if you get through to the final stages.

What about opinion formers? There are always people who are prepared to stand up and talk about your industry; could they quote you? These people may be journalists but often nowadays they might be bloggers or podcasters.

Networking is important for most businesses particularly if you want to win clients locally. Having actually met someone is a very strong and easy way of building trust. Find out where your local networking opportunities are. This may be the Chamber of Commerce, local meetup groups or BNI.

I do recommend you check out the website meetup.com because a lot of good events are run and publicised through there.  You can search by location to filter.   And also, look at Eventbrite for your country. You will see that Creative Agency Secrets does a lot of Eventbrite work and we find the people actually search this site and sign up to our events.

Members of your staff also talk about your company and it’s important that every time they mention your firm you want it to be positive and also consistent. It’s important that you, the business owner, are not the only ambassador for the business.  Can you enthuse them?

Conferences, trade shows and exhibitions are another good place where you can get better-known. You could run a trade stand or you could just attend and see who else is there and talk to the other people you meet. If you’re able to get onto the conference speaking platform as a speech-giver then of course it’s a very good way to put your message across in a subtle manner and showcase your expertise. Do your research locally – are there conferences running and can you get a copy of the full attendees list if you are a speaker?  This gives you an opportunity to get in touch with people after the event as well.Symbol for profile raising as part of new business development

Read the other posts from this series here!

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Step three: New business pipeline

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How well are you doing at winning new customers and prospects? Is it very important because your percentage success rate at winning opportunities has a direct impact on the number of opportunities that you convert paying customers.

symbol for new business pipelineEven a small improvement in your success rate will help you to make more money.

Step 3 in our Methodology is all about the steps prospects go through before they decide to buy from you.

Recent new business success

Let’s start by doing an analysis of your recent business successes. Go to your accounts software and print out a list of all of the invoices you have raised over the last six months. Make a note of the total sums payable by each individual and rank than by size so that you have the largest paying customers at the top of the page.

Now let’s have a look at some of the history of each of these customers or clients.

  1. How did you first get to know them?
  2. What dates did they first get in touch with you?
  3. What was the first opportunity they discussed?
  4. What was the final proposal to put to them? Was there a difference from 3 above?
  5. Who led the discussions?

Now let’s do the exact same thing for your existing prospects. You should have a list somewhere of all of the prospective new clients with whom you’re in discussion at the moment. Print that list out and answer the same questions as you did with your previous clients. Below is a form that you can use to fill out which may help you to order your thoughts for these.

Classify new business, lead sources,

Where does business come from?

Within your list of prospects may be some which are not yet concluded. Write down what’s the next step is towards bringing them closer to having a discussion with you and making a decision to buy.

How many biz dev stages are there?

A new business pipeline may have many steps, frequently there are common steps which all prospects go through. Usually for a B2B business they start with initial discussions, and you refine your offer and what the customer wants to buy, and you had a price and discussed whether they are prepared to pay for it, then you negotiate and then you either win or lose the business. It is a pretty standard sales funnel.

For B2C businesses the products are standardised and the steps have fewer reviews and revisions.

See if you can Identify what stage each of your current opportunities are at. Note: I put into an opportunity any discussion which has the potential to become new work – but I set it at a very early stage to reflect this.

Look for patterns in the data

What causes you to win business and what makes the sales funnel longer or shorter? Try to identify the causes of positive and negative situations in your sales funnel. These are areas to focus on – the ones which deliver faster revenues are worth focusing on.

If you have lost some opportunities recently, one tip I recommend is to ask a neutral third party to ring these people up and find out why you didn’t win the business. People will often be more honest than speaking to someone who does not work for the business. This can give you great insight.

Next time we’ll be looking at your business and brand profile and how to raise your profile.

Read the other posts from this series here!

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Marketing Communications

Step two: Marketing Communications

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In this section we’re going to look at all the different collateral you use to talk about your business to a new prospect.

Search around your office and pull out a copy of every single thing that you can find which has been printed or used electronically to describe your business services and products. Take a couple coffees with you as this might take some time!Symbol for marketing communications

So the sort of things that you should be looking for are printed collateral – these might include business cards your brochure case studies printed service or product sheets, notepads.

Other things should definitely include in your collateral list are your business website and any other listings that you have on external websites such as Yellow Pages, Hot Frog, Localist, Finda et cetera.

Now have a think about other information that you send out regularly these could be newsletters you maybe write a business blog, or articles that go in the newspaper or maybe a specialist magazine – add them to the list.  Do you also have other things you do like videos? Or maybe articles on LinkedIn.

How about social media? Do you have a business profile on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram there are many more of course so just check all of these and add to the master list.

Which works well for your business?

Now the critical thing is to see whether or not these marketing communications have been effective for your business. Look at the design of each one, is it a consistent? Is your logo, branding and strapline the same on every single one?  What about those external listings websites like the Yellow Pages are you using the same words to describe your business in every single place and what about the website landing pages are they all the same?

If you don’t have firm data, just give yourself a score out of 10 for each item listed.

How often do you send out newsletters, articles and other expert updates? Who writes them? What topics do they generally cover?  How about press releases?  Do all of these align with your business mission statement that we discussed in the previous chapter?

I am expecting that you will find some inconsistencies. This is normal. Make a list of the different items and those you perceive that need to be improved and plan who is going to do this and by when.

If there are obvious gaps in your list which you know should be filled, add them – or make it a “wish list” of marketing materials you’d like to have available.

Read the other posts from this series here!

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Step One: State Your Business

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This section is all about explaining in as few words as possible what’s your business does, what product or service it makes, and who you sell it to.

One way of describing this is an elevator pitch. Let me give you an example my business creative agency secrets, has the strapline “marketing success unlocked”.

That is the quick version of what it is that we do.  We offer marketing success to people who previously found this a problem that they could not resolve. You notice that this actually is also incorporated into our logo which is two things, a C. A. S. initials and also a padlock which is open. Thanks to Ross Murray who is our wonderful graphic designer, he designed this for us and it was a great moment when we saw what he had created and how well it aligned with what our business does. You can contact Ross and Angela Murray at www.redspark.co.nz

We then have a longer version of our elevator pitch.

A marketing agency specialising in execution marketing for small and medium businesses.

And of course we have an even longer version, you can read this on our website in the about us page.

How do you describe your business?

Here are some ways that you can help to think through the different options

  • What’s the company history?
  • Who are the key personnel?
  • Who are you trying to sell to, your target customers?
  • Do you have some specific objectives of the business, this may be to grow it, to sell it, to create an income for yourself, to be a social enterprise?  There are many more
  • Who are your competitors, what is unique, special or different about you?
  • What’s your track record? In previous businesses and in this current one.  What sort of clients have you helped?
  • Do you have case studies? Are they well known?  How did they reflect on your business?

Write down longhand the answers to all of these questions.

You may have some other questions that you think are particularly relevant to yourself. From this, you want to try and build 3 separate statements about your organisation.

The first one needs to be the equivalent of a strapline to go alongside the company name and logo. Here are some examples from clients

SD Talent, best practice human resource management for your team, outsourced.

Crossfire, trusted fire engineering.

Baucher Consulting Ltd, better tax stories for you: a better tax system for everyone.

Read the other posts from this series here!

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