Small and large, all B2B businesses need an effective development strategy to be successful. In fact, 71% of fast-growing businesses have written plans that they frequently use, according to BusinessDIT findings. Furthermore, BusinessDIT found that entrepreneurs with business plans are 260% more likely to launch.
If a business plan is so vital to the success of a B2B company, why doesn’t everyone have one?
Well, because they can be difficult to develop. Effective business plans are data-driven and intentional, aiming to provide tangible value to your customers. This guide will help you assemble your business’ B2B strategy in 2024. We’ll provide you with relevant resources for assembling your business plan, check a few necessary boxes, and then put you on the path of beginning business outreach and iterating your strategy based on feedback.
While this post will be primarily aimed at CRE business development, the methodology and high-level strategy can still be applied to many other industries.
Step 1: Gather Data
Data collection is perhaps not the most exciting step, but it is essential to develop an effective strategy. Data collection involves collecting information about:
Potential leads
People
End users
Gatekeepers
Decision-makers
Companies
Contemporaries
Competitors
Adjacent businesses
Industry
Location statistics
Industry data
Historical findings
Failed businesses
Successful businesses
This is a lot of data to discover, so let’s break it down a bit.
Potential Leads
Gather data about potential leads with the intent to maximize the ROI on your lead-generation and prospecting efforts. This is where Biscred shines.
With Biscred’s massive database, for example, CRE-related businesses can identify their customer bases so their marketing and sales teams can target not only the right audiences, but also tailor their messaging about their products and/or services. In the example above, we filtered to property management companies in Texas with experience in mixed use, retail and office CRE and manage a minimum of 10 properties. Our results delivered 167 potential leads.
We dive deeper into this in a related post: Generating better commercial real estate leads.
It details:
How generating better leads will lead to a higher prospective net ROI
Resources that you can use to generate leads
How to interpret the data that you collect about your leads
Assessing the quality of both the lead generation method and the leads themselves
Acquire a few good prospective leads, and identify the key decision makers at the business. For a simple guide on this, read our post on finding key decision makers by email or phone.
These individuals will fall into a few categories:
End users: The people who actually use the products or services provided. In the B2B industry, these users can look very different from field to field. For a proptech company, this could be the IT department, HR, and anyone who interacts with proprietary software daily.
Gatekeepers: These individuals stand between you and the person who can sign a project’s contract. It could be a management team or a procurement office, depending on the industry or business. Using our proptech example, this could also be the IT department. Someone in a position of seniority could be a potential gatekeeper.
Primary decision-makers: These are the vendors, subcontractors, or suppliers who sign the documents that allow for a purchase to be made. They’re the ones responsible for making the end decision for a sale. End users and gatekeepers influence decision makers, so you can see why knowing all three would matter!
As you identify the people and businesses that your industry needs for success, we recommend reading through Biscred’s approach to CRE data. We’ll go through a bit of how we collect data and why that makes the data we collect have so much value.
We also have a few separate guides on how to find commercial construction leads and how to find commercial cleaning leads for your industry-specific concerns.
Step 2: Fill Your B2B Tech Toolbox
We think of the many B2B technologies available to you as tools in a box. If you don’t know what they do, it can be overwhelming to look down at that box and all the possibilities within. If you know what to look for, you’ll quickly be able to pick out the ones you require and the ones you don’t.
We cover your B2B tech stack in this post, along with examples of each. But the technologies that a business development representative (BDR) or sales development representative (SDR) may rely on for day-to-day tasks include the following.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
Software that helps businesses organize and oversee customer interactions and relationships. Good CRMs work across all industries and help you manage prospects, leads, contacts, and interactions. You may even be able to build libraries of resources and communicate with customers directly through the system.
Content management systems (CMS)
Software that manages digital content. This can be email marketing, website content, social media, and more. Good CMSes help you plan, schedule, and publish material for your business.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Technology can help monitor and measure what leads are doing on your website. How far do they get down your digital sales funnel? What do they respond to more on your website? A good CRO will help with testing new website elements and features.
As you review your tech stack, make sure that your methods of outreach aren’t being flagged as spam or bouncing entirely. Email marketing is powerful, but must be managed carefully. If you would like to learn more about best practices in B2B email marketing, we recommend this post on understanding SPF, DMARC, and DKIM.
STEP 3: Choose Your Biz Dev Channels
As you assemble your business development tools, you may be wondering about what channels you’ll be broadcasting your content on. Certain tools, after all, are meant for certain channels. So how are you going to attract your business? In other words, what’s your marketing campaign look like?
Your marketing media fits into these three categories, and may even fit into multiple categories. A marketing campaign usually uses multiple types of media for an all-around strong message. Briefly, the different types of media are:
Paid: Media that your business purchases to be displayed on another platform. For example, a TV commercial is paid media. A brand paid the network for the time slot in between the content to show their advertising media. Paid media is simple and proven to be effective, but can have extra costs.
Earned: Media that’s earned isn’t actually produced by you; instead, it’s content that your audience, customers, and advocates produce that is relevant to your brand. An example would be a newspaper review of your product or service. Earned media is “free,” but you do have to earn it. There’s also little control over the messaging of earned media.
Owned: This media involves the information channels that you own, such as your website or social media accounts. Producing media for these channels is a relatively lower cost than paid media. An example would be your business’ blog or YouTube channel. Owned media can be a low-cost way of generating leads, but also may fall flat and draw very little traffic if not SEO optimized.
If you want to learn more about social media marketing, you might consider advertising through LinkedIn and understanding how LinkedIn ads work.
So how do you categorize all of these leads?
Inbound leads are the prospects that are themselves reaching out to your business because they’re interested in a service, product, or possible partnership. Inbound leads come as a result of your digital campaigns, marketing, referrals, networking events and however else you’re putting out information about your business to generate interest. Inbound leads have a lot of value because it’s assumed the lead already has interest in your brand.
Outbound lead generation is where you initiate the conversation with the prospective customer. They haven’t expressed any interest in your company — you’re the one who, based on research, suspects that they may be interested to learn about your brand. Outbound lead generation is the result of cold calls to contacts, email campaigns, and networking. Outbound lead generation can tap a much larger pool of people, but needs careful research to make sure you’re contacting the right leads.
To learn more about outbound lead generation strategy, check out this post on some of the best practices for outbound sales.
STEP 4: Create Customer Profiles
You’ve already started to sort your leads in the previous step, so let’s take it a step further into how you sort your leads even further. A potential strategy would be organizing all of your contacts, or business relationships, into different “buckets” based on how frequently they interact with you.
This can be as many buckets as necessary, but the point is to see how deep your brand’s relationship is with its customers and how you, potentially, can move the leads that don’t interact with your brand as much toward stronger, more established relationships.
You can learn more about this segmented workflow in our post on outbound sales best practices where we cover the strategy in more detail.
If you want to learn more about how your business contacts fit into the B2B sales pipeline, we’ve got a post on the different stages of this pipeline. This details the stages of a typical buying journey.
Awareness
Consideration
Deliberation
We’ll also recommend identifying the groups that you absolutely must get in front of: The A-list, which is your highest quality, most valuable prospects. But, you should also be aware of your B prospects, the people and companies that are still worth engaging with as potential prospects.
In this case study about Biscred customer BridgeInvest, you can learn more about this two-prong approach to prospecting and lead generation.
STEP 5: Define Value Prop
Your business’s value proposition is the value that you offer to your prospective clients in return for their money. In other words — What do you have that they would be willing to pay for?
The value of a product or service isn’t as rigid as you may think. A lot of factors contribute to what a customer is willing to pay for. The messaging of your brand, the individualized care toward a lead, the unique positioning of the brand, marketing materials, media on the website, and just about every other forward-facing element of your business contribute to your value proposition.
To simplify this, think of what problems your leads have that your business can solve.
Identifying the issues that your prospects need to solve also involves separating your messaging into segments based on the prospect’s relationship with your business. For example, a commercial roofing contractor may have prospects in the following categories:
Commercial builders looking for roof installation during the construction process
Prospects who need roof repairs
Businesses looking for new complete roofing systems on their property
Each of these prospects may fit into different categories: A, B, C, etc.
The position for your brand’s value proposition would change depending on each segment of your prospects. It’s up to you to identify if the A segment is more important than the V segment. Put yourself in their position. Craft your marketing material and your branding to suit the needs of these segments.
To practice this, check out practicing your sales pitch with AI. Finally, learning how to handle objections in sales will help you better understand the value proposition your business has with its customers.
STEP 6: Begin Outreach
As you start moving toward outreach with your marketing material, we recommend crafting different templates depending on the prospects that you identified in the previous step. Let’s look at an example. A B2B business has identified two prospect categories: A and B.
Prospect A
Prospect A has a clear problem that your business is poised to solve.
Present your most relevant expertise first and list the roster of past clients (with permission, of course) that legitimizes your business.
Appeal to their frustrations — the concerns you identified in the previous steps. If decision-makers are risk-averse, you might want to focus on how you can help them avoid headaches, rather than make lofty promises.
The material that you send to this prospect will have a standard format similar to something like an event follow-up email. You can read more about crafting those here.
Prospect B
Prospect B doesn’t have an immediate need, as far as you can tell, but they’re on your radar.
Be up front with this discrepancy (“You might not need a commercial cleaning service today, but …”).
Offer to stay connected in case that changes down the road, or to spread your networks further.
For more about strategist for contacting prospects, and to learn more about the techniques for prospecting, we recommend this post on warm calling. This is a delicate step, so practice and do your research.
Step 7: Test, Learn and Iterate on Your Biz Dev Strategy
As you execute business development strategies, don’t assume you’re going to get it all right on the first try. A successful B2B business development strategy probably came from a long line of iterations.
The road to success is paved with mistakes, so find the ways that you can measure and analyze your marketing campaigns so you can make educated decisions on what to adjust. This post on 4 powerful outbound sales tactics details good analytics to use and where you can track them. It will also explain more about how to interpret the raw data that you collect.
Another post we’ll recommend is about net promoter score (NPS), which is a metric that’s used to judge and quantify customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s determined based on feedback surveys.
Another statistic to keep in mind on top of all this is cost per lead. This post about calculating cost per lead will help you make sure that your marketing costs don’t exceed the average value that you’re receiving from your customers. Even if you’re generating a lot of leads, if your cost is too high, you still won’t make a lot of money.
Main photo ID 315449025 | Business Development Strategy | Andranik Hakobyan | Dreamstime.com
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