Crack the Code on Business Development

In Best Practices by Marita Peterson

Cracking the Code

Have you figured out how to crack the code on business development? Have you aligned your sales, marketing, and operations to work with each other seamlessly? Is your process scalable?

Easier said than done, right?

What we’ve learned at BDPros through over a decade of experience in process-based sales, marketing, and operations is that you can’t separate the three when it comes to B2B business development. We’ve tried the siloed approach, and it does okay – until it doesn’t. Getting the entire team – marketing, sales, and operations – to come together can be like herding cats sometimes, but luckily for you we’ve learned how to herd cats and we’re going to give you some of our secrets.

Programming Your Business Development

This is what we like to call our process and procedure creation method. In essence, when we create the processes to drive B2B sales seamlessly and the procedures to integrate sales, marketing, and operations, we’re putting together code to tell our business development machine how to run.

Process-Based Sales

From CRM setup and data tracking procedures to detailed workflows and pipeline checkdowns, we’ve got a process for everything.

Most importantly, we make sure to stick to it. We’ve set up the infrastructure and put down the code. We aren’t about to waste our hard work and the tough lessons we’ve learned over the years.

One of the really important steps in business development and growth is to write down your processes and procedures. How to use your CRM appropriately, what typical workflows look like, cadence of outreach – any and every process needs to be recorded. People will inevitably leave (c’est la vie) and we don’t want their knowledge to leave with them.

Documenting all the details gives your team access to the information they need to do their job, and they can also see how the other arms of your company work.

Which brings us to the next part – herding your cats. Getting sales, operations, and marketing to work together with a unified goal. You need the transparency of process to create trust, and you need trust to successfully execute your program – no bugs here!

Sales – The End Result

Sales support and growth is what you have when you put all the pieces of your business development code together. You combine the base code (operations) with the user interface (marketing), and you have a finished, polished tool you can use to create scalable and sustainable growth. Let’s start at the beginning.

Outreach and Prospecting

There are a ton of different options available for you when it comes to making outreach. Emails, calls, social media outreach, referrals, trade shows – how do you know which one to prioritize?

Which works best? Does cold calling even work? What about email marketing, or trade shows, or social media strategy? Does any of it work?

The answer we always come to is that all of it works… sometimes.

To maximize our potential success in the B2B arena, the processes we’ve set up and system we adhere to is why we can leverage all of these options at the same time.

The Workflow SOP

One of our success is developing a workflow with all aspects of your process integrated. An email following every cold call, follow-up calls on opens and clicks for email campaigns, lead hand-off – all of this is documented in our workflow.

We want to know exactly who does what to eliminate confusion.

We know who is following up on leads, who is taking meetings, and who creates the proposals and moves in for the close. Everyone knows their part in the sales process.

We know how often to make outreach, what tools to use, how many touch points are most effective, and we know how and when to document the information to move it through the pipeline. And we stick to it.

No exceptions.

Our sales team can only accomplish this by working closely with our operations team – the base code of our program.

Operations – The Base Code

Our operations team is integral. They create the infrastructure we log our data into, they do the maintenance and data cleansing, the prospect procurement, the analytics on outreach to make sure we’re the most efficient we can be, and they are the “double check” on making sure data gets tracked in the right place.

CRMs, Data, and Analytics

Sales can be busy, and salespeople aren’t necessarily the best at navigating CRMs. Although we make it a priority to have our own sales team at least a little knowledgeable in how operations does their thing (there’s that transparency thing again – really helps with the whole ‘trusting your team’ part), some of our clients work a little differently.

This is where our operations team comes in as a resource for our clients – because of our experience with multiple CRMs and custom setups in the B2B space, we can work with our clients to find the best CRM for them and customize it to gather and display all important data on a dashboard. We can move lists from one system to another, do data cleanses and data analysis, and make sure our clients’ sales team is logging all the pertinent information. Our operations team codes in the safety net that makes sure no opportunity falls through the cracks.

Sales Support

We’ve found that this administrative support has been so valuable for clients that we developed our copilot program, a more robust offering, specializing specifically in providing administrative and operational assistance to their sales team. We work with the sales team to log all their meetings, phone calls, opportunities, pipeline development, prospects, and anything else, to help them succeed and make sure our client keeps all the information they gather.

The support and accountability we provide makes sales forecasting easier and helps the sales team do what they do best – sell.

Having our sales and operations team working together has brought us and our clients stability and growth in the B2B space, but together they’re not everything – we’ve got one thing missing still. How do you fill in the gaps left by sales and operations? That’s where our sales and growth-focused marketing team comes in.

Marketing – The User Interface

So now you have the code and the execution of that code. It’s time to show that value to your prospects. This is why we don’t silo at BDPros – we need our marketing team to work closely with operations and sales to understand where marketing can make the biggest impact.

Some of our clients have complex products and services that need more explaining, and part of the way marketing helps with this is by creating email marketing campaigns or marketing collateral with the goal of educating prospects and getting them interested.

Email Campaigns

Our marketing team knows when to send the email marketing campaigns (some industries have better open rates in the mornings, some in the afternoon, some in the beginning of the week and some later) and how to craft targeted, interesting headlines. This is where having a partner like BDPros is invaluable. We already have this knowledge and can execute on it, you don’t need to do all the legwork to figure it all out yourself. Time is money, and the less time you have to spend on researching, the more time you have to spend on closing sales.

Marketing Collateral

This philosophy works for marketing collateral, too. We’ve worked in a wide variety of industries, representing clients whose products and services ranged from wide application to the incredibly niche and complex.

We get it, it’s hard to explain to people sometimes, especially when you’re in the weeds of things. How do you know what is too much information and what is too little?

Understanding the Niche

Our marketing team can help here too. They work alongside sales, so they know what objections are coming up regularly during outreach, and our team has marketed to a lot of prospects in a lot of different B2B industries.

We have become subject matter experts in a ton of areas, and in the process of gaining that experience, we’ve learned how to take the complex offerings from our clients, put them in layman’s terms, and tell our clients’ story in a captivating way.

The Finished Product

Combine the code, the user interface, and the execution, and you have our winning formula in B2B business development.

That said, it’s one thing to know the steps and another to perform those steps. Outsource it to a well-rounded, full-service business development team with expertise in all these areas.

At BDPros we have built millions in pipeline and closed millions in sales across a ton of industries using these methods.

We know what we’re doing.

Want to know how we can help your company grow? Request a consultation now.

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