Business Development Strategy: A Product Design Approach

As a business development firm, our clients work with us for three reasons:

1) We know their business / markets or can learn them quickly
2) We know how to design and use marketing- and sales-related tools on their behalf
3) We empower our clients to accomplish marketing and sales operations goals

The processes we use to collaborate with our clients reflect the ones that product development teams, made up of engineers and production and ergonomics professionals, use to create market-ready products.

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, it is not enough to have a great product or service. You need to make sure the right people know about it. We help vice presidents of marketing, marketing managers, and owners of closely-held companies meet their business development objectives by helping them juggle their many responsibilities with actionable sales and marketing strategies. In many instances, the strategies we develop are evolutions of solutions we have created for clients in related markets.

In product development terms, our engineering (technically savvy account management team), production (website development and marketing automation professionals), and ergonomics (visual artists and writers) teams collaborate with clients to create strategies and content that are structurally sound, technically accurate, and sufficiently relevant and engaging to generate positive responses from our clients’ target audiences.

Generating MQLs and SQLs

We don’t arbitrarily develop “products” we assume our clients’ customers will like. Instead, we design campaign strategies based on what our clients and we know about their markets. We do it with “play to win” as the goal instead of merely participating in the bidding or quoting process. We accomplish that objective by:

• Identifying target markets and job titles within those markets
• Creating marketing campaigns that resonate with those personas, using marketing automation to drive engagement
• Using customer relationship management (CRM) software to convert prospects into marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
• Using CRM to boost engagement and convert MQLs into sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• Using CRM to convert SQLs into loyal customers (Top Engaged follow-up)
• Measuring the real-time effectiveness of campaigns and quickly adjusting based on data rather than assumptions or intuition.

These marketing tools, which we use strategically in highly customized campaigns (one size does not fit all), are designed to maximize ROI. From targeted messaging to impactful visuals, every campaign we create is built to engage, convert, and deliver measurable outcomes. Generating leads, however, is only half the battle. Our CRM engagement services help to ensure that those leads are nurtured and converted into loyal customers.

Because managing the entire spectrum of marketing and sales activities can be overwhelming, our “product development” team works with our clients to craft compelling copy, design impactful visuals, and optimize websites for search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX).

A significant part of our work also involves sharing knowledge with our clients (empowering them), so they get comfortable communicating on their own about their companies’ products and services in ways that resonate with customers and prospects and ultimately increase sales.

Such empowerment includes the adoption of language we have developed through rigorous workshops with client teams, “heat maps” that show the most frequently viewed sections of targeted emails, and sales data that shows a correlation between a communications tool and sales activity.

Measuring & Managing Marketing & Sales Activities

By educating our clients and equipping them to act with less involvement from us in the long term, we enable them to close deals faster and more efficiently and benefit in measurable ways from working with us. More specifically, our methodologies allow clients to know how much revenue their investment in sales and marketing strategies and tactics is generating.

We also give client teams the ability to create and disseminate content they develop based on our guidance and manage their own CRM databases or collaborate with us in doing so. Because we partner with our clients, working alongside them to transform their goals into results, their success becomes our mission.

When clients are comfortable performing many of the marketing and database management functions, we initially provide for them (i.e., they can develop and test their own products in-house), they often engage us in a sales operations capacity to research new or underserved markets and support them in activities that help to increase demand for their products or services.

Marketing and sales, conceived and executed correctly, can be a complex undertaking, like bringing a product from concept to production and creating market demand. Don’t let the challenges of developing and implementing a successful marketing strategy hold you back. Instead, let’s partner to take your business to the next level. We’ll make sure your prospects and customers know why you’re the best choice for them.

To explore how we can build a sales and marketing machine for success together...