Pages

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A back to basics approach to business development



By Ellen Keiley

A back to basics approach to business development  It is a challenging time for business. There is lots of competition for every opportunity, making it more difficult for businesses to drive financial success. Therefore, it is advantageous - and arguably necessary - for professionals and organizations to differentiate themselves from others. You have likely heard this before, but it is always good to be reminded that a strong focus on client service will set you apart. Clients will appreciate the attention to their needs, and if you do it right, you will build relationships, loyalty, and enjoy greater wallet and market share.


Clients expect a certain level of service from their service providers. If one can exceed those expectations, it is a win/win situation. There are numerous ways to do so.

  • Engage in “active” listening.
  • Seek client feedback.
  • Don’t take relationships for granted. Be client centric.
  • Get to know your clients as people.
  • Take all organizational interaction into consideration.


 

8 Tips for Successful Business Development - By Eric Grafstrom





Many founders and CEOs get to the point where they ask, “We need to hire a business development person. Do you know anyone?” Few roles have more varied job descriptions than business development. It’s no wonder why it's hard to figure out who to hire, what this person should do and how to measure success. If your company is at the stage where it's time (or you think it's time) to hire someone for business development, these tips can help you make sure your business development efforts are a success.

Summary points:

  • Hire the Right Person at the Right Time
  • Know the Difference Between Business Development Vs. Sales
  • Consider Post-Deal Management
  • Focus on Quantitative, Not Qualitative
  • Fail or Succeed, Emphasize Responsibility
  • Assess the Opportunity
  • Make Deals Carefully
  • Get Legal Counsel


Sunday, March 25, 2012

Balanced Scorecard: Strategic Management System






The Balanced Scorecard originally was conceived as an improved performance measurement system. However, it soon became evident that it could be used as a management system to implement strategy at all levels of the organization by facilitating the following functions:

1.    Clarifying strategy -
 the translation of strategic objectives into quantifiable measures clarifies the management team's understanding of the strategy and helps to develop a coherent consensus.

2.    Communicating strategic objectives -
 the Balanced Scorecard can serve to translate high level objectives into operational objectives and communicate the strategy effectively throughout the organization.

3.    Planning, setting targets, and aligning strategic initiatives
ambitious but achievable targets are set for each perspective and initiatives are developed to align efforts to reach the targets.

4.    Strategic feedback and learning
executives receive feedback on whether the strategy implementation is proceeding according to plan and on whether the strategy itself is successful ("double-loop learning").
These functions have made the Balanced Scorecard an effective management system for the implementation of strategy. The Balanced Scorecard has been applied successfully to private sector companies, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Salary for Marketing Manager Jobs

Business Development Overview




Business development is a combination of strategic analysis, marketing, and sales. Business development (or "biz dev") professionals can be involved in everything from the development of their employers' products and services, to the creation of marketing strategies, to the generation of sales leads, to negotiating and closing deals.
The job of the business development professional is typically to identify new business opportunities-whether that means new markets, new partnerships with other businesses, new ways to reach existing markets, or new product or service offerings to better meet the needs of existing markets-and then to go out and exploit those opportunities to bring in more revenue.
Since the field is a cousin of marketing and sales, even when an organization doesn't have a stand-alone business development department or employees with the phrase "biz dev" in their job titles, you can bet that folks in sales and/or marketing are handling business development responsibilities. You can find biz dev jobs in all industries-at everything from tech startups to huge pharmaceutical companies. What the work entails, exactly, depends on how big a company is and what industry it's in.

What You'll Do
Your job in business development may involve any or all of the following:
The first aspect of the business development professional's job is typically to identify new business opportunities.
This means several things, in terms of what you'll do. First, you'll need to stay abreast of what's happening in your industry-what your competitors are up to in terms of products and service offerings, pricing, marketing strategies, and so on. Second, you'll need to make sure you understand what your company is up to on an ongoing basis-to understand your company's strategy, how your company compares to its competitors, and how it's perceived in the marketplace. Third, you'll need to understand the market for your company's offerings-who comprises it, and how it may be changing.
Next, as a business development professional, you'll need to think creatively about everything you know about your company. This is the part of the job in which you identify possible ways to improve your company's sales, which can mean identifying anything from new market segments (or individual potential clients), to new sales channels to sell through, to other, related products or services in the marketplace with which your company's products or services can be combined into synergistic, "co-branded" offerings.
The next part of the job is prioritizing the new business opportunities you've identified. To do this, you'll need to compare the potential returns of each new opportunity to the costs your company would incur to exploit it. Which means spreadsheets-lots of spreadsheets.
Finally, you have to bring the new opportunities you've identified and prioritized to fruition. In other words, you'll be negotiating with those at other organizations who can help you take advantage of the opportunities you've identified. And, if you're good at what you do, you'll be closing deals with those other organizations to increase your company's bottom line.
One thing you'd probably be doing as part of a biz dev career at an enterprise software company, for instance, is identifying and signing partnership deals with IT consulting firms that implement enterprise software for their clients-deals that will give those firms you partner with a cut of your company's revenue from any new sales of your software that they can bring in. Or, say you're in biz dev at a big publishing company that's looking to deliver a new, younger market to its advertisers; in this case, you might be involved in acquiring a smaller publisher that already has expertise in marketing to a younger audience, as well as established distribution channels for getting products to that market.
Business development involves varying degrees of sales and strategy. In some companies, biz dev people may focus on getting new corporate sales accounts, while in others they may lead new product development. At larger companies such as Oracle, Cisco, or Microsoft, one of biz dev's many responsibilities may be to decide which smaller companies the company should acquire next to ensure that it retains its market strength in the future.
Working in business development is an excellent way to become adept at business strategy while gaining hands-on experience in negotiating deals and managing partner relationships. Business development jobs are also highly cross-functional, requiring close collaboration with various internal and partner-company teams such as sales, engineering, and marketing to ensure that a deal is consummated. With its focus on strategy, biz dev steers the direction of a company-the deals forged today determine what the rest of the company will be working on tomorrow.

Who Does Well
You'll need strong business acumen to do well in a business development career. To understand the competitive landscape, you'll need strong research skills. To analyze new business opportunities to pursue, you'll need excellent quantitative and analytical skills. To negotiate with other companies you might potentially do business with, you'll need excellent people and communication skills. And, of course, to close deals, you'll need the killer deal-closing instincts possessed by the best sales types.

Requirements
If you're interested in business but don't want to go the traditional route of working for a consulting or investment banking firm or getting an MBA, biz dev may be a good alternative. The best way to get into business development is by first gaining experience in finance or corporate sales.
The minimum degree requirement for an entry-level position in business development is a BA or BS. For more senior positions, an MBA is often preferred, along with five or more years of previous business development or sales experience.
Business development positions at high-tech companies may require a technical background, or sales experience in a related field. Strategic-planning or corporate-development positions usually require a minimum of two years' experience in investment banking or consulting.
Networking with friends or alumni will give you an advantage getting your foot in the door. If you're asked in for an interview, be ready to demonstrate your knowledge of the company's business and show that you're familiar with its competitive landscape. Be sure to play up any experience you have in closing deals or managing relationships. And remember that recruiters will be seeking a keen eye for detail, solid communication skills, and analytical ability.

Job Outlook
In the long term, business development opportunities should grow, especially in expanding industries such as pharmaceuticals & biotech and technology. The growth in business development careers is being driven by a variety of factors. For one thing, businesses are doing more and more on the Web, meaning there are more and more opportunities for alliances, partnerships, and other business activities between and among companies doing business on the Web, Internet companies, and Internet services companies. At the same time, there's a growing need for biz dev types to seek out and close business deals in new markets. And as companies increasingly strip themselves down to only their core components, they rely on business development to do the deals that allow them to outsource non-core business functions.
Recently, job seekers looking for biz dev positions have found themselves in an extremely tight market. But as the economy improves, we're already seeing growth in biz dev career opportunities.
Those with an aptitude for landing and structuring deals-lawyers, for instance, or investment bankers-have the best shot at landing plum business development jobs.

Career Tracks
In order of increasing sophistication, the three overlapping layers within business development are sales, partnerships, and strategic planning. Most biz dev jobs blend all three, although one area may be emphasized.
Sales
At some companies, business development might be better described as business-to-business sales. In many cases, the business development team and the sales team are one and the same.
Cold-calling or prospecting for potential clients, members, or partners is often a task that falls to entry-level biz dev employees. These employees often have to hone their own sales pitch to convince other companies that a partnership would add value to their businesses.
As in traditional sales jobs, there's often an account-management aspect to business development-coordinating a variety of partner relationships and deal types, each at a different stage.
Business Developer
Companies of all sizes in all industries are building their businesses around partnerships-and it is business development's responsibility to initiate and manage such relationships.
Often the biggest challenge facing business developers is negotiating the terms of partnership deals. Getting another company interested in a partnership is just the beginning-drafting a contract and negotiating its terms is a process that can drag on for months.
Once both parties sign the contract, business development must work with other teams in a company (e.g., product management, marketing, and operations) to oversee the successful meeting of the terms of the partnership.
Strategic Planner
Some business development jobs aren't called that at all. Instead, they're called "strategic planning" or sometimes "corporate development." Strategic planning jobs are found mostly at large, established companies seeking to expand and diversify their business. Just like management consultants, strategic planners spend a lot of time thinking about top-level strategy issues such as what new business activities their company should pursue, how it should position itself and market those activities, and which technologies it should invest in.
At some companies, strategic planning may be carried out by the corporate finance department. In such cases, biz dev jobs may resemble investment banking functions such as mergers and acquisitions. For instance, if a company wants to acquire a new business unit, strategic planning may analyze the market to find a suitable business to acquire, determine an appropriate asking price for the company, and follow through with the negotiation process.
If the acquisition takes place, strategic planning may help integrate the two companies. This task may be as simple as processing a stack of paperwork or as complex as relocating and reorganizing the activities and personnel of the two companies.
Strategic planning may also involve institutional investment-that is, parceling out the company's money to fund outside startups. In this way, strategic planning can be a bit like working in the venture capital industry. For instance, when high-tech companies invest in high-tech startups, strategic planners may perform due diligence on potential partners, determine how much to invest in a particular venture, and negotiate a stake in a company.

Source: WetFeet

Twelve Social Business Predictions for 2012

  1. Social shifts to mobile. This prediction is obvious given the massive ramp-up of smart devices this year (in late 2010 they eclipsed PCs for the first time ever) yet it needs to be stated and is actually one of the biggest user experience (UX) shifts in social so far. Social business solutions lacking a capable mobile UX are going to underperform, especially in the second half of the year, in terms of adoption for end-users and sales for vendors. While vendors have been getting much better at providing quality native mobile clients, there is still lots of room for improvement, though this will largely happen in 2012. Less successful will be Enterprise 2.0 efforts that have performed extensive customization for their desktop intranet, who will have to do the equivalent updates for mobile devices such as the iPad and Android tablets.
  2. Analytics and business intelligence (BI) becomes standard fare. Making sense of the endless flow of conversations, inside and outside of the organization requires smart, effective filters. It also needs a way to analyze the giant haystack to derive business significant insight. This has led to a flood of social analytics tools and vendors that has turned into a glut, just as sustained interest emerges. As I explored in my keynote presentation at Defrag last year, social analytics has emerged to cope with the quantity of information that is created in social media, and to extract value from it. This is one of the primary reasons we created the Social Business Index and why Salesforce acquired Radian6 this year in one of the largest social media acquisitions of 2011; getting to ROI means getting to the information that matters inside time windows that matter to make business decisions and guide strategic activity. Expect capable analytics and downstream business intelligence features to be added as central elements to virtually all social media tools. The most useful additions of social analytics and BI will also make the distinction between leaders and also-rans not only in terms of products but also as key activities in social business projects on the client-side.
  3. Gamification doesn’t happen, yet. Adding game mechanics to social business through leaderboards, competition-driven activities, and via other game-based engagement mechanisms has a very bright future in my opinion. I was finally convinced of this when gamification was famously used to solve the highly stubborn protein folding problem for the AIDS virus earlier this year. In my estimate, 2012 will be an experimental year where early lessons learned are made and the right directions are teased out by the industry. Capable offerings either won’t be ready or mature enough for it to be significant in 2012; perhaps in 2013 but it will happen. In the meantime, social business efforts can certainly experiment where it makes sense but can otherwise focus on other items in this list in my opinion.
  4. Social intranets struggle forward, social business processes don’t. Those overhauling their intranets to make them more social have had a long, hard time of it. To be clear, this is not because social intranets aren’t useful, but coordinating (and sometimes fighting) the IT department, corporate communications, HR, and often competing vendor camps inside the company means that many firms aren’t as far along as they should be. SharePoint has often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular. Industry regulation, privacy laws, and other issues for many firms have made internal social media difficult to adopt widely. Combined together, the drag has been surprisingly high for Enterprise 2.0. That said, Toby Ward has reported the highest penetration of social features on corporate intranets yet, with 61% of all companies reporting at least one social media tool in place this year. This has led to an increasing attention on a subject that adds a new dimension to the discussion: Integrating social media more directly into business processes. This discussion was sparked by Laurie Buczek this year and was discussed widely by the Enterprise 2.0 community, with a growing consensus that while general purpose, open-ended social media was the right direction (and is vital for emergent outcomes), a more direct route to value capture is also needed. It’s now increasingly believed that high impact results will come most directly from integrating social business into daily work processes on the ground. Expect much more practitioner focus on this in 2012. For more details, read my latest round-ups of where we are with Enterprise 2.0 here and here.
  5. Smaller social business vendors continue to get rolled up. It was a year of acquisitions in 2011, including Radian6, Rypple, Leverage, and many others. After years of building up customers in a growing space, the success stories have started to emerge. Expect that, to the extent that technology alignment and functional overlap can be addressed, 2012 will be an even bigger year for acquisitions as Salesforce, IBM, and SAP, and perhaps Microsoft, go on a spending spree to snap up the first few generations of winners in various social business verticals. This will make a fair number of their customers unhappy, as the desire to escape the stranglehold of the big enterprise vendors was no small part of the attraction of going with the startups in the first place. This will make some room for a next generation of more sophisticated social business startups. It may also slow innovation from the acquired companies as they get absorbed into the software giants that will likely push a round of customer defections as the top end of social business market both heats up and speeds up. This will keep the market interesting while retaining choice, though longer term, consolidation is inevitable.
  6. The social business unit/center of excellence phenomenon continues. Last year I wrote about the emergence of an organizational structure we called the Social Business Unit. In most large organizations, a social media committee is created out of a group of interested stakeholders (typically IT, corporate communication, HR, legal, and some business users), they sooner or later realize they don’t have expertise in social media and end up creating a dedicated team, a center of excellence, or other central group to manage the move to social media. I now see this happening to the extent this year that it’s fairly standard but, next year, expect it to become a top objective and a virtual requirement as companies realize their are moving too slowly to adopt social media across their lines of business. The move to a real social media function will drive up social media budgets but will get organizations the maturity they need and sort out the experimental social media ‘pandemonium’ that is often common in large companies (and usually a good thing if managed well by the SBU.)
  7. Internal and external social business efforts blur, but remain distinct. Ever since the term social business was coined, it was quickly realized that there is a really single continuum across internal and external usage. While companies often maintained separate efforts for internal and external engagement, it became obvious that they were surprisingly identical in terms of features and function except for the audiences they were engaging. With the advent of more and more social business platforms and tools that can keep information safe in blended social business environments, the blur has now started to happen. In 2011 it was still not that common however, and most efforts remain separate. That will change in 2012, but real blur appears on track for a 2013 mainstream appearance in my estimate.
  8. Customer-facing social “hockey sticks”. While marketplace-facing social has had a terrific run-up for businesses over the last few years, customer-specific social solutions — such as with CRM — only started experiencing major growth this year, and is expected to be a $1 billion industry by next year. 2012 will be the year of the social customer in strategic terms.
  9. Community management goes pro. It didn’t take long for the social world to conclude that communities work best with designated leaders guiding them, supporting them, and dealing with the thousands of tiny tasks that are essential for any large group of people to function well together. But business users have been slower to get on board with community management, even as we see that Enterprise 2.0 efforts with community management capabilities regularly report that it was a critical success factor. In 2012, community management will get the respect it deserves on the enterprise-side and become a first class citizen as a strategic social business capability. I also expect that training and certification for this vital function will also mature significantly.
  10. Social business budgets go up another level. This year’s average social business budget, while somewhat larger than last years, will climb up another significant notch as social business become more prevalent across the the organization. As more dedicated staff are required and the social business unit becomes more common, expect a respectable increase, on the order of 50% or more in the average social business budget, especially if the economy starts to mend. Many organizations have held off spending on even important new projects because of the economic climate. Thus a growing turnaround will likely accelerate social business investment.
  11. The year will close with a consensus (or lack thereof) on enterprise social apps. I’ve been tracking the promise of embedding of social applications into enterprise social networks, so that our business systems are embedded in collaborative context. I’m not alone in thinking this is a vitally important way to connect our systems of record with the informal, unstructured work activity that dominates the work today. Jive is a leader here with its social app store, but all the big vendors support social apps except for Microsoft. With the development over the summer of the next version of OpenSocial, it has reached the point that it will be capable enough to meet enterprise demands for features and flexibility. Given that the latest version of Jive put social apps front and center in many large companies, we’ll likely find out by the end of 2012 if this is a primary way that workers will integrate their core business activities with social networking.
  12. Social business becomes less art, and more science. This prediction was also on Angela Houseman’s 2012 prediction list, but it’s one that I’m very much seeing as well. The early days of social media attracted highly creative types that sometimes thrived on lack of structure and analysis. Today, even social business, particularly in the marketing arena, requires serious number crunching, quantitative analysis, and the ability to derive insights from the resulting business intelligence. While creativity is perhaps more valued now than ever, the analytic and scientific approach is moving into the fore as well from tools and frameworks to services and methodologies.
Source: http://www.dachisgroup.com/2011/12/social-business-predictions-for-2012/