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We have been getting a lot of enquires to discuss what business development (BD) actually means. While it might be a simple concept, it's easy to blend the lines between BD and other important functions of your business.

So, what does business development actually mean?

In the main, we have found that most Business Development Managers (BDM’s) are from a predominantly sales and marketing background therefore this is where the majority of the focus lies, however, this is only a fraction of what makes a business successful. 

For example, why would we need to continuously pump money into advertising if we only have the ability to handle 10 clients at a single time? We can see from this alone, that business development is so much more.

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🚀 How to actually Develop a Business

Most of the companies that come to Saint don’t have any sort of business development strategy in place, but for the ones that do, there are countless teams with zero correlation of what the true goal is. We see teams of marketers, sales advisors and media agencies all working "together" to create a strategy with zero communication between them.

Developing a business is no simple task and where most go wrong is normally on the simple stuff. Company Directors will hire a business development team and think they will be sent in the right direction, but they end up spending large sums of money on advertising with no real recognition of the rest of the business. Great I have all these leads, but no thought was put into if there is a sales team in place, can the men on the tools actually handle this?  

How can you develop a business successfully?

Business development (BD) can be well described as a rocket, every thruster of this rocket has to be performing efficiently, not one completely outrunning the other, it just throws the ship off course, leading things to spiral out of control.

It's the Business Development Manager's job to make sure this rocket takes off perfectly and performs effectively across every thruster, every function of your business. 

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📊 Does BD sit at a Management Level?

We can now see that business development as a whole has become its own function and has quite rightly separated from just being a form of sales or marketing. 

BD now sits at a management level, being able to oversee and interlink every integral part of the business to run effectively. This means consistent oversight all the way from the company's message to the deliverability of the end service. 

They understand and drive for the highest level of operating capacity possible with the best service and are not just sales driven anymore. As mentioned earlier, there is no point splashing the cash on advertising if we simply can't handle the work. It's poor coordination and will lead to disaster. 

🤔 How does this help my business?

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The above lavishes all the love a Business Development Manager (BDM) has for the service they deliver. It’s this passion, knowledge and standards that set them apart from their competition.

The BDM knows the needs of the client, they even know the last promotional email that went out, they need to know the numbers the company requires to break even, they need to care about the company.

The Saint's Dashboard is a fantastic tool for tracking what's most important to a business with up-to-date live data. 

The purpose of a Business Development Manager is to not make you rich but to keep you rich. Overnight successes are a thing, but can easily lead businesses to overtrading and underperforming, making it easy to get into tricky financial situations or develop a poor reputation. 

Having a business development manager allows you to scale appropriately.

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🎉 That's a wrap!

I hope you found this article useful! If you would like to go over anything we discussed within this email, please let me know by simply getting in touch here.

Are you looking for a BDM for your construction business? 

Work with us! Saint provide free consultancy from a Business Development Manager. Have an open chat about your company and any of the worries/challenges that you are facing whether it's operation, marketing, finance, etc.

Book a FREE consultancy call with us here and get started with your dedicated BDM!

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