How Business Development Consultants Position Companies For Growth
So you’ve got ambitions to grow your business to the next level, and your wondering where to go next. Before you start making decisions have you considered whether your business is ready for growth?
Ensuring your business is ready for an increase in business is just as important as having a way to generate that extra business, so that you achieve both the initial boost and sustainable long term momentum.
A Development Consultants Effectiveness
To effectively develop a business, the consultant should be looking at generating and sustaining growth.
When it comes to generating or stimulating growth it will be a marketing and sales led process that will start with positioning the business and ensuring the products and services are right for the market. Momentum will come from continued efforts in the areas of marketing and sales but to ensure that its sustainable the business must be able to to fulfil demand.
The return from any money spent in business development will be diminished if the business is unable to move beyond its initial growth spurt into a sustainable trajectory so its important to asses the organisations resources and infrastructure to determine if they can meet peek demands and avoid have supply being overtaken which may severely affect customer relationships.
The last thing you want to do is invest unwisely and in an untimely manner in additional staff or equipment that is either underutilised or never used so timing these investment can be crucial and there may be some inevitable upfront investments as well as further staged investments in-line with growth plans.
Assisting With Change And Adapting The Business
Ensuring sustainability will also require continued effort and development to meet new demands and changes in market trends.
As well as the needs of the business and primarily its customers, the needs and desires of the owners and investors in the business must also be considered which may include future decisions such as full or partial retirement, sale, flotation or merger.
Having plans that cater for both the short and log term goals as well as any back up plans, will be essential for dealing with unforeseen eventualities that may throw the business off track temporarily.
It may also be that because of changes or new developments things like staffing and company procedures may need reviewing in-line with policies and processes for getting thing done.
You should also give some thought and consideration to your target market and products and services so that you can continually evolve in-line with the market and create other avenues for expanding the business further.
The Business Growth Development Process
Developing the business should be a stepped process where each stage builds on the last.
Initially a review of the business is performed to determine where it is, its ability to cope with demand increases and potential hidden assets that can be quickly leveraged.
The first step is to position the business correctly and understand what makes its stand out.
Next we look at integrating this knowledge into existing marketing and sales processes.
Then comes the first part of systematising marketing and sales so that information can be captures, segmented and used for effective marketing and sales purposes.
These is broadened into other special relationships and partnerships.
Its further exploited with more custom marketing and advertising.
Later visibility in the local community is stimulated.
Then we come onto more direct marketing.
Finally stimulating word of mouth.
Put it all together and you have a very effective programme for creating and maintaining growth.
Article by Nicholas Windley
