Consistently profitableand industry-leading companies have one powerful common trait: best-in-class business development organizations and systems, and most important, company-wide business development cultures that demand every employee contribute in some way toward securing new business. Business development is an essential ingredient for any thriving, successful company. Fundamental business development principles are outlined below.
The business developer today is concerned with positioning and capturing potential growth opportunities, i.e. prospect identification, selection, definition, development, and execution. Both in the development phase and the implementation phase, the business developer collaborates and integrates the knowledge and feedback from the organization’s specialist functions, for example, R&D, operations, marketing, and sales to assure that the organization can implement the growth opportunity successfully.
Many companies today require a new and enhanced focus - by everyone in the company - to help create and sustain profitable growth in the years ahead. To be successful, companies should train employees worldwide and progressively add a business development element to their culture, where employees recognize the importance of and actively participate and engage in business development processes focused on creating customer value and developing solutions.
Such enhanced focus will help a company to:
• Improve the project selection process and capture efforts so when they do a job they give their clients the best resources and the customer receives the best job possible.
• It will make people more professional in dealing with customers and will allow consistency of process in business development.
• It will allow more disciplined, smarter decision-making.
• It will lead to a better understanding of customers and markets.
• It will enable employees to understand the importance of their role and the skills they need to help the company be successful in winning work.
The acquisition of new business is vital to the survival of any business. In an effort to increase a company’s success rate in acquiring new business, they must assess and, in most cases, improve, the business development process itself. This involves a systematic approach to help an organization optimize its underlying processes to achieve more efficient results.
Process improvement is central to improving the work processes to become more efficient and effective. It is an aspect of organizational development in which a series of actions are taken by a leader to identify, analyze, and improve existing business processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives, such as increasing profits and performance, reducing costs and accelerating schedules.
A key element of the business development process is the Proposals & Estimating (P&E) function, since it touches all aspects of a business and directly affects a company’s ability to win work. It is the one area where companies should absolutely focus their efforts for process improvement.
Business development is not a linear process, but a cycle of targeting, positioning, managing customer accounts, and developing proposals to win work. The business development process should be a simple and disciplined approach to acquiring new business. Essentially, there are five important characteristics associated with this process.
1. It is a process for improving sales through systematic development of customer relationships.
2. It is a collection of simple tools that work together to improve the selling effort.
3. It is a process for positioning to win critical project opportunities.
4. It is a process for identifying and communicating competitive advantages.
5. It is a process for improving teamwork in multi-functional sales efforts.
The Business Development and P&E groups should work together to implement a more structured and disciplined decision-making process, including formalizing a “Stage-Gate” process. This would establish consistent reporting lines, roles, responsibilities, accountability, and performance measures. It would also empower functional groups with quality control accountability and commitment to the bid inputs; providing input and support as required.
A stage-gated approach to business development and decision-making creates a visible and measurable function and helps ensure support from the entire organization to produce winning proposals.
Christopher M. Barton
Sr Vice President, Business Development – Offshore
Wood
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