Business Strategy : Master the Art of Business Development

Welcome to our “Business Development Strategy Formulation: Become a Business Developer” course. My name’s Gary and I’m a Business Developer with plenty of experience in discovering and implementing new opportunities to grow start-ups and Corporations. I’m going to be your course instructor and I hope you enjoy learning with me.

Business Development (BD or Biz Dev) is a necessary practice for all companies that seek to achieve sustained long-term growth. But, surely you are asking yourself, what exactly is Business Development? Is it actually Sales?  Maybe it’s Marketing? Is it all about Building relationships? If you ask 10 different people what Business Development is, you will get 10 different answers.

Because Business Development is all of the above and so much more.  It’s a complicated and fascinating business discipline that allows for the discovery and introduction of long-term growth opportunities. It is, according to Forbes, the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships.

Business Development is not Sales or Marketing. However, Biz Dev relies on Sales, Marketing, and other areas of the company to discover and implement long-term growth opportunities aligned with its business objectives.

In general, in our courses we always try to give the point of view of start-ups and listed corporations. In this case, we will try to do the same. 

First, you must Capture the key business objectives of the company, which I will talk about in detail later on. As the definition of Business Development says, the rest of the components of the Plan must be aligned with these objectives.

Next, we must carry out the Discovery stage, identifying new opportunities for long-term growth, a key objective of Business Development. How to do this is something that I will explain in later sections.

Afterwards, we enter the Elaboration stage, where we detail all the necessary information about the identified opportunities to guarantee correct implementation.

Finally, the opportunities are Implemented. In order to do this, the Biz Dev Manager will be responsible for coordinating the agents who will participate in the process. 

The first activity of developing a Business Development Plan is to Capture the key business objectives of the company. Why? Because the results of the Plan must be aligned with these objectives. 

Apple Business Strategy.

Once the company's Key Business Objectives have been captured, we enter the Discovery phase, where we will identify long-term growth opportunities aligned with the Key Business Objectives.

A key piece to discovering new products and services (i.e. opportunities) is Innovation. 

The Ansoff Matrix, also called the product-market matrix, is one of the main tools used in business strategy and strategic marketing. It was created by the strategist Igor Ansoff in 1957. In Business Development, it is the perfect tool for determining where we are going to identify opportunities for growth.

As I have explained in previous readings, in the Discovery stage we must identify ideas that may lead to long-term growth opportunities.

For this, we must develop an analysis centered mainly on five questions:

1. What products and services do we offer?
2. What do our customers currently want? 
3. What will they want in the future?
4. Where is the gap?
5. How can we cover this gap?

Before continuing with the next stage of the Business Development Blueprint, we will see a case study that will allow us to better understand the concept of Discovery.

In this lecture, I wanted to tell you about an excellent way to discover new ideas and opportunities, but it’s a bit more complex. It's called Design Thinking, and it is mainly used to generate new products (which, as you know, is a key piece in the growth strategies of the Ansoff Matrix).

Design Thinking is a very popular methodology used by highly prominent companies to generate innovative ideas aimed at providing value and satisfying the needs of users. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and father of Design Thinking, defines it as follows: "Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success ".

If you want to know more about Design Thinking you can see this TED talk: Design Thinking - Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-hzefHdAMk

Once the growth opportunities have been identified, their content must be detailed prior to their implementation. In start-ups, this activity is usually the responsibility of the Biz Dev Manager, while in corporations it is usually led by this person, but it relies on different departments within the company.

Business Case and Opportunity Charter Templates.

The methods for implementing identified opportunities can be more or less complicated depending on its complexity and value (remember the categorization we did in the Discovery stage). Most of the time, you must apply Project Management (PM) techniques to ensure that you are successful.

Joint-ventures are a key part of the Business Development process. Most of the time, our company will not have all the necessary capabilities to develop the identified growth opportunities, and must ally itself with third parties.

Whether you are a Founder or work as Biz Dev of a start-up, I am guessing there have been times when a corporation will have contacted you to discuss a possible Joint-Venture. Am I wrong? If so, in this lecture, I'll explain how to manage these types of situations successfully.