Every business reaches a point where growth starts to plateau. You’re not acquiring new customers at the same clip, sales cycles get longer, and your existing customer base feels tapped out. When this happens, it’s time for business development teams to take a hard look at their strategies and make necessary adjustments to get growth back on track.

In this post, we’ll explore practical frameworks organizations can use to re-align BD strategies with their growth goals. By taking a data-driven approach to pinpointing gaps and weaknesses, you can focus your adjustments where they’re needed most. We’ll also share tips on implementing changes, training teams on new priorities, and measuring performance to ensure your tweaks deliver results.

Adjusting strategies requires thoughtful analysis, planning, and execution. But done right, these steps can supercharge growth into new heights. Let’s dive into the key steps modern revenue teams need to continuously adapt and improve.

Understanding Business Development Strategies

Before adjusting BD strategies, it’s important to level-set on what business development is, and the core strategies and activities it encompasses. 

Business development refers to the pursuit of strategic initiatives and partnerships that help drive sustainable growth for a company. It focuses on identifying new growth opportunities and forming mutually beneficial arrangements with external partners like channel partners, technology vendors, manufacturers, distributors and so on. 

Some core BD strategies and activities include:

– Market research: Comprehensively researching target industries and customer segments to identify market conditions, trends, challenges, and new opportunities.

– Partnership development: Seeking out and establishing strategic partnerships and alliances that provide new customer access, complementary capabilities, or expanded geographic reach. 

– Channel development: Building new sales channels and distribution networks to accelerate customer acquisition and revenue growth. 

– Product development: Enhancing existing products and solutions or building new offerings to better serve customers and expand share of wallet.

– Mergers & acquisitions: Identifying and acquiring companies that open up new markets, add key talent and technology, or eliminate competitors.

– Licensing & franchising: Establishing licensing agreements or franchising models to quickly expand into new territories.

– Investor relations: Developing and maintaining relationships with investors, shareholders, and venture capitalists to facilitate fundraising.

These core BD strategies tend to be more strategic and long-term focused compared to day-to-day sales execution. But they work hand-in-hand to fuel a company’s growth engine. When growth plateaus, often times adjustments are needed at the BD strategy level to pave the way for sales teams to hit their targets.

Aligning BD Strategies with Growth Goals 

To determine which adjustments should be made, BD leaders first need to align on the biggest growth opportunities and priorities across the executive team. Common business growth goals include:

Increasing Market Share

Gaining larger share in existing markets is one of the most straightforward growth levers. Tactics like increased advertising, competitive positioning, and enhanced sales incentives can help capture share from rivals. New distribution channels and strategic partnerships can also expand reach to gain share.

Expanding to New Markets 

Entering new geographic territories, customer segments, or product categories represents a massive growth opportunity. Strategic market selection, savvy Partner identification and bold investments in sales & marketing lay the foundation for success.

Developing New Products/Services

Releasing next-generation or adjacent products and services allows companies to leverage existing capabilities while providing new value to customers. Aligning R&D and product roadmaps to customer needs, market gaps and emerging trends ensures offerings resonate. 

Driving More Revenue from Existing Customers

Selling broader, premium offerings to established customers is far easier than starting from scratch. Tactics like upselling, cross-selling, customer success programs, and loyalty incentives maximize lifetime value.

Once executives align around primary growth goals, BD leaders can start evaluating current strategies and priorities against these objectives. Where are resources currently focused? What new partnerships and initiatives would help achieve each growth goal? This analysis will reveal where strategy adjustments are needed.

Evaluating and Adjusting Current BD Strategies

With growth priorities set, next BD teams must take a hard look at their existing strategies and tactical activities to identify gaps, resource misalignments, or weak points in the plan. A few best practices can help:  

Analyzing Current Performance

– Quantify results: Review KPI dashboards, sales reports, and pipeline metrics. Look at trends over past quarters to spot changing momentum. 

– Conduct win/loss analysis: Interview sales reps on recent wins and losses to identify what’s working vs. roadblocks faced. Look for strategy strengths & weaknesses.

– Talk to customers: Voice of the Customer interviews will reveal unmet needs, desired solutions and partner preferences to inform strategy.

– Speak to prospects: Understanding why prospects choose competitors can pinpoint weaknesses to address through adjusted strategies.

Identifying Gaps and Weaknesses

– Map current activities to growth goals: Which goals are BD activities currently aligned to? Where are gaps?

– Assess partnerships: Do current technology and channel partnerships provide access needed to achieve each growth goal?

– Evaluate research: Is enough market research conducted into new segments, buyer needs and competitors’ moves?

– Examine organizational support: Do reps have sufficient sales enablement, marketing content and product training to execute key strategies?

Brainstorming New Tactics and Approaches 

– Ideate on white spaces: Brainstorm new partnership types, market segments, competitive tactics and technology integrations that could address gaps.

– Learn from other industries: Research how similar companies in other industries are approaching growth goals for new ideas.

– Leverage executives’ perspectives: Get diverse views from leaders across departments like Marketing, Product and Finance on new BD opportunities.

– Consult trusted advisors: External experts often identify unseen growth levers based on broad market perspectives.

This end-to-end analysis will highlight where adjustments are most needed to realign BD priorities and tactical plans with the growth goals on the horizon.

Implementing Adjusted BD Strategies

With gaps identified and new strategic priorities set, the next imperative is effectively executing on adjusted plans across all customer-facing teams. Cross-functional buy-in, clear communication, and comprehensive enablement help ensure successful adoption.

Communicating Strategic Changes

– Educate all teams on growth goals: Sales, Marketing, Product and Service teams need to understand growth objectives guiding strategy shifts.

– Provide new BD strategic plan: Share details on new partnerships, target markets, competitive approaches and research priorities with transparency.

– Set expectations for realignment: Manage expectations that some existing tactics or programs may receive fewer resources given new focus areas.

– Solicit feedback: Get input from frontline teams on potential challenges to work through upfront.

Providing Training and Resources

– Update sales collateral: Create new sales decks, value proposition statements and ROI calculators aligned to growth priorities.  

– Develop messaging frameworks: Craft messaging and objection handling guides to enable reps to articulate new positioning, partnerships and offerings.

– Conduct product & solutions training: Educate client-facing teams on new product releases, technology integrations and service enhancements central to growth goals.

– Host executive Q&A sessions: Allow teams access to leadership to ask questions and build understanding of adjusted strategies.

Tracking Performance and Iterating

– Define success metrics: Establish specific KPIs, conversion benchmarks and activity targets to measure effectiveness of strategic changes.

– Build reporting dashboards: Create visibility into key performance indicators through simple, real-time dashboards.

– Review progress regularly: Host regular business reviews to check progress towards growth goals and quickly resolve execution issues.

– Refine strategies: Use results and feedback to double down on strategies working well and make further adjustments where needed.

With close cross-functional alignment, comprehensive training and real-time performance tracking, organizations can ensure new BD strategies deliver on revenue goals as expected. But the work doesn’t stop once initial changes are made – continued iteration and improvement is critical to stay ahead.

Measuring Success of Adjusted BD Strategies

The only way to definitively know if adjustments made to BD strategies are working is to implement robust measurement frameworks. Leaders should define success upfront based on growth KPIs and diligently track performance over time to validate effectiveness.

Setting Clear KPIs

– Measure revenue impact: Set quarterly sales targets, growth rates, average deal sizes and lead conversion rates.

– Track partnership traction: Quantify number of new co-selling wins, partner-influenced pipeline and referral lead volume. 

– Monitor changes in share: Use market data to measure increases in customer share within key segments.

– Evaluate new offerings: Define adoption targets, booking velocity, and customer feedback scores for each new product or solution.

Monitoring Progress Over Time

– Analyze trends: Look at each KPI over trailing 3, 6 and 12 months to spot positive and negative momentum.

– Compare across segments: Break down growth metrics by customer type, product line, industry and geography to see where gains or declines are strongest.

– Validate with customers: Regularly sample customer sentiment and Net Promoter Scores to ensure strategies address buyer needs.

– Discuss in business reviews: Make strategy success metrics central topics in executive meetings like Sales Ops meetings.

Making Further Adjustments as Needed

– Course correct: If targets are missed in any area, quickly convene teams to diagnose root cause and develop countermeasures.  

– Highlight successes: When initiatives drive clear growth acceleration, invest further in those areas.

– Test new approaches: Try introducing new strategic pilots like partners, marketing campaigns or technologies in just a subset of regions or segments.

– Learn from competitors: Keep close tabs on competitors’ moves and borrow approaches that prove successful in the market.

With the right success frameworks in place, BD leaders can confidently determine which adjusted strategies are moving the needle on priority growth goals, and which require further tweaking. This agile, data-driven process ensures resources stay focused on the highest-impact initiatives.

Conclusion

Developing business is a never-ending pursuit for ambitious companies. Customer needs shift, markets evolve, new competitors emerge and initial growth levers plateau over time. By continually re-evaluating BD strategies against growth goals and making data-driven adjustments, sales organizations can keep revenue momentum accelerating.

While change is never easy or comfortable, taking a structured approach helps smooth the transition. Gaining buy-in on growth priorities, transparently communicating changes, providing comprehensive enablement and measuring for success will ensure adjusted BD strategies get embraced across the company. With close cross-functional alignment, a willingness to iterate, and a laser focus on serving evolving customer needs, any company can adapt and take their growth to the next level.