Contacts: Find and engage

At the top of the BDET (Business Development Egg Timer) are the contacts and these typically include all that encompass your BD universe: current and ex-clients, prospects, referrers, leavers, journalists, friendly competitors, etc.

The most important questions to ask at this stage of the BDET are

1. Can we see everyone that we want to engage with?

2. Are we clear on what we are saying and sending?

3. Do we know who we haven't got and how we'll rectify?

In a little more detail:

1.Identify the addressable (& profitable…) market

Of all the stages to explore, testing and growing the addressable market often receives the less focus than ideal: it can be a grind, the immediate return can be relatively low and it’s a less familiar activity for some teams. Despite the slog, defining your addressable market, then ensuring it is aware of your expertise and propositions is critical.

I mention profitability as it’s important to target segments that fit your appetite in relation to margins, risk and expertise.  It’s frustrating to target markets which might result in lower than anticpated fees and or slower payment:  start-ups and inbound investors for example can be very competitive on pricing.

Your addressable market might be defined by your BD plan or by a specific issue. Either way,  build participants by considering factors such as relevance, sector, size, geographies, growth plans, IP approach, supply chain exposure or M&A appetite.

Where you have targets outside of your current database, use third party research databases and rankings to plug gaps, then LinkedIn to confirm key individuals. For firms without an insight function or research budget, the compliance or onboarding team might have a spare licence to products such as Orbis, which are ideal for company research.

2. Highlight expertise/solution to clients and prospects

I’m stating the obvious but ensure your content ticks all the boxes– tight, insightful, opinionated, digestible etc. Aim to be even more fantastic than usual when prospecting as you’ll typically be competing with the incumbent firms and others.

I would contend that you can cast the net more widely when discussing more exclusive content such as a case study. When you are reacting to regulatory change or a significant event such as a major data breach, be more circumspect with your mailing, as competition for attention is often more fierce.

Campaign triggers include: regulatory change, a strong recent case study, sector or macro activity, or a reputational issue which might impact similar companies.

3. Leverage relationships, personal targeting, marketing

How are you getting the issue in front of your audience – mailings, digital, PR, personal approach or a combination of these.  Personal efforts are often best and we’ll look at those next time within Leads as encouraging partners to supplement a central effort often has a positive impact

For colder approaches I have found that highlighting a couple of topics can work well so you’re still focused, but not betting on a single issue that might not land.

4. Measure sends, approaches, responses, MQLs

For the central and digital efforts we all have access to fantastic data across websites, aggregators, mailing systems and CRMs/CDPs – make sure you are capitalising by measuring and joining up and acting upon all the engagement you can.  Most firms have great websites that showcase awesome content and some of these can work harder to drive more visitor engagement through cookies and forms.