Jody Glidden — January 5, 2018 — January 5, 2018
Good business development teams are hard to come by. Great business development teams are even
more rare. To stay on top of prospects and close deals that keep your firm growing and prosperous, there are a number of skills each team member needs to have. From excellent communication skills to expert negotiating tactics, business development professionals need to have it all. And they need to be able to work together to bring in more business.
But how can you be sure that your firm has the perfect business development team? What kinds of people do you need on the team?
Having worked closely with the top business development teams in law, finance, and professional services firms across the world, we know a thing or two about what makes a great team. To help you find the perfect professionals for your squad, here are the three types of people you need to create a business development dream team at your firm.
The Innovator
In Hinge Marketing Research’s 2017 High Growth Report, 20% of the highest growing professional services firms cited technology as the reason they outperformed the competition. If you want to promote real business growth at your firm, technology helps you stand out from your competitors, attracting more clients to your firm. Because of this, you need someone at your firm who is willing to take on technology as it pertains to attracting new business.
Having a technological innovator on your business development team helps you stay on the cutting edge. They could help optimize your performance through innovations like a new customer portal, CRM automation, marketing automation, and more. With a team member always willing to try new things that
improve the team’s efficiency or improve the customer experience, your firm will be able to offer new and creative solutions that save internal time and attract more clients.
The Analyst
Creating a business development strategy without data gives your business a severe disability. Without data, your business development team is both blind and deaf. Data is a real and effective way to learn more about your prospects and clients, but also about your business performance and sales cycle. Through data you can learn where clients fall off in the sales cycle, when it’s best to reach out to them, and also know which clients are at risk.
So how can your firm glean all of this data and information? While you might have automated systems for collecting and recording customer data, there’s still the matter of connecting the dots. This is where a true analyst can make waves.
Equip your business development team with the information they need to optimize their performance by putting a passionate analytics professional on the team. As someone with an affinity for data and patterns, they can help your business development team optimize processes, communications, offers, and more. You can also power your business development team and CRM with relationship analytics to provide your team with automatic insights. Your team’s analyst can then create an action plan off of those data patterns to retain and attract more business.
The Buddy
Business is all about relationships. Even today, that common saying still holds true. Strong client relationships are the foundation of your firm, helping you retain existing clients and keep them satisfied with your services. This is something that can save your firm a lot of money as retaining an existing client is five times less expensive than acquiring a new one. And while it’s natural for some to make fast friends with clients, your business development team needs to go deeper and be a true support for your prospects and clients.
Because strong relationships are the key to strong business growth and client happiness, you need someone on your business development team that serves as both a friend and support system to prospects and clients. Great at building lasting client relationships, a buddy focuses more on the client than on themselves through excellent listening skills, expertise, advocacy, relatability, and more.
Through their extreme loyalty and commitment to servicing clients and making them happy, they can bring in more deals and upsell larger ones.
Form Long Lasting Client Relationships
With a business development dream team, your professional services firm can create lasting client relationships. For more ways your biz dev team can strengthen client relationships, download our latest ebook, Paint a Complete Picture: How to Master the Art of Relationship Intelligence.
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