Building a business development team can be tough. It takes an in-sync crew of top-notch communicators, negotiators and collaborators to stay on top of prospects and close deals that keep your firm growing and prosperous.
So how do you find these business development gems in today’s competitive job market?
Good news: we work closely with the top business development teams in law, finance and professional services firms across the world, so we’ve picked up a trick or two.
Read on to meet the three types of people you should look for as you build your firm’s ideal business development team.
The Innovator
Technology helps you stand out from your competitors and attract more clients to your firm. In fact, 20 percent of the highest growing professional services firms cited technology as the reason they outperformed the competition in 2017.
That’s why your business development team needs a technological innovator. This squad member will keep you on the cutting edge and optimize your performance via new tools like a customer portal, CRM automation, marketing automation, and more.
Because exploration is in their DNA, the Innovator is also a person who will constantly have an eye out for creative ways to improve the teams’ efficiency and performance and the customer experience.
The Analyst
A business development strategy without data is a severe liability. Without data, your business development team is in the dark. Not just blind to prospect and client insights, but also unaware of your business performance and sales cycle. When is the best time to reach out to a client? Which of your customers is at risk?
The Analyst will make sure you have the answers. And 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 shines.
Thanks to their natural affinity for data and patterns, The Analyst will arm your business development team with the info they need to supercharge your performance, processes, communications, offers and more.
And if you really want to see your business development team make waves, equip The Analyst and your customer relationship management (CRM) tool with relationship analytics. The Analyst will be thrilled to use its automatic insights to create action plans that pull in and retain business.
The Relationship Owner
Relationships are still the backbone of any business. They help your firm retain existing clients and keep them satisfied with your services. And they save you money—holding onto a client is five times less expensive than acquiring a new one.
To maintain a laser focus on this foundational element to business development, you need one, accountable rockstar: The Relationship Owner. They’ll serve as both a friend and a support system to prospects and clients.
Great at building lasting client relationships, a relationship owner focuses more on the client than on themselves through excellent listening skills, expertise, advocacy and relate-ability. Through their extreme loyalty and commitment to servicing clients and making them happy, they can bring in more deals and upsell larger ones.
You can also empower The Relationship Owner to do what they do best with relationship intelligence automation software (aka RIA).
RIA tools, like Introhive, automatically collect, analyze, score and map all of your firm’s relationships to arm The Relationship Owner with easy-to-decipher relationship assessments across all of your team members, suppliers, clients and prospects.
From transactional data to customer service inquiries to social media profiles and other online activities, RIA passively collects any information it can from inside and outside company walls. This gives The Relationship Owner—and your entire business development team—a more complete the picture of who your customers and prospects are. (Request a demo from Introhive to see this in action).
Discovering “who knows who” and “who knows who best” through relationship mapping and scoring leads to stronger relationships—and can help you seal the deal when you meet prospects and clients face to face.
Form Long-Lasting Client Relationships
Build the dream business development team. Create enduring client relationships. Grow like you never have before. To get started, download our eBook, Paint a Complete Picture: How to Master the Art of Relationship Intelligence.
Accelerate Business Development with Introhive
See for yourself how Introhive automates mundane tasks and manual CRM data entry, while also serving up key client insights—exactly when and where busy professionals need them most.