Business development is at the core of every organization, whether big or small. If you stop developing new business for your organization, you may begin to see sharp decline in your sales, revenue and bottom line. That is the number one reason all CEO’s and founders of companies must make a conscious effort to invest in business development. 

First, what is business development? 

“Business development is all about development new business for your organization. It is focused on attracting, retaining prospects and servicing customer accounts,” says Linda Sparks. The combination of your overall marketing, sales and customer service function is what is known as business development. 

Why business development is important? Without a sale, there is no business; and a sale is simply a single, individual transaction. To grow your business, you must focus on activities that help to connect, nurture and convert more clients for your organization. Joe Pope & Lee Frederiksen said, “Your business development strategy can be key to the success or failure of your firm.”

In some companies, the work of business development is assigned to a business developer, business development manager or a business development consultant. Whoever is put in charge of this role, is fully responsible for signing new business for the company with existing leads, existing clients, new clients and potential clients. 

If you’re a CEO or manager of a company, the key to growing is to focus on business development. You must constantly invest your time, money and energy in business development. The return on investment will results in more sales, more revenue and more profits for your company. 

Why is business development important? It encompasses:

• Generate new leads for your business
• Nurture those new leads for your business.
• Getting new deals for your business.
• Following up on the deals for conversion. 
• Finding problems for non-converting deals.
• Closing and converting deals into sales. 
• Promoting the brand and getting people to know the business.
• Generating more formal sales for the business.
• Managing customer account effectively for sales. 

Capturing new leads, cultivating and nurturing existing leads will culminate in more revenue. Most business people take they’re off the ball—growing and increasing revenue through business development. Therefore, they experience slackness in their operations. They expect things to happen yet they don’t invest their time, energy and efforts into business development.