I would like you pause and think about a simple question: What percentage of consumers have changed their behaviour over the last two years?
Think about your friends, your family, your network and your own changing and shifting behaviour. What are you now doing differently and what changes have you observed around you. I regularly speak to groups of professionals on this. The broad agreement seems to be that consumers and client’s behaviours have shifted in a significant way over the last two years (let alone the shifts that are coming with a challenging economic outlook and the cost of living crisis). It would be hard to deny that the economic environment is in a period of flux. The big question is, as a leader how are you adapting your business development approach to match these shifts? Great business leaders use their own situational intelligence to do three things really well in period of change:
Reflect on previous success
Fully understanding the fundamentals that don’t change. Delivering great service to your clients and completely understanding their needs. These are the cornerstones of a successful business development strategy. Rather than just looking for new ideas and approaches you need to challenge yourself, your organisation and your teams to “do the fundamentals and do them extraordinarily well”. There are very often great opportunities for most organisation in this space.
Research the changing marketplace
Sounding out your trusted clients to explore what they are doing and seeing how they are changing their personal approach or business strategy. There are very often opportunities to reopen discussion on services and approaches that may have previously been ruled out. Meeting with and fully understanding your new clients and understanding why they chose to work with you. You are looking for changes in patterns in why they choose you or your firm. Very often this shift in clients buying values goes unnoticed by individuals as no one looks for these shifting patterns.
Innovate
This one comes with a caution. Innovation can only come after the two points above. There is no point in innovating if you aren’t doing the basics well and don’t fully understand how your clients needs have shifted. Innovation can lead you down the wrong route very quickly. When you have understood the two first points then looking for innovative (very often simple) ways to truly engage and excite your clients. Great business development leaders apply their situational intelligence to changing times in exploring the three key points above. Take for example what we have applied here at New Results:
Reflect on previous success – we get lots of great feedback about our “discovery led, PowerPoint light” training sessions. We haven’t changed this format for our face to face delivery, we focus on refining and improving this as a fundamental part of our offering.
Researching the changing marketplace – lots of our new clients are asking for shorter sessions. “Espresso sessions”, “lunch and learn” and “bitesize learning” is something we
have worked hard to deliver for our clients. We have had to rework material to match the increasing need for shortened high impact sessions.
Innovate – we have had to increase our delivery of eLearning. Creating online business development academies for some of our clients to help with long term development programmes and embedding of new learning. We encourage those leading a business development team, partners and directors of firms to apply their own learning and experience along with these three points. What have you previously learned about a changing marketplace? When in the past have you had to shift what and how you work with your clients? Periods of change always provide challenges, and very often there are opportunities in these challenges, if you are prepared to dig in and look for them.
