Full Business Development Function—The Rise of the Machines!

?? The Rise of Modern Intelligence Tools

Today, the integration of marketing and media with business development is changing the way your new sales or business development hire will undertake their daily tasks forever.

With modern tools such as powerful engine-class CRMs, marketing automation and data analytics systems, the traditionally siloed functions of marketing, media, and sales are becoming interwoven into the other functions of the business. These tools allow businesses to collect, analyse, and act on real-time data from the whole business in ways that were previously simply impossible.

For you, as a senior manager, this shift means that you now have access to multiple systems that offer detailed insights. Engine Class CRMs can track the full customer lifecycle, from initial lead generation via a Managed Project Pipeline through to showing the operating capacity being used in the company by offering detailed, real-time updates. These business development tools allow your sales teams to automate simple tasks, freeing up their time for more strategic client engagement or taking control of how you operate as a business. It's one of the tools needed if you want to take a long-term step back from the company and have it as a passive income, but understand this came only from recruitment with the right measures in place.

??? The Machines are Talking!

The title sounds like an idea from a sci-fi novel but what does this really mean? With modern advances in technology and capabilities, certain industries or sectors are evolving faster than others and one area, in particular, to benefit from this spotlight effect is business development. Think of all those media and marketing assets you have gone through in the past over the years, the new website, advertising, and a little bit of SEO, maybe you were advanced and even had a printed PDF business strategy you would dust off from time to time to remind yourself of where you are hoping to go.

When you reflect, these media function assets were all static and standalone items. The shift, the new difference between a media function and a business development function is, now with these advances, the assets have now come alive - they now can talk and most importantly they talk to each other giving you and your new sales or business development manager a real cutting edge and signal how things are improving.

The old way of helping our client visualise the architecture of how their media assets worked together was to show them listed in separate lines, for example, a sealed system showing the customer journey would be at the top, and in the middle, we would have the business development strategy, the plan and register of what we hold and at the bottom would be the CRM. In between each of these lines, various assets such as a website or a Managed Project Pipeline. This line of assets would be called your media development function, ie what tools are in the toolbox.

Now it has evolved away from this format into the new digital business development function, we are able to collapse the list into one linear line that communicates as one. We now can embed this into the other software functions of the business, the accounts, the admin, the project management, the task management, the sales or even into your existing CRM you wish to keep providing the senior management or the new sales or business development manager with a dashboard of data that provides real insight and vision to the business allowing better steering.

?? Move from Passive to Proactive

For decades, sales, media and marketing were often treated as passive, secondary functions in many industries, including construction. Traditional marketing functions were static, disjointed, and limited in their ability to integrate with other business areas. Often, marketing teams would create campaigns, push them out through mass media or physical collateral, and hope for the best, while the sales team would operate in isolation, working without a unified strategy or real-time insights. The directors and senior management would have a love-hate relationship with the company's media and sales department at best depending on results and involvement.

Now it's the very baseline of the business conversation to build or measure off. Business development IS the business.

In essence, media functions in the construction sector have remained unchanged for nearly 10 years.

However, with the advent of modern business intelligence tools, this outdated model is being replaced with a new more dynamic, integrated replacement. This is not the old media passive approach waiting for the phone-to-ring, hoping mindset, this is now a pro-active and confident attack mode- if they do not know about your company now, they soon will do, especially if you engage a powerful asset like the Managed Project Pipelines.

Media functions can no longer be merely about advertising or promoting a service or leave it to a sales or business development manager with a cheesy smile—they have to now evolve into fundamental components of business development function that communicate or fall further behind than they are already.

Media function ?? BD function

A business development strategy is in essence an advanced intelligence version of a media or marketing plan but at its core an interconnected hybrid of a high-level corporate business plan being powered by a digital platform. This platform drives its assets to achieve results and your goals - this is your business development function, the tools available to use.

This combination creates a ferocious engine in comparison. The difference between a media provider, someone who does your website and some social media versus today's experienced business development provider armed with this new tech is now night and day.

It's not a costly reset as a lot of the same assets are reused, switching to a full business development function is easy and painless, if anything they save you time and money and perform better.

Your business and your new sales or business development manager will depend on this very vision. The question is where as a company do you sit? Are you going to re-use the same media o or are you going to change and evolve to the business development fun approach and assets of 10 years action?

Is your new sales or business development manager going to use this old 10-year-old media playbook for the next 3 to 5 years? Where will you be as a company then, and what calibre of staff will you be able to attract to your company?

A good example of the growing distance between the old media world against the new digital age is if you are with a media agency at the moment and you start to talk about what they can do, you will see they have a limited toolbox, their list of services is capped.

Business development fights back for you. If you mentioned to your media person that you're having cashflow fears and they give you a blank look, whereas your business development provider would immediately start looking to open as many doors to the business.

Not just for the extra sales but also very conscious that the target is the fact the cycle of payments from other sectors and clients have much shorter payment cycles and can pay within 7-10 days as opposed to waiting the 30 or 60 days from other clients.

They will identify and steer into smaller pre-planned maintenance visits to keep the workforce busy during quiet times with market and business intelligence that brings in smaller but multiple payments over and over on a daily basis.

They would no doubt then ask to activate other functions, powerful tools such as Managed Project Pipelines and look to start filling in the work diary for 3-6-9-12-18 months ahead but also talking to you about operational capacity so you stay within the recommended 80% operating margin.

Sometimes it is all there, you just need a bit of help and by going to construction-only specialists, these doors open for you.

Your existing media function team or provider are all very good professionals and we work with these every day in collaboration but if you can start to sense how limited they are. As said before our biggest client base is directors or sales and business development managers who want to claw back more time and control so we understand how to delicately navigate the channels.

The real negative is the old legacy media function is holding your company and in turn your new sales or business development manager back. The legacy media function is your single direct ready-for-market support, the very source and message of the company, and sadly it's outdated.

If I had to take a guess about the level of contribution or as a satisfaction survey towards the success of a business still using the legacy-only media function provider as opposed to the new business development provider I would say the legacy media function version hits around the 20-35% satisfaction performance mark.

Does that resonate with what you feel is the success of your media function and what it delivers at the moment? Does it feel hit and miss, you're not sure what's working and what is not. Is your new sales or business development manager spending more time on chasing up on admin and instructing, than really building relationships and closing deals?

The newly evolved business development function is, in contrast, laser-targeted with an unforgiving, relentless and accurate delivery system, the human error of forgetting, not getting around to it or being unmotivated to do so is now gone forever.

This is what your new sales or business development manager needs, this is what senior management is now demanding to have at their disposal to give the company an advantage over its competitors.

?? A Smarter Way to Recruit

The integration of modern tools such as CRMs, marketing automation, and data analytics is transforming business development by merging traditionally siloed functions, enabling real-time data collection and automated processes, and allowing better decision-making at quarterly strategy intervals and local levels in short spans.

The move from static media to dynamic, connected systems helps sales and business development managers gain useful insights faster, making better decisions and spending less time on routine tasks.

Traditional marketing methods, which relied on passive strategies, are being aggressively replaced by proactive, data-driven business development approaches that provide businesses with a competitive edge through targeted operations.

Evolving from legacy media functions to operating a modern business development function not only enhances performance but also positioning companies for the scaling gateway which we need these key assets in place.

For further reading about business development strategies click here here or book a power session with one of our business advisors today!?