The strategy for efficient foundational business development practices for small defense focused businesses.

The Employment Strategy:

Step 1: “start with discussing problems to refine the solution opportunity.”

All companies have expertise. It is the foundation by which that company develops, produces, and evolves its product(s). Rarely is the company’s expertise woven directly into the customer outreach pipeline for business development. To start, you should identify all areas of expertise within the company. Rather that is one very niche area, or a whole range of topics, compile that list and the associated experts within the company. Next develop an external facing set of free educational content on each of those identified topics. This serves three goals. One is to provide a high-quality free resource to potential customers which can attract them to you. The second is to identify and build a personality driven outreach campaign around your employees as experts. The third is to drive follow-up conversations through the interactions on this educational content. What this practically looks like is "Mike from the engineering team" doing regular videos on "topic X" as an expert in that field, discussing all the great things he knows, and what the topic can do for people. This self identifies and validates Mike as an expert in that field, familiarizes and builds trust in Mike with viewers, and creates an opportunity for easy follow-ups with Mike through social media.

All this can be done for low cost, and mostly just the time of creation. Quality videos are not as much about the visuals, as it is the content. “Mike” being able to talk clearly and simply on a topic, is far more important than dropping big money on splashy visuals. People want to know they can trust Mike, and that is validated through the quality of the content and how Mike conveys it, as well as the ability for people to easily reach out and start a conversation with Mike. Much like Michael Jordan selling Nike shoes, you know Jordan is an amazing player, so the shoes are an associative item you trust have value based on the person. Similarly, you need to provide a way through the educational content to demonstrate the expertise of your people, and then through easy communication build their persona to then drive follow-up conversations.

Great avenues for employing this kind of content are the major social media sites, as all facilitate the hosting of audio-visual content and accompanying communication channels for viewers. Be careful with only internally hosting this type of content within your company website, as all the potential eyeballs are on the social media sites, and local hosting also increases costs. Go to where the masses are, and where hosting costs are the least. Ultimately this is about maximum efficiency where costs are lowest, potential customer eyeballs are the most plentiful, and your content is the most evergreen to produce once and talk about often.

Step 2: “focus on expanding the discussion to define the potential customer community.”

Now that you have a regular and recurring way to drive educational interactions with potential future customers, you need to focus on growing and refining that base of interactions with people. This can be accomplished in multiple ways. First, in addition to the baseline educational content and video posts, you want to host live virtual events. This is a naturally self-selective interaction that you can target to the defense related application of your topic(s), that also filters the participants into a smaller but more engaged group. It is simple and straight forward in these interactions to actively or passively identify the military personnel in attendance. This allows you to start scoping the conversations into military specific applications of the expertise being provided. Second and in parallel, you should offer free on-demand onsite demonstrations and training events on your topic(s) by your expert(s) at your facility. Think about what you would regularly pay to send any of your people to a conference or any other event in the hope of having a conversation with just one potential customer. This gives you self-selected, engaging, and long duration interaction with potential customers all with the homefield advantage. Both methods are nearly free except for the prep time and utilization of various event coordination depending on how fancy you want the live stream or onsite interaction to be.

These two simple approaches give you a recurring target interaction with potential future customers that self-selects the participants, drives them to your controlled interaction of choice, and sets you up for all kinds of potential follow-on conversations. It’s not that these two events replace attending conferences or other events for customer interaction, but rather can help drive or determine which of those events might be worth spending your limited funding on. Wouldn’t it be much better if you waited to attend a conference that you knew potential customers were going to and you planned to meet at, because you had talked and coordinated with them already from a live stream event, they attended of yours previously? This is the whole point of this approach, create multiple free, easy, but valuable interaction points for potential customers to approach you, and let those interactions drive the conversations with attendees around the art of the possible within a topic area. This drives and informs the value proposition for your future business development interactions, as the successive events escalate and further filter the interested client base down to the core leads you want to pursue.

Step 3: “finally start to articulate your range of options for customer engagement.”

Now that you have had multiple interactions that have filtered and defined both a group of people, and the topic area they are interested in, you can start articulating the various ways you can help address potential needs and problems they have with your product(s) or service(s). The trust has been built up at this point, at least to where it makes sense and doesn’t come off as initially “salesy” to the potential customer. You both should know enough about each other at this point to be able to start guiding the conversation from initially educational, to now being focused on problem solving. Where does the potential customer need exist that drove the preceding desire for the educational knowledge you provided? Mold the conversation around their needs, to flesh out what opportunities might exist, funding they might have access to for solving this problem for themselves, as well as identify additional people that might share their problem. All of this goes to refine the opportunity for you, and can be done virtually or in-person, and at single or multiple events. There is no “correct” way to do this part, rather just a judicious application of time and money that seems to make sense at the time given the interactions up to that point.

Efficiency is the name of the game, and never let a single potential sale blind you to the cost in loss of attention to other opportunities. The goal in these final opportunity refinement interactions is to try and get to opportunity definition as quickly as possible. The opportunity definition doesn’t have to be exact, but rather just enough knowledge to validate rather you need to continue focusing on this interaction, or move on to other potential customers.

Notes: Who, When, and How to involve

No one likes a used car salesman, and new car salesmen are only regarded one level above that. Make sure to build step one around your topic experts. Make your engineers, designers, and other creation orientated talent in your company shine like stars on social media. Let them drive the educational conversation into an expanded series of interactions that lead to a sale. The BD/Salesperson(s) in your company should be facilitating these interactions similar to event staff. The care and feeding is done by the BD folks, and the talking is done by the experts to the potential customers. The BD folks serve as the “fixer” for the company’s interaction with potential customers. Need an event, we got you. Taking all the notes during events, we got you. Need follow-up communications, we got you. Want to make potential sale of product or service, we got you. The point is the experts are busy with their day jobs, so all this educational and potential customer interaction is additive to their already busy schedule. The BD personnel should be focused on making the additional work for the company expert(s) as small as possible, and the ease of interaction from the potential customers to the company as easy as possible.