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If you believe that business development is essential for a company's success - and let's face it, who doesn't? - this article is for you. It provides best practices for 2024 planning and is designed to help you plan and grow your business more effectively, both personally and professionally.

If you’re tired of a shotgun approach to sales and business development, it’s time to change your plan of attack. Account-based marketing (ABM) offers small and medium-sized contractors a critical opportunity to pivot from selling to everyone to capturing the right projects with high-value accounts. With limited resources for business development, ABM is targeted and measurable. Use this guide to start building your account-based marketing plan.

Building relationships through shared interests can make your efforts less self-promotional and lead to unexpected resources that may open opportunities to meet prospective mentors, partners and clients which, in turn, will foster your career and business development.

Industry Conferences are a great way to network and collaborate with your clients and business partners.  Essentially it is a single location for you to engage with multiple contacts while making a single trip.  Effectively utilized, it is an efficient and cost-effective way to pack a lot of business development into a small window of time. Your long days, properly planned, will provide positive results which will justify the time and expense expended for each event.

You’ve seen it discussed everywhere lately – from trusted nightly news programs to your teenage kids and from folks as high up in the food chain as U.S. Government officials. And even with all the coverage, there are still many questions left unanswered. Is it breaking any rules? Can it be trusted? Is it going to make our jobs obsolete? We’re talking, of course, about ChatGPT and how AI in digital marketing is seemingly taking over.

The remaining aspects of SERVE provide more helpful tips and techniques for managing and enhancing the relationship building journey.  As you read each of them, consider how both the heart (emotion) and mind (logic) should be engaged. The first “E” in SERVE stands for “listening with Empathy and honoring wants.”

As a business developer in this industry, you are selling solutions. As you build that trust one kept promise at a time, you may find your customer starts asking you for advice about other things. You are on the path to becoming one of their trusted advisors when your customer starts proactively sharing their plans, asks for your advice on broad topics, and starts using you as a sounding board. So, why become a trusted advisor and how does that help you with business development?

Organizational disruptions are something every company will face. Sometimes these disruptions are easily managed, while other times they quickly morph into a crisis. How you manage and lead your team through a crisis begins with planning.

Being busy is a blessing for many companies today. Most firms are overwhelmed with the amount of work they have for their employees, but firms should still be marketing their services to clients and prospects. Positioning your firm and marketing your services right now, while you have the cash flow, will elevate you in the marketplace.

Who are the most valuable customers on your account list? Gut instinct likely points you straight to your key accounts. If you’re like most businesses, you double down on your best customers because you have their loyalty, trust, and a profitable track record. After all, sales wisdom tells us that it’s easier to keep an account than to earn a new one. How do you push growth beyond your key accounts? One of the most strategic opportunities to grow stands with your second-tier accounts. If you can move the middle of your account list, you have a calculated path to increasing sales, footprint, and margin.