Business Development 101 for Startups

For those of you running a Startup here’s what you need to focus on to grow quicker and be attractive to investors.

1 - Solve a Problem

I don’t care how good your product or service is. In today’s world if you don’t solve a problem you’re not going to get the attention you need for people to buy from you. Check your ego at the door and reverse engineer your solution to work out what components solve a particular problem that your customers have.

2. Profile Potential Customers

For an established business this is really easy. You examine your customer list and select your best customers. Then all you have to do is profile them and find more of them. Easy! With a new Startup you might not have solid data yet, so what do you do?

You do a friggin sh*t load of research and testing!

If you’re B2B - pick some job titles who you suspect might have the problems you described and profile their duties by looking at job descriptions online for similar positions. This will lead you to clues of the problems they might encounter.

If you’re B2C - jump on Facebook insights and look for the pages your potential customers like. Rummage through the posts and comments sections of these pages to find out what gets people excited. Do the same for instagram and other social media platforms. You’re looking for clues to build a psychological profile of your customers to find out what they love, what they hate, what are their fears,  what do they desire and what their ultimate dream is.

This research will yield the different types of customers you might potentially have. Then you can build a profile on each of them so you can market to them more effectively. Your message to market is crucial for your success and a big mistake I see is that people have only the one message they farm out to everyone. Respect your buyers - come up with individual messages that resonate with the different personas.  

3. Understand Your Buyers Journey Timeline

Roughly 3% of your potential market are ready to buy from you right now. The rest of them are in various stages of a journey. Think about it, before you buy anything, you go through a mental journey - either short or long depending on what you buy. It’s the same with your customers.

As a guideline, the usual stages are - ignorance, awareness, research, evaluation, purchase, support. There are others but if you focus on these ones you’ll get the traction you need to start building sales.

As you commence your business development activities you’ll need to categorise each potential customer into a segment of the buyer's journey so you know where to move them to next.

4. Create Problem Solving Assets

Now you know your customers, their problems and the various stages of their buyers journey, you need to create marketing material that educates your customers on how to solve the problems they face.

You might be thinking, hang on AJ, isn’t that just “content marketing”? And yes… you would be technically right. But here’s the thing.

Content marketing used to mean something once upon a time, but today the term is being thrown around by amateurs who fall in love with an idea but not the implementation of that idea.

These amateurs recognise they need to create content but don’t put much thought into it and produce absolutely worthless drivel for the sake of ticking a box. That’s why most of the internet is cluttered with bullsh*t mediocrity. You may or may not be picking up on my frustrations here…

Anyway…

Looking at “content” through the lenses of Problem Solving Assets, shifts your mind to think about creating items - articles, videos, cheat sheets, audio files, info-graphics etc etc - that are valuable to your potential customers. Each item you create needs to help your customers move through the different stages of their buyer’s journey. This is known in growth wizard circles as inbound marketing - getting customers to come to you.

To maximise your customer attraction strategies you need to do both inbound marketing and outbound sales.

5. Use a CRM

A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management system that helps you keep track of your outbound contacting activities. You need to keep track of who you contact, when did you contact them and what you said to them. This is important because at any given point in time, you need to know what stage of the buyer’s journey each of your customers are at so you can move them into the next stage.

In time to come, this information will help you predict your revenue. Imagine knowing for certain how much money you’ll earn within the next 3, 6, or 12 months without it being based on aspirational dreams after a weekend at a Tony Robbins seminar.

Only kidding - Love you Tony!

6. Cultivate Patience

The biggest mistake I see with business development is that people want results yesterday or today at the very latest. While nothing is impossible, achieving quick sales is in no one’s best interest. We live in a disposable economy so trust is crucial to build customers who love you and you need time for that.

As a rough guide, work with a 90 day timeline and test your message to market combinations to see what works for your market and your business. After 90 days you’ll have enough information to be able to mount inbound and outbound campaigns that will yield tangible results.

Again this is a rough guideline - you might get results quicker, or it might take a little longer.  The key here is to be patient and realise that when you do things right, customers fall in love with you and will want to stick with you as long as possible. That’s how giants like Amazon were made.

There’s so much more to learn with Business Development but the points I’ve outlined above will help you gain meaningful traction in your activities - hopefully better than what you’re currently doing.

Happy Business Developing, Entrepreneurs!

AJ~

P.S. My mission is to help more people become Entrepreneurial Thinkers so that we make the world a better place. If you run a Startup and want me to train your BDM based on my principles OR If you have a Startup Organisation and want me to teach your Startups how to do business development like an Entrepreneur, hit me up at Accelera.xyz

***************************

About the Author:

AJ Kulatunga is a keynote speaker and management consultant who helps Leaders and Management Teams unlock hidden value in their business. Connect with AJ via LinkedIN.