Business Development & Partnerships

Introduction

Business development is the generation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships. It’s about providing opportunities for that value to persist over the long term and to keep the gates open so that value can continue to flow. Thinking about business development to create long-term value is the only accurate way to succeed in consistently growing an organization.

Business development roles at any level, from executives to VPs, are looking at how they can grow their increased revenue, physically expand, and develop through fostering strategic and long-term partnerships. This means using customers, implementing strategic partnerships, using your markets, and building your company’s reputation.

Use case

Strategic partnerships are any relationships with other organizations that can help you grow your customer base, focus on an ideal customer, move into new markets, or help your business to develop unique strengths it didn’t have previously. They work at every level, from maintaining positive relationships with the press to establishing good relationships with your key suppliers.

The hardest part for many business development people isn’t building and maintaining relationships. It's getting enough attention around the opportunity and then building internal support to make them happen. Several problems arise, beginning with the business development manager having to develop a new business case from scratch for every potential partnership since they don’t have a consistent format.

Every partnership is different, but having a blueprint to follow would save these managers a lot of time and effort that could be used elsewhere. Every business case’s preliminary information is about the opportunity, how the partnership will work, what resources will be needed to make it happen, and how much the company will profit.

Once the business development person gathers all this information, they need to convince the business of several things:

  • - The executives need to care about this specific opportunity, even if it isn’t very big. But unfortunately, executives often focus only on the huge, important deals and have little interest in anything else.

  • - The product team needs to build it, which is met with several other problems such as timing is awful and it would have to be built a year later.

  • - If it isn’t on the product roadmap, it might be met with resistance because there isn’t enough budget, and it may conflict with what existing customers are asking for.

  • - Finance then needs to approve the investment on every new partnership, and since most of these partnerships come off-budget cycle, they are met with resistance because they don’t have the funds to back all of them up.

  • - Finally, HR also needs to approve the people who will have to work on these projects and build the products.

Facilitating Collaboration

Effective consensus building is based on team collaboration. It happens when people with complementary skills work together on projects or tasks in a genuinely connected and collective way. The traditional way that people try to build consensus in organizations usually consists of many repeated meetings to get everyone on the same page, splintered discussion threads in email or slack, and PPT decks - or rather, office swagger and politics.

To deal with all of these obstacles and successfully do their job, employees need successful collaboration and consensus within the organization. Unfortunately, achieving effective collaboration in an organization is never easy. While getting everyone on board the traditional way may seem like the most obvious solution, business leaders need to realize that new platforms and technologies will be more effective.

For many large organizations getting everyone on the same page for a project is a real struggle. People are busy, everybody is trying to do their job, and people don’t have time to spend on recurring meetings to get everyone who wasn’t able to join the last meetings up to date. Greater collaboration creates new ways of working and with that comes more smart information that enables more smart decisions.

Some of the most effective decision-making processes include building consensus. Working together allows employees to share their ideas while understanding how their team members think, work, and operate. As a result, collaboration proves to be mutually beneficial for both the organization and its employees.

By design, the Agreed platform brings everyone together from every department, facilitating collaboration and consensus internally. Validators from these departments can easily and quickly upload all the necessary information from Finance or HR into the designated phases of a business strategy. Meanwhile, executives will be invited to take a look at the work that’s being done and chime in with their own requests and questions about the plan that’s being developed.

The Blueprint

Having a blueprint to follow when detailing new business plans for potential partnerships would be a game-changer for organizations. The blueprint will provide realistic expectations for a new venture in the practical form of outlining the costs and benefits.

Agreed’s business planning process includes five phases, and value and risk assessments. This makes it a great fit for Business development departments, who need this consistency. The business development person will no longer build every business plan from scratch when Agreed provides them with a better process to follow and allows them to focus more on building valuable partnerships.

They also won’t have to go back and forth with the other departments anymore for the required information. Instead, everyone will communicate on the Agreed platform, enabling them to have all the necessary information on a new strategy whenever they need it and ask questions or add their own contribution.

Go-To-Market Strategy

Organizations need a go-to-market strategy for a range of events, including launching new products or services, introducing a current product to a new market, and even relaunching the company or brand. The GTM strategy will help a business clarify why it's launching the product, understand who the product is for, and create a plan to engage with the customer and convince them to buy the product or service.

With the Agreed software, a business development manager can create and develop a successful Go-To-Market strategy. They are able to build on business insights to align the right go-to-market strategy that fits the needs of both partnering companies and stays agile in a rapidly changing market.

New strategies can be shared quickly throughout the organization and if executives are happy with what the business development person proposes, the go-to-market strategy can be picked up and implemented fast.

Outcome

Before, a biz dev manager had to convince the company that a partnership was worthy in a short pitch meeting and would almost always be met with some questions that they wouldn’t know the answer to, obstacles that seemed too big to overcome, and potential partnerships that would fail, because of the lack of collaboration and consistency in the organization.

After implementing the Agreed software, business development managers can craft their business plans according to a blueprint that would answer almost every question executives and stakeholders might have from the start. They would be able to get people on board quickly to add their validations and thoughts, effectively building and successfully pitching these new opportunities faster than ever before.

There would be no more need to have recurring meetings because people aren’t all there, and they miss context and have understanding gaps to fill or splintered email threads that inevitably someone gets left out of. Now with Agreed, the process is streamlined and easier to follow. Everyone in the organization has the chance to collaborate to the success of the initiative, and projects get approved and have the ability to scale faster. Because the organization now has a consensus mechanism that makes everyone’s job easier, employees are more efficient, and productivity increases. This, in turn, enables the company to innovate more by building a company culture and way of working that inspires employees to share more of their ideas and go the extra mile.