How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager
A Business Development Manager is a very popular career choice, because it can potentially be a very lucrative and financially rewarding career.
Based on your positioning, knowledge and experience, you can literally get paid to give advice – and who wouldn’t want to do that!
So how do you become a successful Business Development Manager?
In this guide, you’ll learn how to a successful Business Development Manager:
- Even if you’re not yet popular in your field
- If you currently have no in-depth sales skills
- Without coming across as pushy and salesy
If you want to learn how to become a successful Business Development Manager, you need to follow the steps below.
- Have a business owner mindset
- Pick a niche
- Plan who your ideal audience is
- Create a marketing and sales strategy plan
- Set up inbound and outbound systems
- Learn how to sell consistently
- Consistent delivery & referrals
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #1 – Have A Business Owner Mindset
The first step is learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is approaching your job, role, or whatever you may currently have to create income, as a business owner.
Many Sales Professionals struggle because they approach their role as an ‘employee’ or contractor.
The problem with this mindset, is that you’re giving away many of the ingredients needed for success to someone else outside of your control.
If you need leads, they think it’s someone else’s responsibility.
Perhaps you need referrals – they think that’s the employer’s job too.
Do you need training – again, they think someone else should be paying for that.
This employee mindset holds you back, because it puts the potential of scaling and levelling up in someone else’s court.
If someone else is in control, how can you expect to take charge of your own potential?
An important part of learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is making the decision that you want to be successful at it.
And to be successful – you need to be in control and approach your role as a business owner.
A business owner makes decisions and drives their own future, results and outcomes.
To be successful – you’ll need to do the same.
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #2 – Pick The Right Niche
The second important part of learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is picking a niche you want to serve.
As it is explained here, niche marketing is a highly targeted form of advertising and serving.
The reason why you want to identify a niche, is so that you can be laser focused on the industry and people that you want to serve.
Think of it this way.
Let’s pretend hypothetically that your kitchen oven is leaking gas.
Because this problem can be quite harmful, you’ll need to hire someone to fix it urgently.
You can either hire a person who’s a handyman (knows how to do a number of things, but not an expert at any), or you can hire someone who’s an expert at fixing ovens.
Who would you hire?
Well as the problem is potentially critical if not fixed, you’ll most probably like many people – hire the expert.
The same is when you’re learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager.
You need to position yourself as an expert in a particular field; and the way you do this, is by picking a niche.
When you’re choosing your niche, try to identify the following:
What Do You Already Know
The first area to focus on, is what do you already know. Where do you already have vast experience?
As a Business Development Manager, your role will be to give advice, and sell people the best solution to their niche pain points.
By having experience in a particular field, you’ll be able to lean on your knowledge and previous experience to do this as a specialist.
Write out what fields you’ve worked in, and what you enjoyed – and also what you didn’t so you can avoid or outsource that.
Will It Sell?
The second question you need to ask when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is will people actually pay for the advice that you want to give.
Remember as mentioned- your role is not just to make a bit of money here and there, but instead to approach your role as a business owner and build a business out of your Business Development role.
Is there an actual market for what you’re selling, and are people actively looking for what it is you’re selling?
A great book to help you learn how to accurately do this, is a book called Choose by Ryan Levesque.
In his book, he details the exact strategies and tactics you can use to identify whether or not your idea will actually work.
I highly recommend reading this book prior to beginning a new business, as it’ll save you time and money in selecting something that people actually want and need.
Can You Learn?
Finally, another important part of learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager is identifying what you enjoy, what people actually want – and then bridging the gap by learning what it is you need to know to serve those clients.
For example – if you enjoy digital marketing and want to sell those services; but don’t exactly know everything about the field, you can learn and up skill your knowledge by taking courses, reading books, and diving deep into the topic.
Perhaps your experience may be selling solar, and you enjoy doing so.
If you don’t know everything you need to know to become a solar BDM yet, you can perhaps partner with someone working in a company to get experience, before you go out on your own.
This way, you can learn the methodologies, process, and much more on how they handle business.
Choosing a niche is crucial when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager.
If you try to serve everybody; you’ll end up serving nobody.
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #3 – Identify Your Ideal Audience
Once you’ve got your mindset right and have chosen a niche, the next part when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is planning who your ideal audience is.
Once you identify your niche, you’ll need to understand who the people are that will benefit from your chosen niche.
Ideally; you want to not only document this by industry, but also by who the decision makers are within these industries.
Many Sales Professionals make the mistake of prematurely presenting their product or service or speak with people who aren’t decision makers.
By speaking with decision makers up front, you can reduce the likelihood of common sales objections, such as the “I need to speak with’ objection.
To learn more about how to prevent this, check out the related article below.
Related article: Easily Handle The ‘I Need To Speak To’ Objection
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #4 – Strategic Planning
Once you know who your ideal audience, the next step in learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is strategically planning how it is you’ll reach them.
To do this, you’ll need to create and focus on two key documents.
These are:
- Your Marketing Strategy Plan
- A Sales Targeting Strategy
Your Marketing Strategy Plan
A marketing strategy plan is a step by step approach to finding out how to get your products and services, in front of the right audience with your marketing efforts.
Does your audience watch YouTube? If so, what keywords are they searching for, and should you advertise targeting those keywords?
Perhaps your audience uses LinkedIn? What are their job roles, and does it make sense targeting that audience on LinkedIn?
This is a crucial step because it’ll dictate the type of advertising medium to use to target these audiences.
To learn how to do this in more detail, check out the related article below.
Related article: Marketing Strategy 101 – What You Need To Know
Your Sales Targeting Strategy
Similar to your marketing plan, a sales targeting strategy is crucial to know when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager.
A sales targeting strategy is the process used to find out who your potential clients are; and then setting up systems to reach that desired audience.
It includes setting up targets, and then working out whether you should be using inbound sales methods, outbound sales methods, or both.
To learn more about your sales targeting strategy, check out the related article below.
Related article: Sales Targeting Strategy – Your Complete Guide
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #5 – Inbound & Outbound Systems
Another core ingredient when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is setting up systems so you can prospect effectively, and bring in leads and potential clients.
Sales is the lifeblood of any business, and prospecting and lead generation is crucial to your success as a business owner or Business Development Manager.
Generally, there are two kinds of prospecting methods. These are inbound sales, and outbound sales methods.
Inbound Sales Methods
Inbound sales methods are the process of setting up a lead generation system, where the leads come to you.
When set up correctly, the system can be put on autopilot, and can be a great way of filling your sales funnel with qualified leads.
When creating a sales funnel or your inbound marketing system, you’ll need to set up the following parts of your system:
- Valuable and consistent content
- Landing pages
- Advertising
- Email sequences
- An offer
If you’re interested in learning how to set up each of these steps, you can do so by checking out The 5% Client Conversion Formula.
Outbound Sales Methods
Outbound sales methods are setting up systems that work when you’re manually prospecting for your ideal clients.
This can be done via dropping in on potential clients, sending email, messaging on social media, and cold calling.
At The 5% Institute, we teach a system which entails:
- Finding your ideal prospects on LinkedIn
- Retrieving their email using an email finding software
- Emailing them
- Following up with a call, after creating some rapport and familiarity
Both inbound and outbound systems can be efficient for your business, and Business Development activity.
To learn how to implement the outbound system for your business, check out the Find An Endless Supply Of Leads program here.
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #6 – Learn To Sell Consistently
The more important and crucial part when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is learning how to consistently sell your product or service.
You may have an excellent product and service and be good at generating leads.
However, if you don’t know how to effectively, and consistently learn how to sell those people without being pushy and salesy, you’re not going to be a successful Business Development Manager.
To become successful as Business Development, no matter what industry you’re in, you need to focus on three key areas:
- Getting in front of the right people
- Having a consistent process
- Helping people sell themselves
Getting In Front Of The Right People
When you’re learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, you may be tempted in speaking to as many people as you can.
As per our article here, it’s important to meet with people who are decision makers, and people who would not only benefit from your product or service; but also, be someone you’d be happy to work with.
Not all clients are equal.
Ensure they’re the right fit and stick to a standard.
Have A Consistent Process
A sales process, or sales methodology as it’s sometimes called – is probably the most important ingredient in your business.
Your sales process is a step by step system you use to understand where a person is at, what their issues are, what their desires are – and then knowing how to effectively present your product or service to win the sale.
Many sales process systems differ; that’s why we created a step by step system, to teach you exactly what you need to know to close more sales.
To learn how to consistently win more sales, check out The 5% Sales Blueprint here.
Help People Sell Themselves
One of the critical mistakes Business Development Manager’s make, and one we don’t want you making when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is trying hard to sell people all on your own.
It is much more effective to ask questions, that help people sell themselves.
There is a particular art to doing this effectively; using strategic questioning techniques.
To learn how to do this, check out the related article below.
Related article: Tie Down Sales Techniques – Your Ultimate Guide
How To Become A Successful Business Development Manager #7 – Delivery & Referrals
Last but not least; an important function commonly forgotten when learning how to become a successful Business Development Manager, is ensuring that you consistently deliver a positive result for your clients.
Many people are quick to try and get more work – but often people forget about ensuring they consistently deliver a positive result for their clients.
You don’t want to just deliver a result; it needs to be positive, and you need to be able to replicate this over and over again.
Ensure you have a system that can do this, before you try and close more sales.
Secondly – once you’re able to do so, you should have a system in place to ask for referrals.
Referrals are an excellent way of winning business, because the trust and desire are already established; you just need to show up, use a sales process, and win the sale.
To learn how to set up a referral system, check out the related article below.
Related article: How To Get Referrals – 5 Ways To Boost Your Sales
Final Thoughts
If you’re wanting to learn how to become a successful Business Development Manager, this guide will help you on your way to achieving your goals and desires.
To recap, focus on the following areas:
- Have a business owner mindset
- Pick a niche
- Plan who your ideal audience is
- Create a marketing and sales strategy plan
- Set up inbound and outbound systems
- Learn how to sell consistently
- Consistent delivery & referrals
If you would like to learn how to consistently close more clients, register for our 7 day sales challenge here.
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If you’re committed to wanting to learn exactly how to close sales consistently and more easily, then you may be interested in our sales blueprint.
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Click the link below to learn exactly how The 5% Sales Blueprint can help you learn how to close sales on a consistent basis, and will get rid of all the guesswork.
