Business Development For Dummies

Chapter 1

Introducing Business Development for Services Firms

In This Chapter

Defining business development

Looking through your customer’s eyes

Making time for business development

If you ask ten people what they think business development is, you probably get ten different answers. Chances are that even your own view of business development isn’t completely aligned with others in your organization, unless you’ve taken special and unusual steps to make it so.

Whether you’re a business owner, involved in business development or just interested in discovering more, you probably inherited your view of business development from your business experiences, gleaned it from Google, created it yourself or perhaps used a mix of all these influences.

In this chapter, I set the scene for the whole book, providing a clear definition of business development, which involves strategy (see the chapters in Part II), marketing (Part III), sales (Part IV), customer management (Part V) and partnerships (Part VI) – and I set out why business development matters. I also describe the central role of your customers and tackle the problem of becoming overwhelmed, discussing how and why you need to find ...